Alyssa Zheng, Period 2, 5/24/2023

Socio-political Consciousness

Like many others in this country, I was born and raised in an immigrant family. Racism and discrimination are all too familiar to me, my family and the millions of others who left their home country for the land of the free. There are constant discussions in the media and in our everyday lives on the effect of race and ethnicity on how we are treated by other individuals and by the system. I grew up hearing stories that gradually progressed from casual racism and snarky remarks to violent hate crimes ending in lives being taken. Growing up in a mainly Asian American community, I always thought that what I would hear would just stay as stories and gossip amongst ourselves. I never really took the idea of “racism” too seriously because it had just never experienced it. Where I grew up, I looked just like everyone else. I was not a minority, and my race did not affect how I was treated.

In the environment that I grew up in, race was not power; money was. Despite all being immigrants who came from an entirely different continent, we attacked and looked down on each other for not owning a car, not speaking English, not having a good job, and not being “successful” in the eyes of the American dream. We were all being discriminated against by a whole different group of people, but the internalized racism between us stopped us from banding together. Even within my own family, I felt a hierarchy of power. We were all immigrants, but just because one of us spoke English better than the other, or one of us arrived in America earlier than the other, the latter would be looked down upon. During the first few years that my parents lived in America, they felt more racism from their own people than from outsiders. They would be denied jobs, paid less, and even talked bad about to their faces just because they were new immigrants. My dad’s father looked down on his own son all his life, all because my dad was a laborer who made little to no money. While I knew of the existence of people who hated my race/ethnicity, my own culture was what I felt really hated by.

Now, after moving out of that predominantly Asian community and seeing the real world through both my own eyes and the media, I know that race and money both play a big part in how I’m treated. Obviously, there’s nothing I can change about my race, and I’m grateful to have had my childhood in a community where race didn’t matter. Now that I’m older, race is something I think about more, but money is something I think about less. I realize that money and success and something I can achieve with hard work, and doesn’t have to be a defining factor. Financial and social success is powerful, but it is not impossible to attain. Combining my two mindsets from my childhood and now, I can realize that both race and money don’t really play that big a part in how my life plays out - I can determine my own destiny with my decisions and my choices.