Somewhere Between Laurence Steinberg Summary

The peer reviewed article “Ethnic and Racial Identity During Adolescence into Young Adulthood: An Integrated Conceptualization” is a well written article on the struggle that people of color face when coming face to face with their identity in social situations. Umana-Taylor, Quintana, Lee, Cross, Rivas-Drake, Schwartz and Seaton (2014) analyzed ethnic and racial identity or ERI and how it relates to important developments and issues from early childhood well on into young adulthood. They worked to find the most important milestones during the development or ERI as well (Umana-Taylor et. al 2014). This paper will consist of the information given from the article and how I’ve dealt with my own ERI.

One source once stated, “By masking the discomfort, of being pre-judged” (Mora 40). People should examine their culture in order to better understand how it affects their identity and perceptions. In order to understand one’s cultural identity, he or she needs to understand what the term means. According to one source, cultural identity can be defined as “We all have unique identities that we develop within our cultures, but these identities are not fixed or static” (Trumbull and Pacheco 10). Various aspects of a person’s life that may determine his or her cultural identity music, community, family, ethnicity, relationships, religion, clothing, and food. After analyzing several texts, the reader recognizes that four important

There are two different dimensions of our identities: ethnicity and race. Ethnicity refers to one’s belonging to a specific cultural, or racial group that makes up culture, race language, and/or place of origin. For example, one can be African-American but have different ethnicities, one African-American and the other African-Caribbean decent. Race is a social construct that can be changed over time. Historically, referring to its specific characteristics one possesses based on: ethnicity, religion, or language; today's its classified solely based upon the color of one’s skin. Nevertheless, ethnic and racial identities are important and instill a sense of belonging and identifying with that specific group through attitude, behaviors. Moreover,

Though it does not come up in everyday thought, cultural identity is an idea that all humans possess. Abridged, cultural identity can be simply explained as the sharing of a similar culture by people of various ethnicities. However, cultural identity is more complex than that, defined by an individual’s values, beliefs, and ideas of moral behavior influenced by their culture. Furthermore, cultural identity is ever changing from individual to individual. This means that although two individuals may be of the same ethnicity, differences in circumstances may cause variations between the individuals’ personal beliefs. As a result of interracial interactions, multiculturalism has grown during the twenty-first century.

Furthermore, they feel some interest and concern in his/her socioeconomic background, his/her perception of self, his/her position about them, his/her adequacy or dependability, etc. It is also explicitly expressed in the school environment. Both students and teachers do often anchor the relations between different markers of various people for dissimilar motives, however. It was emphasized that children absorb accumulated experiences in terms of racial and ethnic identification. Due to the fact that children may not be conceived of the functioning of the world in an improved, adult manner, they have significant potential to apply self, color and racial basics on or before they are

There are some groups that none of us has any choice in whether we belong to them or not. Factors such as gender, ethnicity, family and even social status are at birth, groups that we belong to, yet cannot choose, and many of these endure throughout life. Although family, religious beliefs and even social status can be altered in later life, all of these groups are ones that are integral to an individual’s identity and in fact add it in life. However, as a child their influence is perhaps even more important as in these formative years one’s gender, culture, family and even religion actively create individual identity.

African American adolescents face a period of development unique to that population, where they explore their ethnic and racial identity along with experiencing

The growth of identity is a practice molded by a person’s family history, environmental experiences, and societal attachments. Identity endures ordeals to make the person secure and attentive so that it’s easier for the person to know what to expect out of their life. Although changes in our surroundings can be accepted, adjustments to one’s identity can often be challenging. Particularly in African American identity, there is difficulty in accepting who one is and knowing one’s place in society. There is an even greater difficulty if one is a biracial African American.

Establishing an identity has been called one of the most important milestones of adolescent development (Ruffin, 2009). Additionally, a central part of identity development includes ethnic identity (ACT for Youth, 2002). While some teens search

First, we must understand what is ethnic identity. The author Laurence Steinberg of “Adolescence” explains ethnic identity as the aspect of the individuals’ sense of identity concerning ancestry or racial group membership. In relation to this statement to the four teens, psychologist Erik Erikson was known for “Identity Crisis” states, “establishing a sense of identity is something that is conscious.” In which, this is clearly present in the video “Somewhere Between” with these four teens and are aware of this consciousness through their sense of “well-being that relates to their feelings of being at home in one’s body” and each of them are trying to figure out their true ethnic identity (Steinberg, p.

In the documentary film, Somewhere Between, four young Chinese women go through journeys in their lives as adopted children of white Americans in modern society. They go through journeys to find a sense of self-awareness and who they truly are and their identities as they travel back to their country of China to find out about their culture and their biological families. This film showed how strong these young women are through their experiences of feeling abandoned, stereotyped, and not fitting in, but at the end they persevered to find themselves, not just within their culture, but who they are inside and what they felt. Jenna Cook is a fifteen-year-old teenager who goes to school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. She is very multitalented and can play the guitar while also playing sports, such as crew and ice hockey.

Subverting the traditional perspective of how ethnicity forms, Barth suggests the opposite of what one would expect; he argues that ethnic identities are based on the social distinctions that result from social interaction. While the common perception is that geographical isolation defines different cultures, Barth argues that it is social interactions within and outside of a negotiated group that strengthens its boundaries. However, these boundaries are far from static; they are constantly being shifted and renegotiated due to the way an individual interacts with other people. As the individual grows, their participation and inclusion in ethnic groups may vary, causing their ethnicity to develop over the course of a lifetime. EMERGE??

Similar to my family’s critical role in my personal and social identity’s development, my ethnicity also contributes some of the most noticeable modifications of a social agents affect on an individual’s personal and social identity. Ethnicity provides a sense of belonging to a group and or a place in a globalised society. As for myself, ethnicity on a micro, meso and macro scale has become a major element in my personal and social identity’s

Moreover, as an individual grows up from being a child, they receive cultural values from the family or the society around. There are questions raised on matters dealing with identity: Can an individual choose his or her own

Cultural identity is a part of the psychological self-concept that expresses an individual or group’s worldview and perceived cultural affiliations. The first step in finding a societal fit is to establish a cultural identity; this can be on an individual level and group level. Who am I? And where do I belong? These questions start to form in the human mind from an early age; it drives humans to explore their worldviews and how and where they fit in the world. Rosenfeld (1971) argued it is a deep-seated primal process that has ensured our continual survival. By finding others that think and act similarly we are offered some protection (Erickson, as cited in Carducci 2015). Erickson (as cited in Carducci, 2015) and Maslow (as cited in Mcleod 2007) argued that the need to belong is a basic building block of human development. Whatever the reason, the consensus is that humans have an intrinsic need to find a like-minded cultural group to belong to; this chosen affiliation is their cultural identity. A person may identify with more than one cultural