My Identity, My Allegiances

Throughout part 4 of the course, we have learned about cultures or groups of people and their place in society. We have seen how they are identified, categorized based on their race or ethnicity, as well as other factors, and how that has affected them and what has resulted from that. There are many things that can be used to identify a culture or a group of people, as well as an individual. Identification is what distinguishes you from others, and this a problem or a task, meaning that. We can see this in My Identity, My Allegiances. For example, the author, Amin Maalout, says that he is different from everyone else because there is no one else out there that has all of the same allegiances as him. He is trying to show that the combinations …show more content…
Nationality means an ethnic group belonging to a nation. Race is a group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of physical or genetic traits shared by the group. Ethnicity is a person's ethnic traits, classification or association. All of these terms have to do with identify, because it is one of the most common ways to identify someone. Race can be a negative thing because there are many negative stereotypes associated with certain races. For example, in the movie, American History X, we saw Derek, the older brother, who was a Nazi, and talked about how he hated the Jews as well as all other non white races because he said that they were ruining America as a country and taking things away from the white people or “Americans” according to him. He said, “Americans are losing their American destiny”. This is what we call racism. And the irony is that he isn't properly informed of the facts about the history of America and immigration because if he was he would know that America isn't white people and hasn't always been just white people. The first people to come to America from Britain were immigrants, and this country has been built on immigration. We also re racism in the video Skinheads USA. The members of this group identify themselves as Nazis as well as a gang. One of the members from the gang in the video said, “if it takes violence then we’ll do violence, we are …show more content…
Ethnic cleansing is the deliberate and systematic attempt to eliminate a rival ethnic group or groups. One of the most famous historical events that resulted from ethnic differences was the Holocaust. Hitler came to power in Germany and had to find a group of people to blame for the bad economy, so he decided to blame the Jews. He practiced what is called instrumentalism, which is a political mobilization based on changing what it means to be “those people”. Hitler redefined what it meant to be a Jew, making it into a negative term. Through extermination or genocide, the physical destruction of an ethnic group, he tried to get rid of the Jews. Another form of ethnic cleansing is called primordialism, which is a political mobilization based on ancient ethnic hatreds. This can be seen in the reading One Day the Soldier Came. In this reading, the Serbians and the Albanians hate each other and have hated each other as far as we can go back and see. This hated is apart of their culture, it has been taught to them and passed down for many years. They identify the other group based on all of the negative things that they have heard about them from their elders due to the past and the conflict. This is an example of primordialism because it's an ancient hatred that goes back a very long