Obama

After reading Obama's memoir/autobiography I feel as though one gets a glimpse of the internal and external that he faces not only as a youth, but also as an young adult in college. As a child Barack is sheltered from his identity through his short lived moved to Indonesia. His curiousty of the outside world is more evident through his observations of the nation and their traditions and customs, not to mention that as a young child one's capacity of self reflection is not full developed. In returning to Hawaii, the audience gets a better idea of his internal and external struggle with his identity. His first encounter occurs at his new prestigious school where the children tease him because of his skin tone. Unaware of his skin tone, Barack is deeply upset and has trouble with others perception of him because of his color. Although this incident at school is eventually remedied, Barack continues to have problems trying to identify and understand his place in the world. Another instance of his internal struggle happens when he and his friend Ray take two white boys on their basketball team to an all black party. One of the boys makes a comment to the effect that he knows how Barack feels being in a community of all whites because this boy was at a party with a majority of the people being black. Barack takes offense to this, and rightly so because the boy is insinuating that he understand Barack, but also because the comment was racial offensive. Lastly, Barack encounters a struggle between him and his college friend Marcus. While Barack is reading a book for one of his classes, Marcus takes offense to it because the book, "Heart of Darkness" follows a man's depiction of the Congo and its people the Kongolese. Barack seems embarrassed, but also fights for this book because he is trying to understand the white man's perspective. In other words, through reading this book, Barack is trying to make sense of his identity. I'm sure there are more experiences of identification to come, but here are just a few...