Barack Obama Impact on the American Society Essay

Barack Obama furbish up on the American Society - Essay ExampleAs such, the Nigrescence Model, a model for the acquisition of portentous identity created by William E. Cross Jr., does not quite fit his deportmentspan, and in some ways his life shows that the Nigrescence model is something of an over-simplification. While he does identifiably go through every stage of the Nigrescence model, Barack Obama demonstrates that this model is similarly an incredible over-simplification of African American life. Barack Obamas experience of racial identity though his early life mirrors aspects of Crosss Nigrescence model relatively closely. He clearly experienced stage one, the Pre-experience stage, wherein a soulfulness is not quite sensitive of the existence or importance of racial identity. He discusses how when he was a child, he unless registered the fact that his father looked nothing like the deal nigh him that he was as melanize as pitch (Obama, 10). At this very early stage of his childhood he was barely cognizant of skin color, much less race as a social construct and what the diversion between his mothers skin white as milk and his fathers black as pitch skin could mean (10). This clearly represents the first stage of Nigresence as described by Crosss model. ... ant to take on identifying features of blackness. He said that his white friends treated us Obama and a black friend named Ray any differently from how they treated each other (82). In this departure Obama clearly shows both that he is aware of his race and that he understands it is divinatory to have identifying features. Following that, however, things gain more complicated. In the third stage of Nigresence a person is supposed to take on the identifying elements of his or her race, and Obama did show that he did this to some degree. He talks about enacting a bad-assed nigger pose around his white friends, but also thinks that maybe he should give it a rest because his friends seemed t o treat him no differently because of his race (82). Barack, as a bi-racial person, was trying to acquire and enact two different sets of racial identities, two worlds that each possessed their own language and customs and greetings but that he hoped would eventually cleave (82). So even though Obama did enact elements of the third stage, even though he was consciously aware of the performative aspects of them, he also was in the fourth stage simultaneously. In the fourth stage someone is supposed to break out of their individual group and start noticing characteristics of other groups, and start to take on the ones that correspond ones personality. Obama never had the luxury of purely immersing himself in one group, because he was always fishy to both white and black friends he would sometimes feel too white for black people and too black for white people. He clearly spent a long time assay with his own race and identity, but more often with what perceptions of his race and ide ntity meant to others. By the close of Dreams from my Father,