Loud family passionate about Family & Food
Ryan Sumner,
College Park, MD.
Italians are often seen as stereotypically loud and have a passion for food. My family falls into these stereotypes
Why are people like me scared?
Tom Lewis,
Phoenix, AZ.
Most “white” people in the USA are descended from people who were considered “other” and often not even white when these ancestors arrived. All of these groups changed and improved America. Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, and Jews were as unwelcome as Mexicans, Dominicans, Africans and Muslims are now. I am white welsh-anglo-scot and I welcome all the above groups. Join me?
I am not wrong, I’m different.
Back when I was a kid, I used to wonder why or how people are different, why do we all have different races? When I was in preschool, my mom would always tell me not to play with kids that were bad. Those kids were black. She said that they were troublemakers, misbehaved, and that they don’t have any manners. And of course, I believed her. Most of my life, I only cared about what somebody looked like on the outside. Now, I know how wrong of me it was to assume somebody’s personality. This project has changed me a lot in many ways. It has taught me how we all need to be fair to each other, it has taught me that nobody’s appearance screams out their identity, I have also learned that not everyone is a bad person and that people are different.
Race is not natural, it’s taught.
It all began in the 18th century. Scientists developed categorizing things in nature, including humans. According to the RACE website, “The 19th century also marked a period of widespread racialization—not just of African Americans—but of Native Americans, Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans as well. Much of the racializing of non-Europeans, and even the Irish, served an economic and political purpose.” This is not fair. People were categorized into groups. Blacks, Asians, Mexicans, Italians, separated from each other. Why were we categorized? As reported in “The Story of Race and the Classification of People”, “ In 1680 AD, the idea of classification by appearance slowly began to permeate society as lawmakers in the early colonies of North America began to use “white” as a classification of themselves rather than “Englishmen” or “Christians.” See how this is not fair? I’m pretty sure we all have questions about race such as, aren’t we all just one human race? Will racism ever go away? How do we become racists?, How did racism start?, and who started racism? Some of these answers can’t be found…but one thing I know is that race is not a natural thing, it is the others that taught us.
When did Italians lose their box?
Trish Lewis ,
Submitted via Twitter: @ECLECTICCHAIR.
Don’t speak Spanish to white relatives.
Max Lazzara,
Minneapolis, MN.
Bilingual when I learned to talk, raised among my father’s Floridian family of Spaniards, Italians, and Cubans, I was just as Hispanic as I was white; but moved by divorce, I joined my mother’s German-Polish Minnesotan family. The message quickly became clear: don’t speak Spanish to white relatives. In a fully English-speaking home in a majority-white town, I had nowhere to speak it anymore. It wasn’t until age fourteen that I began to relearn Spanish, and I was not fluent until age seventeen.
My wife calls me ethnically flexible.
Paul,
Portland, OR.
I could talk about this all day. Race, ethnicity, and ancestry fascinate me. The question of who I am has been with me since I can remember. When I was little, we lived near the reservation in South Dakota, and everyone thought I was Native. My sister who is pale, blue eyed and blonde, would tell me that my parents found me on the rez and decided to keep me. (Ironically, I recently discovered there is likely a little Native blood in my father’s family).
Ethnically flexible – being able to claim or blend into many ethnic groups or situations – is actually a great thing and I have benefited from it many times. I first realized this when I traveled to Europe in college. The Italians thought I was Italian, the Spaniards thought I was Spanish, it was great, and I’ve used it to my advantage everywhere I’ve traveled inside and outside the US.
