Wearing My Race

When I first thought about writing this blog, I was planning on tying all of my group’s words together in one essay. But I also thought of my idea of race and how it affects my self-identity. I immediately began thinking of the way I dressed as I was growing up. As stated before, I am a Japanese-American. How is a Japanese-American teenager supposed to dress? Well, during middle school and into my first year of high school, I was really into hip-hop and rap music. I associated myself with the hip-hop culture and began dressing in baggy pants and big T-shirts. I even had my sterling silver chain, which I wore proudly to school every day. Once freshmen year was over, I felt like I wasn’t representing myself very well. I was imitating an African-American, specifically the artists whose songs I was listening to, and I wasn’t imitating the image very well either. That summer I deconstructed my image of how a Japanese-American should dress by completely stripping my original ideas and renewing them with something more fitting to me. I started associating more with my Asian friends whom I met through a statewide Asian basketball league. It was a society all on its own. My attire went from baggy pants to basketball shorts and sneakers. The transformation was a fashion revolution and reform. Somehow I felt more comfortable in this new attire than my previously chosen one. Yet, I still felt like I wasn’t fully representing a Japanese-American. With another deconstruction of my idea of Japanese-American attire, I began wearing polo shirts and faded jeans. Later, I realized I felt more “white” than I was comfortable with. What I have concluded now in college is that there is no right attire that represents a Japanese-American. I am who I am and if that means I’m feeling “hip-hop” for a day, I’ll rock my sterling silver. If I’m feeling “baller” (basketballer), I’ll wear my Nike Jordan shorts and sneakers. Finally, if I feel “prep” I’m in my polo and jeans. My race is only a concept and does not define who I am. I am a Japanese-American and I wear what I feel.

This next essay was my original thoughts of how I was going to write this entry, but I think the first is more entertaining, and it's a narrative….

Our word cluster consists of the words, Deconstruction, Diaspora, Society, Revolution and Reform, and Race. I think these words can be related together through one: the cause of each term, “Race.” As stated before, race is a concept that humans have created to feed our natural need to organize things. We have created a concept in which people are separated into groups based on their physical attributes, homeland, and culture. This separation of people almost always causes a sense of inequality because some groups will see themselves as better than others. Black Africans were slaves. White Caucasians were the slave owners. Here we see the relation of Diaspora with Race. The idea of separation by race led whites into thinking they were more sophisticated than blacks and therefore made blacks less human than whites. Whites began to forcefully migrate Africans to America in the slave trade. Blacks were considered property rather than humans and were thus traded and treated as work animals. Once this inequality was realized, the black race began a long struggle of revolution and reform to gain their equality. In order to gain the strength to stand up to the self-proclaimed better race, blacks had to unite under one common idea. They cleverly used the same concept of race to form their own society based upon one uniting theme: being black. Today, the concept of race is not as widely used as a form of prejudice or inequality but is instead used as a form of self-identity. In order to transform the idea of race from a concept of categorization, to a justification for inequality, and finally to a form of self-identity, the meaning of race had to be deconstructed and renewed to fit the standards of the time.