At first glance this assignment made me very uncomfortable. I absolutely HATE the idea od being split up into groups based on race, racial identity, ethnicity, and cultures. This is probably also...
I also found this assignment to be uncomfortable because of the idea of splitting up based on race/racial identity. It wasnāt 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 āblackā girls in our school. Ā Moving on from middle school to high school, a lot of people started identifying me as just that, a āblack girlā. 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.
After a while, it upset me to the point where I would deny that I was black altogether and just identify myself as Indian in spite of only being allowed to choose on race. As I got older, I began to identify myself as biracial because I became more aware that my connections to my Jamaican culture were just as equal as my Hindi culture.














