If we understand race as a fluid construct contingent on both historical developments and the politics and society of the moment, it makes sense that we can understand ethnicity and cultural identity, too, in similar ways. In the introduction to Becoming Mexican American, the author George Sanchez quotes anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer in describing ethnicity as "something dynamic, often unsuccessfully repressed and avoided" and "potent even when not consciously taught" that "emerges in full [...] flower after struggle", not something that is "simply passed down from generation to generation, taught and learned". Sanchez goes on to discuss how the 1930s spurred the forging of a new Mexican American identity — a new ethnic American identity. He further clarifies his position by discussing the "oppositional potential" that culture holds while "individuals perceive their interests as unfulfilled". This section stood out to me for a number of reasons, not least because I began thinking about how my own Asian American identity can be linked to these concepts. In addition, the mention of repression and avoidance of one's ethnicity brought to mind our discussions in class about the politics of respectability. Race, ethnicity, and cultural identity are intertwined: existing racial stereotypes stain our perceptions of ethnicities and cultural identities, making it impossible to fully examine one of these three without taking into account the others. In a way strongly reminiscent of the culture of dissemblance, if not the same, there are many ethnic Americans who seek to distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural identities because of the embarrassment that is tied with appearing "too ethnic" or "too fobby" — "FOB" meaning "Fresh off the Boat". The hot, prickling embarrassment an Asian American kid might feel when their parent, fluent in five dialects but not English, speaks with someone in their lives they have distanced from their home lives; the awareness that one's packed lunch is considerably more "ethnic" than the sandwiches everyone else is carrying; the muted discomfort felt when people dismiss one's accomplishments as a product of their race, and not of their own hard work. Being resigned to the fact that characters with a race, ethnicity, and cultural identity that reflect one's own are too often the comic relief sidekicks; the minor, unimportant, "expendable" ones; characters with one-dimensional stories, who spring, fully formed, from the confining boxes of racial stereotypes. I think it is the struggle behind this that has spurred us to speak our own languages with each other; to speak in and discuss what connects us when the society we live in uses this as a way to set us apart. I think it is also our own internal struggle — in a world telling us to be as "white" as possible, to adjust our mannerisms and compartmentalize parts of our identities in order to fit in — that may bring a sort of blossoming. It is not an exaggeration to say that America was built on the backs of people of color — that, still, so much of "America" is taken from the people of color who are discriminated against, faced with institutional oppression, told to "go back to where they came from". Much of our slang — words like "woke", "shook", and so many others" — comes from AAVE, or African American Vernacular English. We could talk all day about cultural appropriation, and the simultaneous characterizations of Black people with dreadlocks or Asian Americans in cheongsams as worse, somehow, for wearing their culture. Part of the ideal, I think, is a field full of blossoming: an America or a world fully and widely understood as more beautiful because it is multidimensional and textured with diversity, where people are allowed to live and grow and bloom fully and deeply as themselves, without being worse off for it.