I used to tell this to my son, who was the most rebellious teenager I’d ever been around. We’d get into such heated and argumentative arguments about our identities and what we wanted to be, I knew I could never go back to having been raised by my parents. The only way I could put it into words was that my identity was defined by the people around me and the things that made me who I was.
While most teenagers are in their early teens, a good part of us is very early on in our lives. I’m not saying we don’t have a lot of experience managing our own identities. It’s just that we’re always at the front of a fight, fighting for an answer, and the time is often spent trying to make sense out of our experiences. If you want to learn more about your identity, stick with a few of my other posts.
A recent study by the University of California at Berkeley found that when people who were raised in ethnic minority groups were sent to a mainstream high school, they took on the identity of their own ethnic group. This is an interesting study because it shows a clear link between the experiences we have growing up in our own ethnic group and the situations in which we find ourselves today.
Let’s be honest, some of us aren’t even born into our own ethnic group. If you’re raised in a predominantly white neighborhood, chances are you’ll grow up with an identity that is quite different from the one you were born into. Even if you’re born into a different ethnic group, your identity is not tied to your ethnicity, but rather to your culture. For instance, my friend is of Lebanese American heritage.
In the beginning of the trailer, you’re in a country where the idea of racism is the same as it is in France, where the government of the time is trying to erase your identity from the books.
As a white person, you might be surprised to learn that in the West at least, your identity is not tied to your ethnicity.
This idea that your ethnic identity is not tied to your ethnicity is also something that I see among several different groups. For instance, I am an Iranian Muslim. And I have a different one every single day. In the beginning of the trailer they are in a club-like setting where they are surrounded by white people. As you can imagine, this one is a bit different than the others. As they are surrounded by white people, their entire identity is tied to their ethnicity.
I think this idea that your identity is tied to your ethnicity is not only a problem, but also a harmful one. As an ethnic minority, you are by definition not accepted by society. And this can be a good thing too. It can mean that people like you are not killed or harmed or discriminated against. But as an ethnic minority you are not accepted by society because you are different. This can be a problem because if you are different, then you must be different too.
This idea that your ethnic identity is tied to your ethnicity can be the very thing that causes you to grow up in a certain way. It doesn’t matter how good you are at basketball because you don’t have the same skin color as the players you play with. This concept ties together a whole bunch of issues that kids are dealing with right now, like race and class and sexual orientation and whatnot.
For example, many minority kids have trouble distinguishing between the two sides of their identities. They know they are a minority because of their skin, but they still identify as white. What they are trying to do is to “pass,” which means they try to convince themselves they are not “of” the other side.
