Race, Ethnicity and Stereotypes too...

Today I am not a person who judge someone based on their skin color. I like to say that I am color blind when it comes to things like that but from age 1-9, before I moved to Philadelphia I lived in Long Beach, California and I was surrounded by a majority of Cambodian people like me. There were a few African Americans and a few more Hispanics. So as you can imagine I didn’t come from a very diverse environment so when I first moved to Philadelphia I had some trouble making friends because there wasn’t much people like me and I really strayed from them. I went through a few years without having any friends until I learned to accept that color wasn’t really important. When I first went to boarding school there were a few people like me but the majority was African Americans but that didn’t make a difference for me. Most of them tried to stick to their own kind but I was friends with everyone, sometimes jokingly they would ask me if I was color blind and I would just simply say “yes.” As the years passed by the other Asians in my grade either got kicked out or they just left school and through my junior and senior year I was the only Asian person in my grade but I was cool with everyone_ white, black, Hispanic, or other. They called me the token Asian but I fit right in.

For me I can say that I don’t judge people by their skin color or the way they carry themselves. I like to look at personality but I know that I get judged by people every single day by the way I dress and the way I talk or don’t talk. I know that because I dress in baggy jeans and clothes that people think I’m a very sloppy person that don’t care about anything and because I don’t like to talk about a lot of thing s that I am a boring person but everyone who has ever given me a chance know that I am one of the most organized and neat person the world has and that I don’t let a lot of things bother me but when I am passionate about something I fight for my stand and when I’m just hanging out I don’t leave without getting a laugh from everyone.

Another thing is people think that just because I am Asian I have to be super smart in math and science but in fact I am only average and at times I struggle just like everyone else so stereotypes are never true for all.