#ped37

I also found this assignment to be uncomfortable because of the idea of splitting up based on race/racial identity. It wasn’t until we started opening up during the first prompt that I started to feel comfortable and more open to talking about my experiences about race. This assignment really helped me open up in my personal reflection essay where I talked about my racial identity as being biracial. In this excerpt of my personal reflection essay, I am able to share this experience with my race when I was growing up:

The environment I was brought up in was very diverse in many cultures except for mine. I never acknowledged that I might have been part of a different racial/ethnic background than most of the people I went to school with until I started to notice that most of my friends had never heard of Bollywood movies I watched, that the headbands and hair accessories of other girls looked differently in my hair, or when people looked at me confused when I had never heard of certain bands or artists they knew, growing up in my school.

Throughout all of my elementary schooling, my sister and I were the only “black” girls in our school.  Moving on from middle school to high school, a lot of people started identifying me as just that, a “black girl”. This would confuse and even upset me because I was not just a black girl. I would then explain that because my mother worked all the time, my father raised my sister and I with his Hindi culture, food, music, and some of his language while I was never really exposed to the cultures they were used to. Me, identifying myself as just Indian caused a lot of conflict because after explaining this to people, I would almost always be argued with that I could not identify myself as Indian because my skin was too dark for an Indian girl, that because I could not speak Hindi fluently and that I could only identify by what my mother was.

I also found this assignment to be uncomfortable because of the idea of splitting up based on race/racial identity. It wasn’t until we started opening up during the first prompt that I started to feel comfortable and more open to talking about my experiences about race. This assignment really helped me open up in my personal reflection essay where I talked about my racial identity as being biracial. In this excerpt of my personal reflection essay, I am able to share this experience with my race when I was growing up:

The environment I was brought up in was very diverse in many cultures except for mine. I never acknowledged that I might have been part of a different racial/ethnic background than most of the people I went to school with until I started to notice that most of my friends had never heard of Bollywood movies I watched, that the headbands and hair accessories of other girls looked differently in my hair, or when people looked at me confused when I had never heard of certain bands or artists they knew, growing up in my school.

Throughout all of my elementary schooling, my sister and I were the only “black” girls in our school.  Moving on from middle school to high school, a lot of people started identifying me as just that, a “black girl”. This would confuse and even upset me because I was not just a black girl. I would then explain that because my mother worked all the time, my father raised my sister and I with his Hindi culture, food, music, and some of his language while I was never really exposed to the cultures they were used to. Me, identifying myself as just Indian caused a lot of conflict because after explaining this to people, I would almost always be argued with that I could not identify myself as Indian because my skin was too dark for an Indian girl, that because I could not speak Hindi fluently and that I could only identify by what my mother was.

The topic discussed during Lauren Rankin’s speech that morning was very powerful. I was brought up in catholic school throughout my whole childhood, but it wasn’t until high school that my attention was brought to the abortion topic. I went to a small all girls catholic high school that uncomfortably advocated the pro-life movement. Young girls, including myself were brought into this school and nudged towards being pro-life instead of having opinions of our own. There would be a month dedicated to the pro-life movement where we would have to watch disturbing videos (like “The Silent Scream”) of abortions for educational purposes in our religion classes and would have trips for us to participate in the “March for Life” in DC. Our principal would also host a meeting in the auditorium where we would watch even more disturbing videos in which parental permission had to be asked. My parents are very foreign so they did not understand the topic of abortion but wanted me to participate in whatever activity the school had. After they signed me up, I unknowingly watched the most biased, gruesome, and horrifying pro-life abortion video that I had ever saw, along with the rest of the school. Being introduced to these things so young, along with a complete lack of sex education in the curriculum left us with such an unfair disadvantage of what the real issue was. Looking back, it scares me how my school dealt with this issue. That young girls were brought up with the mindset that having a different view was wrong and keeping us blind about sexual education.

It wasn’t until my community college that I had my chance to be open-minded and accept that what I have been taught and brought up with was wrong. I am proud to be pro-choice. I’ve witnessed many of things that Lauren was telling us about abortion clinics, and girls just not knowing that there are options out there. No one should not have to risk their future because someone else thinks its OK to.