Personal Narrative: I Am African-American

522 Words2 Pages

Yesterday my world crashed around me while I was in Calculus. Yesterday was the thirty first of November, a date I will not forget. My world crashed because I confronted an identity crisis that I had ignored since freshman year. I am Indian but I was raised in several different cultures but none of them a strictly Indian one. It started when I noticed the other Asian kids in my honors classes would all do very well and behaved differently than me. They were what society views that average Asian student to be but I was not, I refused to be. Despite all of that yesterday made me rethink what I thought of myself and what I wanted from myself as well as from the world in the future. It made me truly understand my identity, who I really am, and …show more content…

I went to school from preschool to kindergarten in a Newark public school, a school filled mostly with African-American and Latino children. So they were my only friends, they acted differently than the people in the suburbs so I considered what I learn from them as my culture. Then in first grade I moved to the suburbs and the kids here were much more well behaved and what society would call “proper”, another culture I was raised in. Then around the time I was twelve I began to going on trips with my father to where he was raised, a Caribbean island called Trinidad where my grandparents and most of my family live. These different cultures confused me as I knew I was Indian but I seemed to fit in better with other cultures.
In Calculus I was partnered up with another Indian student named Sai. He looked like me; he had the same height, haircut, and color skin as I did. When we finished our work we began to talk to pass the time. The first question Sai asked me was how I did on the SAT. It turned out that our SAT scores were around the same so I asked him then what his GPA was and it was far higher than mine, it was in the fours. I drew comparisons to us physically so when I heard of his academic career it got me thinking. That simple fact, that I had just learned, instantly made me think of what I could

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