Multi-Racial America
My experience reading the article, “Merging Identity” by Norimitsu Onishi, has been riddled with questions. I am aware of my own race, Caucasian, as I try to see the viewpoints of the Asian-Americans communicating through Onishi’s journalism. First to challenge my culturally accepted reasoning was Peter Bersamin. A first generation Filipino immigrant, Bersamin experienced the initial realization that he was Asian three months after arriving in the United States. Along my lines of thinking, of course he is Asian, just as I am Caucasian, but this thought was irrelevant throughout Bersamin’s entire life span, until one moment in the land of American culture. Why?
Further reading offers a new look into the American culture I feel so comfortable evaluating my world with. Vietnamese-born professor at UC San Diego, Yen Le Espiritu, states of Asian-American college students as becoming, “racialized and politicized in the United States context.” This assertion effectively opened a new level of insight into my culture’s unique framework of privilege and power. The distinguishing factor of race, used to allocate power in America, elevates personal awareness of race as part of one’s identity. As the system of power and privilege divides members of society based on primarily race, this becomes a key aspect in building one’s communal identity. Finding acceptance, for American immigrants from Asian counties, shifts away from their culturally traditional attitudes which strictly define the difference between specific ethnicities. Long held differences due to historical conflicts between these counties lose ground to the similarities attracting Korean-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans to form a communal identity together as Asian-Americans.
I believe Peter Bersamin to have become aware of his own racial identity by means of the difference it signified outside of his native country. In and of itself, awareness serves only to the purpose of discovery of oneself and the world in which we live. The weight of Bersamin’s realization is born of the system he must negotiate in order to successfully interact within American culture. (Word Count 329)
