Personal Narrative: My Stereotypes

Once, I had to move from a very diverse neighborhood in Chicago to a much less diverse suburban neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Although it had only been six months since I arrived to Chicago, the diverse makeup of the community prevented me from feeling like I was a minority. However my new neighborhood, and thus my new school, was not as diverse. In fact, I was one of the handful foreign students of the school. Moreover, due to the fact that the students did not have a chance to interact with other cultures, I was able to feel the xenophobic attitudes that others had against me.

My family comes from Pakistan, a place where people speak a only a certain way. Traveling there sometimes, felt as if I did not belong there. I lived there for a few years, tried to grasp their way of communicating, but was often told I was too “American” for them. After living there for a few years I started to develop their way of conversing, and then felt as if I had lost my original form. I would encounter many social gatherings where I did not know what would be the right way of speaking, but realized no way was the right way.

As an Indian-Americans, I grew up with two very different cultures influencing me in to distinct worlds: my home life and my school life. It wasn’t until I became a freshman a few years ago that these two cultures fused into one. I used to think using my mother tongue in public was weird, and that I had to be just like my Caucasian friends to be “cool”. As an early teen, I never acknowledged my own religion, culture, and ethnicity; sometimes I disgraced them. But, as I matured, I realized that my religion, culture, and ethnicity is a gift.

As a child of immigrant parents, my formative years in elementary and middle school were shaped by two important factors: the environment in which I lived and my background. My parents worked hard to settle into a new life in a foreign country to provide better opportunities for our family. This meant that we had to be flexible about where we lived due to relocating for jobs, and fluid about our ideas of culture. I recall the daunting nature of moving to a new city, twice, as a child. The prospect of leaving everything that was familiar to me and forming new friendships in an unfamiliar environment was a challenge.

I was born with a label that I did not want to accept. At a young age negative names would be thrown my way and I would constantly be embarrassed as each one hit me. Growing up I constantly wished I was someone else. I am a Nigerian student who formely believed that things would never change. I never felt upset about who I was until I attended elementary school.

Whatever the educated and often professionally successful person previously thought her position in society was, now she is challenged, as random white persons casually but powerfully degrade her. This moment is always insulting and even a relatively minor incident can have a significant impact. (Anderson 253) Anderson is simply restating, how a competent and successful individual will face discrimination if their race is different from the white-ruling class. He describes how anyone from a different race will be forced to self-evaluate their social status as an individual. His description of self-evaluation is similar to the time when I was in high school, every time that I felt I had finally, become equal to my peers and enjoyed the same

I have blond hair and pale skin. On the color wheel, my father is a rich mocha, my sister is a warm copper, and my mother is a perfectly tanned caramel; I am somewhere between cream and eggshell on the opposite end of the spectrum. Being stereotypically white can be difficult when you’re African American. The beginning of high school was when I first began to feel that my fair complexion hid my true identity.

I had grown up in all-white areas all my life, causing me to be ashamed of my background. When my family moved, I became exposed to people of all different backgrounds. When moving, I found people of the same culture as me, which resulted in learning about it and feeling comfortable expressing it. In brief, after

I started listening to this audio in the car on my way to swim practice and I originally thought that it was going to be a boring and a monotone podcast. To my surprise, I quickly discovered that I was wrong. The way she introduces the story is very fascinating and thrilling. My car ride was only 10 minutes.

But the thing is, there are so much of these people who are different than you. Getting along with them and having a good relationship is so hard that sometimes you have to give yourself up and become a new kind of person. This might sound really odd, but that’s the way I have been trying since last 2 years and it worked pretty well. You can not expect others to change their all traits and attitudes, there must be a moment when you have to make concessions and just react to them with a big smile. The point is, when you realize that you are one of the minority and are different than others, in my case everyone who were born in United States, however, and want to be accepted to their group, you have to be the first person who changes yourself and is willing to be accepted.

Hailing from a modest family, I knew that the opportunity to receive an education in the United States was more than a dream come true. As an immigrant, however, adjusting to life in the United States was far more difficult than I envisioned. I had an accent. I dressed differently than most people. But, I knew from competing in track and field events as a child that I would, at a point in time, face real life hurdles.

For me, my racial and cultural identity has always been at the forefront of my life experience. I grew up in an Iowan rural small town that was founded on Swedish heritage. My home town of Albert City, Iowa was founded by my Swedish ancestors, many of which still have family there today. Therefore, I have always known that my Swedish blood was an important aspect of my life. However, I am also of German, Norwegian, and Danish heritage which has conflicted my views of my identity.

To begin with, I have never considered myself to be one part of a specific group, but more of a diverse group of “bubbles” blown together. My own bubble consists of concepts that I identify myself with, such as being Latina, Spanish as my first language, Basketball as my favorite sport, Food as something I enjoy eating, education which I am pursuing and funny videos which makes me laugh. My subculture is a subculture on its own. It is inevitable to keep to just one way of looking at media because of new information that comes out each day. I tend to enjoy watching concepts that would not be ideal within my culture.

Their name was Logan. Their hair fell down past their chest and their head was covered with a baseball cap placed backwards slightly to the left. They wore a striped pink and blue button up with black slacks that loosely fell to the floor. To some, they was just another pretty girl who looks like she raided her father’s closet but they changed the way I look at myself and the world around me. I use the pronoun “they” because Logan is agender and they/them/theirs are their preferred pronouns.

The dragon I would like to defeat during senior year is my insecurity. The reason for my insecurity stems from my childhood when my mother abandoned me. My parents had met at an AA meeting, and after they finished attending, my father had recovered from the disease, but my mother had not. They had joint custody up until the age of six; however, it became apparent that my mother’s conditioned worsened, so the court granted my father full custody. I felt as though my mother purposely deteriorated because she did not want me.