TOW #19 IRB Post

Reading goal: read for the overall purpose
Writing goal: effectively analyze examples to show how they help the author achieve his/her purpose

     Race and family heritage play a substantial role in the formation of self-identity as it affects how we see ourselves as well as how others see us. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama examines how this issue developed in his own life. The first four chapters of this book, part of the first section titled Origins, detail the beginning of Barack Obama's life and a little of his family history. He first goes back to his Kansan grandparents experiences and the life of his mother's family. Then he describes how his mother, whose family had finally settled down in Hawaii, fell in love with and married a Kenyan student, his father. Throughout the course of Barack Obama's childhood his father left, his mother remarried and moved them to Indonesia, and eventually he came back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and go to school. In these chapters, Obama develops portraits of family members, uses a lot of personal anecdotes (as it is a memoir), and compares his experience as a young black man with his friend's to explore the family and personal history that shaped his struggles with his own racial identity.
     Obama talks a lot about his grandparents who helped to raise him. He gives a lot of background on his grandfather to show the kind of person that raised him. For example, he writes "...my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar... he had come to consider himself as something of a freethinker - bohemian, even," (Obama 1). The description presents Obama's grandfather as someone always searching for the new, with typical American ideals such as individualism and freedom, but also someone who thought his own thoughts and lived his own way. This portrait helps Obama to show that he grew up in an open minded family that accepted people despite racial differences in ways others at the time didn't, but at the same time was raised by people who had a different perceived status in the contemporary American society because of the color of their skin.
     As this is a memoir, Obama mostly uses anecdotes to portray his ideas. Some describe his experiences at the almost all-white private school he attended in Hawaii, including his first day when his teacher asked him about his Kenyan father. Obama describes how the other kids asked him questions and how he felt isolated at school. These anecdotes showed how as a young kid Obama was singled out as different as a black boy in a world of white children.
     And yet, Obama also felt out of place among his black friends. He writes "Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray about white folks this, or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother's smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false," (Obama 81) and later "I was different, after all, potentially suspect; I had no idea who my own self was," (Obama 82). Obama contrasts his experiences with his friend Ray's, who seems to have solidified his identity as a black man in a white man's world. Obama, as the son of a white mother and grandson of white grandparents, did not have the same security of identity as his friend, which complicated his issues.
    Obama has so far effectively weaved all these elements together to create a compelling and engaging memoir which helps the reader to think about the way race affects our personal and public identities.