Influence Of Race In St. Louis Mo Essay - 1,947 words

Influence of race in St. Louis MO Throughout a persons life there are certain characteristics that affect them. These characteristics cannot be chosen, they are given from the moment of birth: Race, Class, and Gender. These characteristics are determined by the parents and have a major input on an individuals life. Race, class and gender is what makes a person who they are and who they will become. Of course, in our days a person can change any one of these variables, but this change will turn his life 360 degrees in another direction. What is race? Can a certain race be a privilege? The concept race refers to a category of people who are believed to share distinct physical characteristics that are considered socially significant.


For distinction of a racial group the following characteristics may be used: skin color, hair texture, facial features, body shape and size. Cultural definitions of race have taught us to view race as a scientific categorization of people based on a biological differences between groups of individuals. Yet, racial categories are based more on social definitions than on biological differences.(Bay 1) I am a white female. I dont consider this being a privilege of any sort. On the surface I look like the majority of people in my community, with only one but to this statement I am Ukrainian. I look like any other American, I talk like any other American, and as long as the people dont know that I am not American everything is well.


I am not implying that when a person finds out that I am Ukrainian, he will immediately turn away and walk from me, but on the everyday basis my race, being Slavic, makes a change. Racist and racism are provocative words in American society. They are descriptive words of reality that exists and cannot be denied. Some people believe that race is the primary determinant of human abilities and capacities and behave as if racial differences produce inherent superiorities. The community that I will describe in this paper is a high school. This community was chosen because in my life the biggest number of distinctions because of race was made during this period of my life. To give a better description of the school, it was an International school with a lot of nationalities presented, but the majority of the students were American, with all the teaching staff and the administrative body being American as well.


I was not the only Ukrainian in our school there were 5 of us in high school and couple more students were from countries with Slavic roots: Slovenia and Croatia. The leaders in my high school were the principal and the vice principal. The principal has never made any distinctions between any of the students (this could be observed because the school was private and small). The main source of prejudice was the vice principal. Being a good student I never had problems with the scholastic part of school (I was receiving a scholarship, so I was good), so in this field the vice-principal could not be prejudiced, but everything concerning behavior was blamed on me. It has to be understood that we all were straight A students in all disciplines, we participated in a lot of after school activities, played sports (I was the captain of the basketball team).


We were socially interactive people who blended in with the community completely. But our vice principal, being quite openly a racist in terms of everything but American, could not let us live without problems. The only people who were always sitting in the vice-principals office were we the 5 Ukrainians. Every single break between classes, one of us (usually me) would spend the whole break in his office. Sometimes the whole situation would get so absurd that even if I was absent from school and something happened, I was the one being blamed. He always used to say: You Ukrainians are always doing everything so fast, going somewhere on top speed, always trying to hurry.


I will slow you down! Couple of times when the situation got out of hand I went to the head counselor, because I couldnt take the pressure any more. The counselor was no help at all. He was Korean, but born and lived his whole life in the United Stated. The only thing he told me is that when he studied in the university the racism was much worse and that he had to put up with many more offenses. I usually told him that this didnt solve my problems, but he would say that there is nothing that he can do, and that I just have to ignore the whole situation and pretend that everything is OK and nothing is happening. I did what I was told, because being in a foreign country with only foreigners around you there is not much you can do in terms of legislative settling of these problems.


Otherwise the school life was very good. Most of the teachers treated me just the same as everybody else and gave us respect because of the scholastic achievements that I received in school and in sports. Of course, there were people who were not quite as opened and ready to give the others and me credit, but with time they understood that we being Ukrainian are just the same as all the other students. Once in school we had to take and interview for our Government class and the interview had to do with the aspect of race. I interviewed a woman; she was the head secretary in our school. Her name was Linda Meyers.


We discussed race, class and gender and what effects each of these had on her life. Linda is a white-American female. She said that she feels by being white, she h ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: racism, st louis, vice principal, ukrainian, american

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