Racial Identity Reflection

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As I listen to the recording I had made back in week two of this course, I am able to realize how far my identity development has come. A few things stuck out to me as I listened to my thoughts and ideas from nine weeks ago. I found myself making statements about being “color blind” and that I “don’t go out of my way to think about how people are different”. I now realize that this kind of thinking is that kind that can inadvertently perpetuate racism in society. In order to challenge racism, there needs to be a dialogue about racism and denying the fact that there is any issue is only making matters worse. I also noticed that I had a tendency to group people together and had the mindset that one person of a certain race can relate to all …show more content…

In my recording, I talked about how I grew up fairly isolated from other races. I had some exposure in elementary school, but I went to a predominately white Catholic high school, I was a member at a predominately white dance studio where I spent the majority of my time after school, my neighborhood was mostly white, my family is predominately white, my friends are predominately white, as well as my parent’s friends. Race was not something that was discussed when I was growing up and I struggled to answer the questions in the recording regarding when my first experience noticing a different race was, or when my first experience discussing race was. I was also very naïve about my own White privilege, and while at first I did feel some guilty about it, I realize now that this is the journey a lot of White people must take in order to develop their racial identity. Patti DeRosa (2001) explain this in a way that really made sense to me when she wrote, “The privileges of this status remain invisible because we are seen as the norm, we are held to be the standard, we are affirmed, and our identity and experience is reflected back to us in a myriad of ways.” (pg. 6). Becoming aware of this privilege is half the battle on the road to understanding what it means to be White in our

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