Race, Ethnicity, and Health Assignment 2022

Running Head: RACE, ETHNICITY, AND HEALTH 1
Race, Ethnicity, and Health
Name:
Institution

RACE, ETHNICITY, AND HEALTH 2
My awareness of race and ethnicity happened in two distinct stages of awakening and
reawakening. Having being born in Nigeria in a black family, I understood through an
awakening that the white people tended to have more than us. This happened sometime back
when I was in middle school, and the white students tended to be doing much better than us from
the black background. It was at this point that I believed that race and ethnicity mattered, but my
reasons were purely based on the belief that it was the natural way of things and it has always
been like that. I believed the white students had more because that is how the world was. I did
learn a little history of Jim Crow South and the black segregation and black enslavement, but I
understood them as history and not a continuous order of things (Black & Fernando, 2014).
Additionally, I studied about discrimination and racism and I would mindlessly think of the idea
of the white man keeping the blacks down, but this was more of a pose than the actual
understanding of the real world. It took me some time to gradually grasp the reality of things.
Back in grad school, I read a lot of articles and books on ethnicity, racism, black marginalization
and discrimination and this become apparent as more of a historical process than an academic
process. I tend to understand how black communities have been marginalized because of their
skin color, and that the whites did better than us blacks because of the structure they created for
their advantage.
Ethnicity and race have largely influenced my life. I am living with the discrimination of
belonging to a group of marginalized societies based on my skin color. Worldwide, people have
been known to make subconscious decisions based on the racial group they belong to. Most
people have preferences of the ethnicity they belong to over other ethnicities (Fairlie, Hoffmann
& Oreopoulos, 2014). Practically, regardless of a high level of education among many people in
the world, there is inequity based on the racial group one belongs and as much as there have been