Race and Your Community

Essay by Bubbles34College, Undergraduate March 2009

download word file, 7 pages 5.0

Race and Your CommunityAbstractIn this paper, I discuss and examine social relationships with a focus on racism and the theories that augment the latter. In particular, I will discuss the social identity theory using my personal experiences as a pivotal point in giving concrete examples. The term social identity is a concept in social psychology that defines the "we" aspect of an individual's self-concept (Myers, 2005). Together with the self-concept, our social identity is the reason for why people define themselves in groups or congregations while maintaining their social identity.

Race and Your CommunityOften times, we only notice ourselves as different when we are surrounded by people who are homogeneous, be it due to age, gender and most importantly color. Growing up as a kid, being black was an issue for me and for the rest of the kids of my age. It was those individuals who were white or Asian that had a more colorful life, a less complicated.

Though the end of the slave trade brought African American individuals a chance to ascend in that social ladder that only whites once had access to, for a while we thought that racism would eventually be wiped out completely in this world. Apparently, we spoke too soon.

Upon examining the members of the community where I live, I immediately noticed the similarities and differences that we had in terms of physicality. Currently I live on base a military community. Though gender and age is very much prominent in examining my fellow community dwellers, the color of the skin was the one that I first looked into without consciously doing so. More importantly, I rarely saw the vastness in number of blacks but I paid importance to the few whites in the community. It was not because I had something against...