Essay on President Barack Obama

President Barack Obama was faced with many hardships starting at a young age and it continued through his whole life. His two major hardships were finding out his identity as an individual and finding out the communities that he best fits in. His reasoning for the struggles of finding himself on his own and through communities was because he was unsure of who has was due to his race. Being a multiracial person, he didn't know which community he personally belonged to. He had mostly been characterized as a black American due to his skin color, but he was brought up in a white home with a white mother, grandfather, and grandmother. Since he was given the name Barack, the name of his black father, he got the nickname Barry to better suit him while living with white people. As time progressed, he struggled with this undecided idea of self and often thought that he has found himself but then realized he isn't exactly who he wants to be. In order to find himself as an individual, he finds and learns his true identity through many communities.

As an individual, the biggest concern is to search for your own identity. A person's identity can be formed by the people who surround you like your family and friends, your environment, your race, your interests, your goals, your morals and anything else is that important to the individual. Many people struggle to find their identity because there is a lack of key components that are needed to shape one's identity. Obama struggled with figuring out his identity because he lacked the component of which heritage he fit best with. Being that his main issue was deciding which race he most identified with, his interracial doubt was because he was a child who hadn't met his father until later childhood. His major concern was that he needed an identity. In the book he screams this out to emphasize the fact that he didn't have a father who was there physically, but was too young to realize that he needed to find this out on his own (Obama, 27).

Since racism was still a big issue in the United States during the time when Obama was growing up, society threw him a curve ball that didn't help him understand his race. The economic instability, the social structure, and the history of the hatred were obstacles that he had to overcome. Since Obama grew up in a white family in Hawaii, their economic status was decent because his grandfather was white and had served in the military. His mother was also gifted so she had attended great schools to further her education. By growing up in Hawaii, he was also around a lot of different races but black was still the minority. Since he lived with white folk he had never needed to understand the economic struggle of a black person due to the support that his family had provided him with school, shelter, support, and food. Barack's grandparents who he referred to as Toot and Gramps were not the typical white arrogant people