Writing My Testimonial

Writing my testimonial was an experience in which I got to dig deeper into my identities and think about the specific events in my life that have influenced my socialization as a racial being. Firstly, I thought about how I consider not being around people of many different racial to be my first socialization step within Harro’s cycle of socialization. For the first twelve years of my life, I lived in Asia. And for the first four years of my life, I lived in Hong Kong. I only saw white people, like myself, and Asian people. I did not really know that people with other racial identities existed. My mom has told me the story of when I saw a black man for the first time in the Hong Kong airport, and excitedly screamed, “Mommy! There’s a chocolate

The first situation was when I was arguing with somebody in high school and my best friend stuck up for me. The person who I was arguing with referred to my best friend as “Blacky,” and after I told him that he was racist, he said that he was allowed to say that because his “mom’s boyfriend was black.” The second occasion, I was talking about how beautiful my baby sister is, and a friend told me that, “she’s not pretty, she’s Asian…” and then did not understand after I told her that what she had made was a racist comment. I would consider this second event the second step in Helm’s White Racial Identity Development Model, disintegration. Because in this stage, the person becomes conflicted over unresolvable racial moral dilemmas, yet does not acknowledge that oppression exists while witnessing

After hearing this, I revised my testimonial in a way that forced myself to be more open about all of my experiences—I wanted to really push myself. I was nervous about sharing my testimonial with Ricardo because it was so personal, but after sharing and hearing his affirmation, I was proud of how honest I had been. From his testimonial, I learned about the perspectives of someone who can be considered the opposite of me in terms of some identities. He wrote about being a person of color and being a man—something with which I have no experience. It was interesting to be able to hear how his grandfather enforced in him goals of trying to reach toward greater things, and how he felt that his mom tries to use the benefits of being white because she is lighter skinned. I learned that although Ricardo and I do not seem to share the same identities at first glance, we both have agent and target identities. As Iris Young writes in Five Faces of Oppression, groups are not oppressed to the same extent or in the same