What Has Shaped Your Life in Contemporary America?

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What Has Shaped Your Life in Contemporary America? When I was born on September 27, 1995, that was when I began my socialization process. I started to realize and understand the importance of language. As I began to get older my parents started to instill values on me that taught me a sense of what was right and wrong. I would have to say that my parents and grandmother were my significant others in my life. My parents were part of the working class, proletariat, and had the means to provide my brother and I with anything we needed. They also introduced the norms to me that were acceptable and unacceptable. Soon enough, by the age of 8 years old I was able to grasp a concept of my culture. I also began grasp the symbols that were apparent all around me As I started middle school I quickly realized that it was a new environment, and that I was outsider. I had an etic perspective most of first year.However, I had a lot of friends and our social solidarity was strong. As middle school went on I began to gain popularity through social interactions and being exceptionally gifted in athletics, which apparently is apart of popular culture. I now found myself looking at middle school with an emic perspective because of all the people I knew, and that I no longer felt like an outsider, but rather an insider. With all of this new attention from others I found myself beginning to be very egocentric, and thought everything revolved around me. I also began to develop a looking-glass self about my self-image from how others viewed me. There was an incident where a friend of mine and I got into an argument and he called me a cracker and I retaliated by calling him a “nigga”, which wasn’t acceptable, but we got into trouble, and had to go to principal’s office. It was in the principal’s office that she laid out the groundwork for double consciousness. She explained to my friend

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