So Now I Understand About My Experiences in the Philippines...But What About My Experiences at Home?

So after researching the past relationship between the Philippines and United States, I understood why the people I met in the Filipino village were weary of my presence. I am, after all, an American, and the American government was, after all, the government they believed was oppressing them and trying to deny them their history and traditions. My questions, however, about Filipino-Americans were still unanswered. After talking to some of the parents of my friends who immigrated, I found an overwhelming sense of pride of being American. They love their Filipino heritage and background, yet they classify themselves as Americans. One person in particular found he was especially proud because he had been raised in one of the villages I had visited, or rather one of similar demographics, and had come to America to attend university. He had come from a relatively lower class background and was now happily, financially comfortable with a loving Filipina wife, who had also immigrated, and their two boys. However after talking with him, I still didn’t really understand what had happened to me years ago with the all-Asian basketball league. If they were all proud to consider themselves Americans, then why did they only like to associate, or rather feel comfortable becoming extremely personally close, with those of the same background? Why didn’t they want to completely interact and accept into their “groups” the Americans they said they were proud to be considered as well? Then I realized that maybe this specific point wasn’t singular to the Asian races. Looking at the demographics from my high school and Wheaton as well, the kids that were considered minorities always felt more comfortable with each other, while the white kids always tended to gravitate towards the other white kids. I googled, “Why people are more comfortable with people of the same race,” and came across a research project that focused on mentor programs where minorities, but primarily African American people of all ages, were the mentees and white people were the mentors. The entire point of the program was to teach and learn about cultural understanding, so essentially the mentors would be the mentees in some situations and vice versa. One section of the packet I came across online was subtitled “The Questions of Race” and presented arguments for same-race matching, or matching a mentor with a mentee of the same race, or cross-race matching, or matching a mentor with a mentee of a differing race.