Sometimes in life there is a lot going on around that as a child you will never notice.

When you’re
a adolescent you might begin to see it, it depends on how developed your mind is. Once you
become an adult it becomes hard to miss. What I’m speaking about is identity issues. Theorist Jean
s. Phinney from California State University in Los Angeles noted: that in addition to the identity
issues mentioned above “ethnic group members” (unlike their white peers) “must deal with identity
issues in relationship to the ethnic and racial heritage”. She goes on to say “their sense
of membership in an ethnic, racial or cultural group is an underlying issues that pervades and
influences progress towards adulthood” (2006,p118).

The essential point Is that a person develops through being challenged: for change to occur
there must be internal or external stimuli which upsets his existing equilibrium, which causes
instability that existing modes of adaptation do not suffice correct, which thus require the person to
make new responses and so to expand his personality if the stimuli are minor or routine, the
child, instead of change will simply react as he has before.

As a child I grew up in Coney Island. My school consisted of blacks, whites, Italian, Chinese and
Russians. I was always close with the black Chinese and Italians. My family always allowed me to
go to their house. While their families never allowed them to come to mine. We eventually
began junior high school. The junior high school that we attended was no longer in our immediate
community. The Chinese begin to hang with Chinese the Italian began to hang with Italians. I no
longer felt welcome and except it amongst my friends. The Chinese and the Italians were always
except it to be around me and the other black girls. When I was around their friends from their own
ethnicity I wasn’t allowed inside there house, not even to use the bathroom this made me feel very
uncomfortable. Although we remained friends we became distant. I begin to associate myself with
girls that look like me.

The passage on page 21 paragraph 3 states much of the early research on this topic was born out of
the civil rights movement in the 1960s and centered on the progression of African American college
students from lower to high stages of development. William E. Cross described this process as a
metamorphosis during which a black student goes from “pre-liberation” stage where the belifes and
values of the dominant culture are accepted through stages of exploration, to higher stage where
there is a sense of black pride, “confidence in one’s own stand it up blackness” and involvement in
social activism (cross 1978 page 17 through 18)