Racial Identity: Reflection Paper

Introduction

Identity is the cultural mode of imagining belonging, or shared substance, whether this is predicated on race, ethnicity, nationhood, class, gender or sexuality. Many forms of identity are seen as possessing an inherent logic, linking communities in a homologous relationship to the expressive forms they produce. This reflection paper presents my reflection on the racial identity and my experiences from the personal life of the first time I noticed that race matters.

Schemas of Racial Identity Development

The people referred to today as African Americans were neither African nor American in the colonies. They had been involuntarily captured and transported from Africa to colonies throughout the Western Hemisphere for purposes of enslavement, or they were descended from those people (Bankston, 38). They were not Americans because slave, servant, or free with very few exceptions, they had virtually no positive standing before English law, especially as it was interpreted in the North American colonies. Although among the oldest American-born populations, they tragically no longer had a true home. Many historians presently seek to demonstrate the ways that people of African ancestry negotiated both with whites and among themselves for a few freedoms (Blackmon, 56). Despite this recent trend in the scholarship, it remains important to recognize the increasingly severe restrictions under which the vast majority of black people lived (Appiah & Henry, 45).

African Americans made significant strides toward parity and integration with white Americans. Yet the importance of race in U.S. society and culture qualified and, in some ways, limited the degree of success experienced by African Americans. Urbanization was crucial to bringing down the wall restraining African Americans from full and equal access to the opportunities and benefits of American life (Appiah & Henry, 59).

Tommie Smith and John Carlos Video: Participant Impact

The Civil Rights movement had made ...