What different communities contribute to you as an individual in society? Reflect on your involvement in family, school, church, peer, and other groups and describe the ways that each community has contributed to your sense of self and your attitude towards the world.
From the day you are born, things contribute to how you are seen as an individual in society. All the punishments, the people you meet, the books you read, build up to make you who you are at any given point. For me the alienation I’ve always felt from society influenced me to do things that I never thought I would do. The need to escape from societies has made me what people see in the society we live in.
My mother’s side of the family has greatly contributed to me as an individual in society. The Cunningham’s, my mom’s side of the family, were mostly born in Jamaica, my mother and my uncle (who disappeared before I was born), being the only people born in America. Jamaicans are very proud of themselves, their culture and the people who come out of their country and they value education and hard work. From the day I could actually comprehend and remember what my mom and dad was telling me, I’ve been told to keep these values to heart. At home I saw my cousins almost every day, and they were always more afro centric than I was. I always felt a little disconnected by the generation gap, being the youngest in the family. I didn’t grow up in the same neighborhood as the rest of my family, and most of them could speak with a Jamaican accent and I could not. Living in a dominantly white neighborhood, it was always a culture shock when we got together at family get together. However, even though I grew up in the middle class, I have always been influenced by the ghetto as a whole because of the pressure I felt as a young boy to be more like my black peers. This is partially from the bullying I had endured as a child.
Although there was pressure to be more “black” as a lot of my peers told me, I became intrigued by some aspects of life in the ghetto of New York City, at first I was pulled in by rap music, then later on hip hop culture as a whole which lead to my interest in the alternative scene of New York.When I was old enough to venture out into the city on my own, I met a lot of punks and hipsters, and also a lot of people who were into hip hop. I became very defensive of the culture whenever I came across someone white who was interested in hip hop; this is a result of the pressure I felt as a kid to be more “black.” Also because as I got more into it, I began to appreciate hip hop for what it was. What I saw as hip hop was all the minorities in the ghetto uniting to create their own art and culture after the government and the “white man” had abandoned them. Rather than using a canvas and oils to paint a mural, they used the side of a train and spray paint. Rather than using conventional instruments, sampled from their favorite songs and MC’s did just what their name entailed.
Although I was pressured to act a certain way, my values and decisions were always heavily based on the teachings I learn in Sunday school since I was in first grade, or at least my interpretations of those teachings. When I was 6 years old I would listen tentatively to my C.C.D. teacher and her teachings of God and Jesus, Noah’s Ark and all the other stories. I always enjoyed going to Sunday school, even though most of my friends hated it, by the time we were nine they all became sarcastic and cynical. While they were arguing with the teacher and arguing that Jesus didn’t exist cause “My big brother told me!” I was reading the bible and trying to be teachers pet. As I got older, I began to think of god in a different way, and I started thinking about what my friend’s big brother told him. When I was thirteen years old, my little bubble of security was popped with the disaster that was September 11, 2001. After 9/11 I began to ask myself, if all those innocent people could die so randomly, is there really a god? I was always a pretty reverent kid, not like those kids out in
I think that although on the outside I kept a pretty calm attitude and seemed pretty resilient, September 11th really affected my personally thereafter. Living about 4 or 5 blocks away from the Word Trade center, I wasn’t allowed back in my house for weeks. I was separated from all the material things that I enjoyed, so I had a lot of time to think about all of the things happening in the world. Being out of my home kind of exposed me to the world around me; I would have to walk to school everyday and pass by the barricaded streets, emergency tape and wooden barricades held me from what I missed and enjoyed the most. At night I would picture the park I grew up playing in covered in ash and debris. The depressing mood of the city for weeks to come after 9/11 affected my schoolwork and the way I behaved. I became very indifferent to the world and very antisocial, my parents sent me to therapy but I wouldn’t budge, I just wanted to disconnect myself from the depressing world around me. The New York public school system had different plans for me, so my search for an escape ended when I didn’t get into any public schools because of my grades. In some ways, I think that September 11th, even though it was a terrible tragedy, helped me, were it not that I had done so badly, I probably would have gone to some public school instead of Packer.
In a way I feel connected to Chris McCandless, because his journey to Alaska was really just a search for himself, and an escape from the world that constantly asked him to do things against his morals. This is what I was really aiming to do through all the phases of my life, kids, teenagers, and even adults are constantly searching for a sense of self in the world. Everyone wants to feel secure, some bully others into being exactly like them, some seek God, and some detach themselves from society like McCandless and I. Whichever way you go about trying to find your identity, every new person you meet is contributing to the way you are seen in society, by affecting the decisions you make, and through the views that person shares with you.
