Who Am I?

Ruqaya Sami Neama - 201503753

Understanding Culture

Prof. Park Sang Mi

Nov 4th, 2015

Who am I?

    Racial identity is one of the most common internal conflicts that people born in mixed backgrounds face in today’s society. We are a globalized world, full of biracial and multiracial people who are torn between being accepted by one culture versus being rejected by the other. United States’ president Barack Obama expresses his identity crisis of being both a White and African American and how that affected him on a personal and political level in his book Dreams from My Father. With Obama’s book in mind, I will argue that a biracial or multi-racial individual faces more discrimination than a non-biracial or multi-racial individual due to the fact that the person has to prove himself to be strongly identified with both cultures. Using my personal experiences, I will also support this argument.

    Obama tells his story of being mixed to show people how difficult it is living life as a biracial/multi-racial individual, and he also argues that the society is the cause of all these problems. Obama starts the fourth chapter of his book by conversing with his African American friend Ray, who does not like White people very much. During the entirety of the discussion Obama does not strengthen or support Ray’s opinions, but he understands why some White people may start to get frustrated with some of the African American peoples attitude. After complaining about his basketball coach that he doesn’t give him enough court time Obama expresses, “’As for your greasy-mouthed self, I’m saying the coaches may not like you ‘cause you’re a smart-assed black man, but it might help if you stopped eating all them fries you eat, making you look six months pregnant’”. Ray replied “’Man, I don’t know why you making excuses for these folks….Let’s get out of here. Your shit’s getting way too complicated for me”’. This conversation shows the price Obama has to pay being mixed. African Americans do not accept him for the way he is – from the way Ray talks to him – because he’s complicated, too white.

    Also, White people did not acknowledge him as a part of them. His White basketball coach once spoke up after losing a game to an African American team, he said “’there are black people, and there are n*ggers. Those guys were n*ggers”. Obama was offended his words because he identified as an African American and to him that was not acceptable, to have prejudice against a certain racial group and not accepting to face consequences of saying such things. In addition, in this part Obama argues that being African American and White does not go hand in hand in the context of American society. An individual cannot be comfortable knowing that he is mixed because he is either too much of one thing and too little of the other. In the end Obama admitted , “I knew for the first time that I was utterly alone”. Having someone from a high political power tell his story on how much pain he had to live with daily as a result of being biracial gives the biracial/multi-racial society a chance to stand up against the discrimination. This shows how much pain and frustration an individual must feel by having someone like Obama include it in his book. That is why it is important to know how harsh reality is being a mixed person. While a lot of people don’t feel it as strongly as some others, the society in general still faces difficulties in trying to understand how to categorize an individual who is not fully one race or the other.

    My personal experience with being multiracial supports the argument that prejudice and discrimination is strongly prevalent in the biracial/multiracial community. I was born in Bahrain to a Bahraini (Arab) father and a Filipino mother. I was raised to accept people as they are and accept myself as I am, a multiracial child. However no matter how much my family tried to protect me from harassments I would face in the outside world, I had to have a taste of it somehow. I was about 7 years old as far as I remember when I faced my first racial harassment. I was at a playground doing what a normal kid my age would do, play around and have fun while my parents chatted amongst themselves. Another kid who was also around my age, I could tell she was full Arab, walked up to me and pointed her finger at me screaming “Housemaid! Housemaid! Go back to your country!” (Arab Gulf countries commonly have Filipinos workings as housemaids) at a young age that comment struck me. The first thing that bothered me was the fact that if she had realized that I was also Arab, she would not have been saying all that. I do not have big wide eyes like she did, nor do I have a tall bridged nose. I was so embarrassed to the point that deep inside I was praying to God that my mother would not hear it fearing that it would hurt her to see me in that situation. Imagine a kid my age feeling the way I felt; it was horrible. And second thing was I knew for a fact that not all Filipinos who travel abroad to look for jobs work as housemaids, my mother for one was a flight attendant just as my father. Although I was really young, I kept thinking of the way that child was raised. I remember thinking why do stereotypes exist and how come no one is teaching the kid the opposite of what she was saying. I was baffled at the way people looked at the world and I wished that they would see it from my point of view. They would know how colorful the world actually is if only they opened up their mind a little bit.

    Another experience I had was when I had travelled to the Philippines with my mother to visit her side of the family during one of my summer vacations. I was walking around with my grandmother at a farmers market and this one lady saw me and immediately commented on the way I look saying “Wow a foreigner, you must be rich.” I had explained to her that I am actually Filipino-Arab but then she went on to say in a very bitter manner “You live a better life than we do, why bother coming to the Philippines? You should stay in your country.” I was utterly shocked and offended by that comment. I had experienced it in Bahrain but why did I experience it in the Philippines as well? Hiding my frustration I kindly told her “My mother belongs here and I am from my mother, so I too, belong here.” Throughout the years it continued to be a struggle for me and my siblings who shared the same treatment by people from our two nations. Whenever we were in Bahrain, they would stare at us and speak to us in English although we spoke perfectly fluent Arabic, it was just that our faces never showed it. And just alike whenever we were in the Philippines people would stare and make comments on how different we were. We did not like that one bit, and it was not because we were not proud or anything, but because in order for an individual to fit in, you just have to accept the differences and embrace them, pointing them out did not do anyone any good and it always ended up in making us feel more alienated by our own people.