1. How did this text make you feel? Did you like it/not like it? Why/why not? Reflect on your thoughts/feelings about this reading.

I like the text written by Kiki Petrosino on how she argues the idea that race should not affect one’s identity. As a bilingual, I strongly agree with the idea that the author is trying to convey.

2. Who is Petrosino’s audience? Describe the tone she uses. What rhetorical features does Petrosino utilize in her essay? Are they effective?  (Use evidence from the text to support your claims). 

I believe that the author’s audience in the text should be anyone who is struggling with the relationship between their race and their identity and seek help, as the author states in the text: “When I write, it’s my voice. This is how I sound when I’m speaking to you.”, this line presents the author’s intention of creating a comfy mood, by making her text more approachable

3. What connection does Petrosino make between her culture and her identity?  (Use evidence from the text to support your claims). If you feel as if there is a disconnect between culture and identity, please explain why and provide evidence from the text to support your claims. 

in the text, Kiki Petrosino disconnected her blackness identity as a writer “But I feel it, my blackness, livid and living. The word afro appears in a poem and my professor suggests I delete it…I don’t delete anything. I write two books of poems.”  from her blackness servant culture as described in the text: “my blackness shows me a flickering host through the colonnades: kerchiefed women carrying laundry, servants with horses, the cooks and carriers of firewood.” 

4. What is a reoccuring theme/main idea of this text? 

The recurring theme that is present in the text is that culture and race can be included in a person’s identity, and should not affect or limit a person’s identity.

5. Narrative identity, or the internal story that you tell about yourself, connects memories from the past with the present and ideas about the future. According to psychologist Daniel McAdams, “Like myths, our narrative identity contains heroes and villains that help us or hold us back, major events that determine the plot, challenges overcome and suffering we have endured. When we want people to understand us, we share our story or parts of it with them; when we want to know who another person is, we ask them to share part of their story.” What do you think Petrosino wants you, the reader, to understand about who they are through the story they tell?  (Use evidence from the text to support your claims). 

I believe Petrosino wanted us, readers, to understand that they are those people who have disconnected from their biased culture into a new identity, as how Petrosino described her past: “left the little Negro school that only went up to sixth grade. I wanted to go to the seventh grade so badly I don’t know why.”