Term Paper on "Race Ethnic Relations"

Term Paper 5 pages (1759 words) Sources: 2

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Race Ethnic Relations

Book Comparison -- Race and ethnic relationships and identity

Both Barak Obama's memoir Songs for My Father and Maxine Hong Kingston's the Woman Warrior are tales of a search for a sense of a stable personal identity. Both are written by individuals claiming membership to one or two racial and ethnic minority groups who are struggling to discover how such membership complicates and creates their status as Americans. Ultimately, their quest for identity is realized and found through explorations of the past lives of the members of their families, as well as moving forward into the future as an adult.

However, Obama's quest remains individualistic, despite the title of his work. When he actually encounters his father in the flesh, he experiences a sense of displacement from his idealized African roots, as well as a sense of homecoming. Kingston's work, in contrast, because of its narrative structure, seamlessly blends the tales of her female family members and her own struggle for selfhood together, without the same level of anxiety of the need to separate and develop a distinction from her Chinese values. In contrast to Obama's writings, Kingston is mainly concerned with negotiating a space where it is safe to be both American, Chinese, female, and to still assert herself in a way that is acknowledged and validated in American culture.

The first section of Kingston's work does not even begin with the author herself, but with an extended tale of someone the author never met, but presumably heard about often when she was growing up. "No Name Woman" describes her aunt, a woman who committed suicide after she gave birth to a child out of wedlock. The selection of this arresting tale from the past to open up a genre that is customarily an exploration of the self suggests that Kingston's own sense of what it means to be a proper woman, or at least a proper Asian woman, is inexorably intertwined in her consciousness with problems of sexuality and desire,. Death and sexuality are fused not simply because Kingston herself has learned from personal experience how these two ideas go together, but because of how she has been brought up, in a ghost-haunted childhood. It as if the actions of her aunt are equally as important as her own decisions and actions.

This sense of the past haunting the present is conveyed in a different way in Obama's text, as he speaks of the forbidden, illicit love and marriage of his parents, an African man and an American woman, one black and native to Kenya, the other native to Hawaii. Societal disapproval is also woven into his family life and his birth. However, rather than gaining a sense that the community rejects feminine sexuality, Obama gains a sense that he himself is problematic, and rejected, because the union that produced him was frowned upon. Unlike the Chinese daughter Kingston, urged to live a respectable life from early in her youth, Obama was never deemed respectable by a racist society, and even his parents ended their union when he was a toddler.

Obama, after his parents divorced, always felt as if he never quite fit into his society. He was never black enough for his black friends, but he did not appear white to the naked eye. He was raised in both Christian and Muslim schools, and exposed to these different value structures. Throughout his life, particularly because of his appearance, he felt driven to meet his father, a man he had never met and did not know, but whom he physically resembled more than his mother, and whom society told him was linked to his real identity, because he was black and make. Rather than having a sense of intimacy with absent relatives conveyed through stories like Kingston, Obama's relationship with his father was filled with a sense of emptiness, a void where a man's presence ought to be -- he knew little of his father, although what he did know filled him with awe. Kingston feels so intimate with the ghost-haunted memories of her mother and her familial past that she even seamlessly weaves myth and reality together, as if both are equally true and necessary to express her sense of selfhood. The reader is given a suggestion that Kingston is almost too intimate, too familiar with her past for comfort, rather than too close. While Obama expresses his alienation even from his own family, for there is no one truly 'like' him in his multiethnic and multinational status, Kingston knows all too well, constantly and pervasively from where she comes.

Obama, like Kingston, makes use of many literary techniques to tell his tale of the evolution of his identity. He notes in his introduction that he has melded characters together, not simply to conceal names, but to create a more seamless literary narrative. He reconstructs dialogue, rather than simply includes a strictly factual or chronological exposition of his story. But instead of fantastic fables, Obama looks inward and reorganizes the chronology of his own life to highlight his identity conflicts, rather than tries to protect his inner struggles into the narrative of fantasy. He engages in philosophical mediation and speculation about events, but they are grounded in the physical reality of space and time.

Obama's book is also a confessional, of his drug use and despair that grew out of his frustrations with not fitting in -- he eventually found salvation through community activism and a path that ultimately led to Harvard Law School. However, even during this period there was a certain amount of dissembling. Obama was always compensating, afraid to reveal his mixed race heritage to his black friends, trying to seem more radical than he really felt to ensure that his credentials were 'legitimate' as a black man. There was, by implication, a certain rejection as well as love of his mother in these actions, although he later embraced her strength and valor in resisting racist norms from her own early childhood. Kingston's book, by contrast, shows her intense identification with her mother to such a degree that Kingston's mother fully dominates an entire section of the text, during her own haunted tenure as a medical student in China. Obama tells a tale of how his mother refused to discriminate against blacks as a young girl as proof of how pluralism is wired into his genes and upbringing, but Kingston seems to suggest that she literally feels and experiences what her mother remembers as a young woman, in the retelling of her ghost tale.

To be fair, Obama shows great respect for both parents in his work, although he is not uncritical in his assessment. The most formative part of his work is when he returns to Kenya to reunite with his father, only to find that his father is a far more complicated individual than he originally suspected. His father is not a hero, rather he is a many-times married man with multiple children who fell afoul of the Kenyan government and lost his job. This embittered Obama senior to such a degree that he fell deep into alcoholism, just as Obama junior sought refuge in drugs as a younger man. But the elder man never entirely extricated himself from this trap of seeking out negative coping mechanisms. Obama left Kenya, knowing that he loved his father, but also knowing that he was not fully African, no more African than an uncomplicated part of white society.

After going to Kenya now Obama knew, that he was an American, not an African, as he once believed. Kingston, in contrast, suggests that her Chinese nature and ties to China through oral history and family ties, specifically female ties are unbreakable, whether she desires this to be the case or not. Kingston never idealized and desired to be more Chinese, as Obama desired to be more black or to be more African, although she did desire to escape from the more repressive lessons about female sexuality. In his memoir, Obama must both embrace his father and reject his father's model of manhood to truly become the American he wishes to become, an American with a proudly pluralistic identity, and to become a self that balances all the elements of his upbringing, and both of his parent's contribution to his nature. Kingston must reject some of the lessons of her past, of her no-name aunt, for example, but she can never shake off the ghosts of the past entirely.

Like Obama, Kingston's relations with her gender are far from uncomplicated because of her relationships with her same-sex parent. When growing up, she associates proper feminine Chinese girlhood with silence, in contrast to her Western female classmates who are far more boisterous. Just as she blames the negative stories of her aunt she heard growing up with a negative association with femininity and sexuality, she grows angry with her own shyness and the other Chinese girls in her class. She is also saddened when… READ MORE

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