Autobiography

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Identity: The Struggle of a Bi-racial Man with Identity in a Racist Society
Introduction
In his book, Born a Crime, Trevor Noah explains how being a biracial child made relations between him and the larger society, a society divided along strict racist lines, difficult. For instance, his white father could not hold his hand in the streets because he could not be seen to be the father of a mixed-race child. In James Weldon’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, the same sentiments ring through, mainly because the author seldom saw his father because of the time's racial tensions. Therefore, what emerges is that there is a struggle for identity among biracial children who often do not realize whether they are black or white until they are adults and often are forced to choose where to belong instead of embracing who they are. Through his struggle, Weldon chooses to be white because it appears to be a more comfortable alternative than identifying himself as black. The paper seeks to analyze Weldon's struggle with identity and the forces that shape his choice.
Childhood Struggle
While it is fair to argue that racial identity did not deter Weldon as a child, he takes an early identity as a white person because he does not understand his bi-racial complexion. The situation is evident towards the end of his second term at school when the principal asks all the white scholars to stand up (Johnson 11). When he stands up alongside white students, he is immediately told to sit down for the present and rise with the 'others.' The event jolted him into questioning his identity, especially when fellow students mock him. The white students said, "oh, you are a nigger too," and the black scholar laughed, saying, "we knew he was colored." Before this day, nobody questioned his race: neither himself nor the children he associated with. Back at home, he fervently asked his mother whether he is a nigger (p. 12). He further explains how his identity left him isolated, leading a lonely life for most of his childhood days, throughout his childhood, his closest friend black. Sims and Joseph-Salisbury (2018) argued that mixed-race men experience acceptance from, bond with, and develop a strategically same identity as black peers. Like his fellow-colored men, he took his outlook on things, not from the viewpoint of a human being but a man of color.
He argues that this kind of perception of things gives black people a sort of dual personality, especially in white men. As a result, the black person understands the white person more than the white person understands the white man. Therefore, his regard of himself as a white person was greatly challenged, forcing him to begin looking at things from the perception of a colored man, which prompts him to realize that his mother was colored and not white as he had thought earlier, albeit unconsciously. Upon realizing his race, Weldon says he felt like he had transitioned from one world into another (p. 13). In his critic of Weldon’s work, Al-Shraah 2018 argues that while the narrator's first paragraph impresses a self-assured man searching for an honest account of his life, the second paragraph reveals a disturbed man torn by doubts. In ...