What’s the first thing you think about when you see Northbrook, or even the North Shore area? For me, it’s an area where there’s some sort of bubble, that encases and hides us from issues that happen around the world. Because we live in a safe society where there isn’t much crime, we as a community don’t understand what others go through in the United States: Poverty, Violence, and Loss of Human Rights, etc. In my CST class a little while ago, we had to complete a social identity profile, where it showed the target and agent groups that we associated with. As you can see here, Disabilities for me, are huge impacts on my life, and although I already knew that, it allowed me to see what influenced me the most and how I truly felt about it. Depression and Anxiety have been extremely negative for me and self destructing for the past few years, and has prevented me from developing many relationships with friends and family. I think about it a lot and my decision making heavily depends on it.
Peggy McIntosh, a professor at Wellesley College, also made a list of “Daily effects of White Privilege”. We as a CST class thought of it as a list of “things I do/not think about”. One of hers was “I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me”. This is similar to Northbrook because of our low crime rate, and lack of violence in our community. My friends all don’t have this issue either around Northbrook, and have really cool neighbors that are always welcoming and actually try and make a conversation with us!
Also, in my life, ethnicity is something that I take pride in now, but not when I was younger. My mother was a Korean woman who moved from South Korea about 28 years ago, and when I was born, she would not talk Korean to me and tried to Americanize me as much as possible. On the social identity profile, for the “strongest effect on how you see yourself as a person”, I wrote 2 to 8. This is because as I got older, I yearned to learn Korean because I felt as though something was missing in my life. All my Korean friends knew how to speak my language, and I would always feel left out, like it was something to take pride in. When my American friends hear me speak Korean, they make fun of me because they just say, “ching-chang-chong”. It doesn’t mean anything to them. But for me, it’s a whole new world that I become open to. I can watch Korean dramas, get close to the other side of my family, and I can show that I love my culture even more than just eating its food. The Social Identity Profile helped me see that I started to value my culture more and it made influenced me more and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fed6hK_y3Ws
Hopefully you guys kind of get a bit more insight to my life and how I want to live it. If you guys want to learn some korean I’d be happy to answer any questions on “how to say ____” in the comment section below!
Peace!
From, Chris
Chris's CST Blog 