Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Birds of a Feather Flock Together

One would think that in 2015 we would all be over racism in America, which is a melting pot of diverse races and ethnicities. Sadly that is not the situation. By definition, race means a person’s physical characteristics like bone structure, skin, hair, and eye color. A person’s ethnicity refers to their cultural factors like nationality, regional culture, ancestry, and language (http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethnicity_vs_Race). While most people get a clear-cut option of how to identify themselves, others do not get that.

            For many children born to Latin immigrants, there is sometimes a struggle as to who to try to identify with more, their non-native parents, or the rest of society? In the US, many people see people from Latin America as second-rate citizens who do nothing but steal jobs and drain government funding. They also see Hispanics as being uneducated, prone to teen pregnancy, and illegal (Golash-Boza, 2013). In fact, immigrants and their children eventually stop identifying as being Mexican, Puerto Rican, Argentinian, etc. so they can assimilate to the US and what they believe to be US culture and standards. Unfortunately, the more they try to identify as being an American, the more discrimination they face, so they start to isolate themselves and conform to the ways of their non-native parents.

            In the US, we need to start accepting the fact that there is always going to be racism in parts of the country. Even though this did not happen to Latinos, it was only earlier this year that a video was released showing a fraternity spouting racial slurs against African-Americans and how there will never be any in that particular chapter. Latinos are more likely to face racial profiling from police and store employees than white people are (http://www.civilrights.org/publications/reports/racial-profiling2011/the-reality-of-racial.html). This ties into how we portray Latinos and the Latino community. On Halloween, people can buy costumes that portray a stereotypical Hispanic with the oversized poncho and sombrero. We as a society need to stop teaching young people that wearing these types of costumes and using derogatory language is ok and that there will be no consequences for these actions.

           Being the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a white woman from Chicago gives me a little bit different perspective. Personally, I never faced any type of discrimination because when you look at me, I look more like my blonde-haired blue-eyed mother with my brown hair and green eyes. When I would go somewhere with my father, people would automatically assume that he was my stepfather because I do not resemble him. When I would correct these people, I would weird get looks and people would automatically ask me if my father had ever forced me to learn Spanish so I could communicate with him. They automatically assumed that I was fluent in Spanish and I ate Mexican food constantly because of my father. I am not fluent in Spanish, nor do I constantly eat Mexican food. Something else I faced was whenever my education came up. My mother is a divorce attorney and my father manages a parking garage. Someone asked me if I inherited my academic ambition from my mother. This is something that I predominately inherited from my Mexican immigrant father. He came to the US on a scholarship to attend the prestigious University of Chicago. However that fell through and he attended Bryant and Stratton College where he graduated at the top of his class and worked at the famous Harry Carey’s Restaurant for 17 years. So, I may not resemble my father strongly, but I definitely take after him in my academic success.







SOURCES 
Golash-Boza, Tanya. "Dropping the Hyphen? Becoming Latino(a)-American through Racialized Assimilation." Social Forces 85.1 (2006): 27-55. 

http://www.civilrights.org/publications/reports/racial-profiling2011/the-reality-of-racial.html

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethnicity_vs_Race