Essay On Ethnic Identity

Heterogeneous cultural groups have evolved into distinct racial groups that individuals misrecognize as natural instead of a social construction. Historically, people did not primarily identify according to race, but rather ethnic group, language, and kinship. Ethnicity is the identification with an ethnic group based on language, religion, historical experience, geographic isolation, kinship or race. Race is phenotypically dissimilar groups in some sort of long-term unequal power and/or economic relationship where the dominant group justifies its position through some kind of legitimating ideology. Although, race has no biological reality, it is culturally real and operates as a principal identity at local and national levels. The United

I would not say I completely understood it while I was younger, as I would hear many comments, but I did understand that I was in some way different enough for people to point it out. Even though I had grown up in the town my entire life, there has never been a point in my life where I felt as if I belonged, or could be identified as an American. Honestly, I built up resentment to my own ethnic and racial group. I would have preferred at the time to be of African American or Caucasian American decent then the one that was being othered. They would say “go back to where you came from,” and actually never called me Indian, but Arab, and other names that did not align with my racial and ethnic group. I grew resentment because of religious factors, because there were Hindu Gods throughout my house, and my mom would force me to do daily prayers. I went to a Baptist Church growing up, and preferred Christianity to Hinduism because Hinduism seemed weird. I was more accustomed to the dominant white culture, than the one I had been raised within. The dominant white culture was depicted as the norm, and the Indian culture was a clear outlier that I could point out from a young