The seen and Unseen

In our daily lives, our race and ethnicity and two very different things that end up determining a lot about us as people, both to all of those around us, and also to ourselves. As concluded in our class discussions this past week, race tends to be knows as how an individual is referred to by other people or how an individual person is stereotyped by public views and perceptions. On the other hand, Ethnicity tends to be seen as how we are viewed culturally or religiously within ourselves or within or families and friends. The public tends to create how we are seen from the perspective of race, often through categorization through skin color or looks etc. In that sense it is not possible for us to change our race, as we are simply to make due with what is given to us and how it is publicly acted upon. Our ethnicity however is not something that we are born with or bound to. It is something that we learn from those close to us in our upbringing and something we look to for internal self definition through our lives. Our ethnicity is not decided for us by society unlike, how as we concluded in class, our race often times seems to be. However despite the social constraints to something as key to our identity as our race, "It doesnt define who we are as a person, because any way of defining it is easily constructed."