My Cultural Identity Research Paper

My cultural identity has always been a journey. I have a very diverse group of family and friends. My cultural identity was formed my by experience and my family. I believed that with the push for multicultural counseling I believe it’s important for counselors to have a strong sense of self. I believe that with diversity being a strong topic and how important ones culture is we have counselors have to learn how to become more culturally competent. Thus far in Social Justice and diversity I have learned so much about myself. I know that in society there are a lot of issues that we failed to adequately address in society. I think that society thinks the way to change the negativity to other groups of people is to ignore the difference among …show more content…
I often want to assume myself as American but saying that I am just American has been perceived as disrespectful to my black ancestors. I have often questioned my identity based on my culture because I have often felt that I didn’t relate to my culture. When I was younger I was often teased because I was not black enough. When I was younger there were so many requirements to be African Americans and most times I didn’t meet the requirement. I was teased a lot by white students who felt they were blacker than me. I have always found that I really hated having a racial identity. I sometimes wish that race didn’t exist but now that I have had time to grow and deal with a lot of the pain from my past I have come to admire my culture and I am happy to say that I am African American. I fit into two different categories of self-identification, the first would be being an African American and the other is being a gay male. Both of these identities play a huge part in my life. I have found that in this current time that both are huge concerns for me. Though I feel LGBT rights are moving very progressively compared to other minorities groups. I am a Christian, I don’t have a specific domination of Christian but my religious identity has recently become very important to me. When I first started to identify as a gay male I didn’t know if I had a place in the church. I was very scared to go to church and it took finally finding a church that had members who openly identified as gay, bi, lesbian and transgender that I was able to feel more comfortable about my religion and sexuality. I have always considered myself middle class that lives in area where people associates themselves as middle class and upper middle