My Diagnostic Essay (Multiethnic Literatures)

"Ethnically Envious"

“Ethnically Envious” is a term recently coined by my mother to describe interest in all peoples and cultures not of my own origin. It is universally agreed throughout my family that my parents will have “brown grandbabies” judging solely from my taste in the magazine cut outs of men posted next my bed; “It would be a surprise if you end up with a white guy” my mother justifies. Race, or “ethnicity” as I prefer, plays the most prominent role in my life because it is the identification category that I find most intriguing and impactful. It is the category most confused and most stereotyped, and the one I have struggled with the most in the acceptance of my own identity.
Other categories of identity, such as class and gender, have never really been significant in my life. I have an agreeable personality, and have made tremendous efforts to understand, and get along with peoples from all walks of life. My personality often hides the stereo-typical traits of my socio-economic class and gender. Many of my close friends have been surprised to hear I am wealthy, “You don’t act like you’re rich” I’ve been told. And many who know me well but who have not seen my house or do not know my father is a surgeon, just assume I am middle to lower middle class because I don’t wear $150 dollar jeans and drive an expensive car to school. In fact, I took the school bus up until my last days of high school.
My gender, however, is simply an omnipresent presence in my life that I passively and contently accepted long ago. My gender has never truly kept me down, nor has it ever been an important part of my conscious or active mind. I have had very few sexist encounters, and aside from the occasional annoyance of inferior treatment by mechanics and car dealers, being a woman has just never been a concentrated subject in my pathway to success.
Ethnicity, on the other hand, has hit me hard. In truth, I have never denied my mother’s label. I have struggled with acceptance of my color. Inside, I sympathize deeply with all the people who suffer/ed under white power, and I feel an enormous weight of guilt that shrouds my race’s history. This is one of the reasons I hold a more connected tie to Judaism than any other member of my family. It is a way for me to separate myself from the white Christian that most often is blamed the culprit of oppression. I recognize the immaturity and underlying prejudices held in my own perceptions of my ethnicity, but I can’t help but feel them intensely. When I became a victim of racism it hurt me more than any other prejudice I had ever experienced; Ladysmith, South Africa, is not place for bouncy white girls.
Although ethnicity has had the most prominent effect on my life, all of the categories mentioned before are intertwined. They are all categories of identity, and all are roots of prejudice; whether it be in the 2008 Presidential election, or the funding of an inner-city Los Angeles High School. It is ethnicity that is most clearly worn on the billions of faces of the world. Humans are organizational beings that like to put things into categories; color is just an easy division.