Race and Ethnicity

 

Ethnicity is not just a person’s race. Ethnicity gives us room to change because we can reject our own and embrace another. You can move from one region to another and assimilate your beliefs, actions and customs to identify with that ethnic orientation. You cannot do the same with race. Race is your biologically engineered features. It can include skin color, skin tone, eye and hair color, as well as a tendency toward developing certain diseases. It is not something that can be changed or disguised. Race does not have customs or globally learned behavior. Going back to our three Caucasians, each could be cloned and placed in different cultures throughout the world that were primarily not Caucasian. While their behavior would change, their physical and biological features would not.

"Race" related physical variations found in humans have no real significance except for the social and cultural importance put on them by people. Race is a cultural term that Americans use to describe what a person's ancestry is, and that unfortunately brings with it many misconceptions and erroneous biological connotations. It was for some time common to divide people into three main races. Caucasian or the so-called white race, for example, native residents of Britain, France Germany. Natives of Uganda, Somalia, and Nigeria in Africa are considered Negroid or part of the black race. Koreans, Chinese, American Indians are all Mongoloid or members of the yellow race. The distinguishing characteristics of these races are based on their visibly observable traits such as skin color, hair form, and bone structure and body shape. We must keep in mind that the American system of categorizing groups of people on the basis of race, was developed by what was then a dominant white, European-descended population, and serves as a means to distinguish and control other "non-white" populations in various ways.

Most people have mistaken me as a Samoan or Hawaiian. They wouldn’t think I’m Filipino because I’m dark and built bigger than Filipinos. I’ve been raised around Filipino cultural but again I’ve been raised as American. My dad is white so I’ve been raised around two different cultures. My experiences being around two completely cultures are so different. On my mom’s side of the family we celebrate holidays completely different than on my dad’s side. I love it because I get to experience two different sides. On my mom’s side everyone all my aunts and uncles and all the elders speak Illcano so when we talk to them they would prefer all the kids to speak in our language it’s a respect thing.

 

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