Reflection On Race And Ethnicity

When I read the instructions of this essay I wondered how hard it would be to talk about myself and where I am from. It’s become a topic I don’t like discussing due to past bad experiences. I used to believe that race and ethnicity where the same thing and now that I took this class I understand that race is just a myth even though people believe it is true. Throughout my life I’ve never had any trouble explaining where I was from until I moved to the US and realized how hard it is to explain where I’m from to others. Throughout this essay I will explain my roots, my ethnicity and how it has impacted my life in the US.

I am proud to say that I am of Hispanic ethnicity and was born 21 years ago in Guatemala. I lived in Guatemala for 17 years

Back in Guatemala I would consider myself a Guatemalan and would be completely blind to color, at least that’s what I thought. Even though many of my friends where of different skin colors, I would just consider them Guatemalan. In my mind, they weren’t black, brown, or yellow they were just Guatemalan. But then this concept of different ethnicities began to develop when I began school in the US. I’m not saying I didn’t know there where different ethnicities, I just wasn’t aware of mine. I learned to speak English when I was 5 years old because I used to go to an American school. All of my professors where American and I used to spend more time speaking English than Spanish. To clarify, I speak English, Spanish, and German; the reason why I clarify is that I never realized I had an accent until one of my classmates told me I did. This is when I started to become aware because due to my accent everyone asked me where I was from and I would happily tell them. The problem was that people began questioning me and judging me saying I was a liar when I told them I was Hispanic. I didn’t understand why, they would all say “but you don’t look Hispanic” so I would ask them what a Hispanic person looked like and they would simply say “brown”. In my mind every Hispanic person looked like a Hispanic person, either white, brown, black or yellow. It took me some time to understand that most of Americans have no idea

Though I don’t consider myself to be from those countries because I was born in Guatemala and I am proud of it. Although I do share beliefs, norms, language, symbols, and material goods with those ethnicities. I also forgot to mention how I was unaware of “white privilege” until I began to research it as a required essay topic a couple semesters back. Hopefully I don’t seem stupid or ignorant, I just wasn’t aware it actually existed. All along I believed that it was just a fallacy that under privileged people used to trash other people’s success. I was not aware of the privilege I had back home or here in the US. Now that I know it really exists I feel bad about how ignorant I was for many years. White privilege also exists in Guatemala, although I was never aware of it when I lived there. After doing some research and discussing it in class I was able to clearly identify exact cases of how white privilege affects society back home. White privilege in Guatemala, to me, seems a lot different than white privilege in the US. In Guatemala everyone is “Guatemalan” no matter what their ethnicity or color is. In the US, you are either American (if white) or African American, Asian American, Indian American. Why do people of color in the US have to another name if they are all American? This is hard to understand in a country like the US, clearly showing