Gabriella Costa First Year Experience
December 5th, 2014 Prof. Kirksey

Citizenship Paper

I was born in Providence, Rhode Island on July 7th, 1996. I am from Norwell, Massachusetts and lived there since I was in third grade. My dad’s family is from Portugal, and my mother’s father’s side is from Sicily, Italy, and my mother’s moms side is from Ireland. I would identify myself as a Caucasian, white young adult female. I am very proud to be a part of an Italian heritage due to the wonderful food that comes out of it. I love Italian sausages that my grandfather is especially good at making, mixed with special homemade tomato sauce, and delicious a secret recipe that is called “Carol’s potatoes.” Carol’s potatoes is a blend that includes hash browns, all kinds of different cheeses, and sprinkled cornflakes for an added crunch. There are not tensions between my families racial and ethnic backgrounds and we all get along very well. We all have family style dinners and have get togethers and everyone gets along just fine. My grandparents on my mom’s side are complete polar opposites as for racial heritage, and they created a great family. Sometimes in life people find it hard to make connections with everyone, and unfortunately one of the reasons because of that is because of racial backgrounds. In the present day, there still is an element of racism on all parts of the board. There are racial problems between all different types of races including the races I am from originally. Sometimes, I have had people not like me just because I was innocent, naïve and from the background I am from. And also because I was different from them. Sometimes I was not able to connect with other cultures because I am not from the same background as them, and that was hard. I once knew someone from a completely different background and there was only one or two connections possibly made to each other from time to time. Some parts of my family grew up in a setting where being friends with other racial backgrounds was not allowed, and so now I was raised thinking at a young age that I should not be friends or date someone with a different race. I grew up to think differently, but could see some characteristics to why I shouldn’t associate myself with certain types of people. I am a person who likes to associate with all different types of people, and am very welcoming to diversity. I love all different people and have a wide variety of friends. I am a very inclusive and (at least I think,) a nice person, so it doesn’t really matter to me what racial background someone comes from, I just like spending time with good people. Being successful in the context of a community to me means many different things. I think it means being able to get along and find peace with all different types of people who come from all kinds of different racial backgrounds. I find being successful in the context of a community meaning forgetting about conflict between races. I find it meaning forgetting about unimportant things that people get upset about, including what clothes we wear on our backs, or what songs and music we listen to or like. All of these problems lie on society. People do not act this way as toddlers. It is based off of what we have learned over time. People are not born prejudice or racist, it is after seeing or hearing the things that have affected them over time. Another thing I would say define people as being successful in the sense of community would be acceptance. Accepting other people for who they are and where they come from would make a huge impact on the communities of today. People find it very hard to accept one another in today’s day and age and it’s a very difficult feat to comprehend. It really is unfortunate that people can be so cruel to not accept one another. There are so many reasons why this happens, mostly unfortunately because of different racial backgrounds and upbringings. Coming from