Colson Whitehead's novel Sag Harbor (2009) and Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father (1995), both tell some of the complex history of race and relationships racial in America. The main characters in these two novels experienced the “tragic mulatto” in their culture. For Sag Harbor's Benji Cooper, he has to balance the black community he's a part of in the summer and the white community he lives in during the school year. For Barack Obama, a mixed-race man, he is trying to find an identity and a place in his family and as a black man in America. The stories of Benji Cooper and Barack Obama blur the reader's perception of conventional racial boundaries in order to prove that race is not an easy issue to define or limit, but rather has many connotations and permeates different societies. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get an original essay During the school year, Benji Cooper attends a predominantly white prep school in Manhattan. The school has a dress code where students must wear ties and dress to class. Benji describes another person's reaction to his appearance dressed for school as follows: "An old white man stopped us on a corner and asked us if we were the sons of a diplomat. Little princes of an African country. The UN is 800 meters away. Because otherwise, why would black people dress like that” (4)? Yet despite the fact that the clothes he wears don't allow him to fit in on the street and being one of the few black kids in his school makes him feel like an outsider, every summer he finds his escape in Sag Harbor, a small community in the Hamptons that generations of African Americans have claimed as their own sanctuary. He knows that this lavish lifestyle is not that of a typical young African-American. He says: “To the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with houses on the beach. A paradox seen from the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was something strange there” (57). While this type of wealthy lifestyle may not be the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of black culture, for Benji and his friends, this aspect of their lives is right up their alley. is normal, because that's all they've ever known. looks back on those times in Sag Harbor and notices that he and his friend overcompensate in trying to fit the stereotypes of their race. This is partly because on some level they understand that they are cultural mulattoes and that their lifestyle is not typical of their race. He notes: “We spoke one way at school, another way at home, and another way among ourselves. We have weapons. One summer we bought guns for a few days and then got rid of them. Later, some of us were given real weapons” (147). As Benji reflects on the difficulties of being a cultural mulatto, he realizes that the different ways of dealing with their race have ended better for some of his friends than others. At one point in the novel, Benji notes: "You could accept the role of black people - take an idea you had of what real blackness was... act forcefully, act, act in a way that would end up being qualified of gangster, committing petty crimes… Or you could accept the contradiction, say, what you call a paradox, I call myself” (59). Although this idea of ​​accepting one's identity and living in balance within both cultures seems not only tooromantic but almost impossible, the reader is left with the feeling that Benji shamelessly did just that to get away with his friends, family, and classmates. Instead of worrying too much about issues of race, he chooses to just be himself, whoever he is at any given moment. Barack Obama's racial history is also unique compared to that of many other African Americans, and this is something he is well aware of. of. With a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, he understands that his lack of experience in the "inner city" makes his story different from other racial stories. He self-consciously explains in the introduction to his book: “I cannot even consider my experience to be in any way representative of the experience of black Americans” (xvi). While some may agree with this statement, there is no single race story, and one person's narrative is not more powerful than another's. The reader is aware that perhaps some ideas of race and confusion on such a difficult subject are the same everywhere. For example, when Obama's father visits his son's class in Hawaii, he talks to the children about race relations in Kenya. Obama describes this explanation as follows: “He told us about Kenya's struggle to be free, how the British wanted to stay and rule the people unjustly, just like they had done in America; how many had been enslaved solely because of the color of their skin, just like in America; but that Kenyans, like all of us in the room, yearned to be free and to develop through hard work and sacrifice (70). In a way, this statement from his father allows the reader to view Obama's racial history as the history of race in America. He may not have had class struggle or “street experience,” but he had difficulty integrating into society. He may not be able to trace his family back to pre-Civil War American slaves, but that doesn't mean his family wasn't enslaved. In fact, it is likely that they suffered oppression from white, European or American men, just like American slaves. While the injustices against Obama's family may be a little more vague than in other black Americas, that doesn't make them nonexistent or any less important than other stories of race. The problem for Obama is that he can't just view white people as oppressors and those who have caused problems for his race because he is as white as he is black. As a man who is both black and white, he must attempt to embrace both sides of himself. Yet he finds it difficult for many reasons, including the fact that he has few examples of a black community in his life. He notes: “Far from my mother, far from my grandparents, I was engaged in an intermittent inner struggle. I was trying to rise up to be a black man in America, and beyond my looks, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant” (76). Obama's struggle is further complicated by the fact that he also has to deal with the white side of his race. He describes this complication in his life in the context of a conversation with a black friend. He says, "Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray about white people about this or white people about that, and I would suddenly remember my mother's smile, and the words I spoke seemed awkward and wrong" (81) . Just as he is incapable of negatively stereotyping African-Americans, Obama also cannot make generalizations about whites without betraying himself and his family. Ultimately, Obama accepts his multifaceted identity. At the end.