Minority Group Member I Had

¶ … Minority Group Member I had a neighbor while living in my parents' house who was a Kurdish refugee from Iraq. He was sixteen years old and we often got together to discuss various things. His experience of living as a minority group first in his home country and then in the United States attracted my attention. In Iraq he lived in a region where most citizens were ethnic Kurds.

However, when he lived in Iraq the country was ruled by the regime of Saddam Hussein which practiced a preferential treatment for Arabs. Arabs as the dominant group often expressed ethnocentric feelings, my friend told me. They viewed Kurds as inferior because of their cultural practices. Being a Kurd was an ascribed status (an identity ascribed by the society).

My friend told me that he was proud of his Kurdish ethnicity but his ascribed status as a Kurd also deprived him of important privileges granted to members of the dominant group (Sunni Arabs) whose ascribed status allowed them to enjoy full citizenship privileges. Thanks to working with local international organizations, my friend told me, their parents were able to get a refugee status and immigrate to the United States. His life in the United States was not so easy because here again he is still a minority group.

From the way my friend explained me his experience in the United States, I can see that here he suffers not from a deliberate political oppression of a minority group but by being torn between his own identity (a sense of belonging to his own culture) and the social pressure of the dominant culture. He cannot live up to the standards of the dominant culture in the United States because that would mean his loss of his identity, his culture.

He cannot live only within his culture either because he needs to adapt to the life here. He feels a sense of belonging to the very small Kurdish community in the neighborhood where I lived. That group was his primary group because their relationships among each other were based on social intimacy and mutual understanding. My friend tried to socialize more with local Americans. But most people he socialized with were for him members of a secondary group.

My friend socialized with them for the purpose of getting used to a new social environment, practice his English, and find new friends. But his relationship with most people in the neighborhood and at school was not based on the kind of social intimacy that characterized his relationship with other Kurdish refugees in the neighborhood. My friend told me often that he was thankful to the United States for welcoming him in this country and that people were generally very friendly.

But he also told stories about his school life and some people's treatment which were based on ethnocentrism. Some of his peers looked down upon him because of his foreignness, Kurdish accent while speaking English, and his inability to fully practice dominant American culture. For example, his peers at school sometimes would not allow him to sit next to them by placing their bags on the next seat or saying that the seat was occupied, although these same students would allow other students (local Americans) to share the space.

This type of behavior may be explained by the concept of territoriality, which refers to nonverbal communication through which people.