...In the Name of Identity: Who are you? What makes you, you? How are you recognized as a human being? What makes you different than every other person in the world? These questions contribute to your identity regardless of what you look like or where you come from. Every single person in the world is different whether it is visible to others or not. Although we are all different, we connect and form relationships through common ideas, values, and goals. In the novel Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama, he recalls many different issues involving his identity as a whole in addition to the communities he lived in and principle values he was raised to believe. Throughout the story Obama creates a theme of struggle involving his own identity. He relates these issues towards his own community and explains how certain occurrences shaped his character values and personality. The word individual can be defined in various ways. It is a word that can apply to many different aspects of life as well as raising questions about who exactly we are as individuals and how we became the who we are today. Some factors that contribute to shaping our identities are social, educational, economic and historical. While Obama was growing up, identity was something he struggled with deeply. He was constantly moving, which forced him to experience different communities and ultimately aided in forming his identity. Looking back on it now, it seems beneficial, but at...
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...Crane QU101 9/13/10 Creating An Identity In Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama he talks about his life experiences and how it formed him as a human being. The story also shows his interpretation of what a solid community should consist of, as well as how individuals should interact with each other within the community. Through out his life he was discovering who he was by new meeting people and trying new things. An individual’s identity is formed through life experiences and cannot be sustained because it is ever changing. A community is a group of people that are brought together by friends, family, neighbors, and people with common interests. Communities are important because it gives people a sense of belonging and being wanted. And in Dreams From My Father, those were the needs and values that Barack was searching for. Communities are sustained through shared values, trust, loyalty, and a sense of safety. In a community people have moral responsibilities to other people and the community as a whole. Communities have moral responsibilities to their individual members because they need to keep their community together. Sometimes you get put into situations where you want to look out for yourself rather than the big picture with the community. You have to be able to put others in front of you sometimes so that you can avoid these types of conflicts. My favorite excerpt from the text came when his father was insulted by a man who said that he would not...
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...Back to School A country thrives when its citizens contribute and make an effort to make the most of what they are offered in life. President Barack Obama is very aware of this and has made it an important subject and goal in his presidential career to inspire youngsters in the right direction, both for their own sake and their country’s. Barack Obamas’ speech “Back to School” at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia was held in September 8, 2009. The age of the present audience varied to children from kindergarten and all the way up to twelfth grade. In addition to that, the speech was also broadcasted to students all over the country. The audience is obviously extremely great, and the speech will therefore have a tremendous impact on several individuals. The first thing Obama seems to focus on in his speech on the first day of the children’s school day are in fact the children themselves. He speaks directly to them, and initiates the whole thing by telling everyone that being nervous is perfectly normal. He has obviously tried it himself when he was their age. Very easily he finds a way to make everyone relate to him by telling stories from his own life. Barack Obama did not grow up under the best circumstances. He was raised by a single mother whom was very passionate about doing what was best for her son. She even sought to homeschool Obama, when he wasn’t at school. She wanted to make sure he would have the best possible future. This particular section of the speech...
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...in place just for people of color or minority and some that are set in place for all if the all fit in the category set forth in that particular law. To this day the law is not equal. Crucial Social and Political incidents When my parents moved our family from Newark, NJ to Piscataway, NJ in the early 70’s, my father wanted to find a place better than where we were coming from. He found a home in an area that the builder was told not to sell to blacks. The builder did not care, he cared that my father had the down payment and he was approved, so the builder let my father buy the home. There was a reason why blacks were not allowed in that area. It all started with the bomb threats, sugar in our car gas tank, screen door torn from off the front door and racial slurs written on the garage doors. That is just the tip of the iceberg. My father told us never to cross to the other side of the road. We could never figure out why, until one day we decided to ride our bikes to the school on the other side of the road. We were at the school no more than five minutes before three police cars pulled and with sirens hailing. They told us to drop the bikes and lay on the ground. He asked us where we stole the bikes from. We told them our father bought them for us. One of the officers then asked us, “Where are the receipts”. (Mind you we were 13, 9, and 8) We told them we did not buy them so we don’t have receipts. The officer said that he was going to arrest for stealing...
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...Marcus Garvey claimed that, “There is a great deal of work to do and it calls for sacrifice and determination on the part of those who are leading.” Colin Powell and President Barack Obama are two African American men who had to overcome much adversity to achieve their elite status in American politics. Both of their journeys varied greatly with Powell serving as Secretary of State under George W. Bush and Obama becoming the first African-American Commander-in-Chief. They also chronicle their journeys with autobiographies, with Obama recording this passage of his life in his 1995 independently written autobiography Dreams from My Father, while Powell recollects stories from his life with the assistance of Joseph E. Persico in the 1995 book My American Journey. On an important side note, both of these books were written before they have reached their respective positions in politics. Obama wrote Dreams from My Father when he was still only a state Senator in Illinois, awhile before he even considered running for President. While Powell wrote My American Journey where at the time he was already Powell was already a 4-star general which preceded the events that led to his appointment as Secretary of State, where he was the first African-American to hold the position and gave his notorious speech in front on the United Nations dealing with the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which dramatically changed the public’s perception about him. Each story instead focuses on how they were...
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...Evaluation of President Obama's First Year and a Half as POTUS" Introduction Barrack Obama became the 44th President of the United States of America on January 20th, 2009. He is the first African American to take office and with his presidency he promised to make changes to America that would liberate the American people from crisis into a bright new beginning. In his Inauguration speech, he claimed to mend the financial crisis by stimulating jobs and laying a “new foundation for growth” (Naughton, “Inauguration speech”). He promised to rebuild the Nation’s foundations such as roads, bridges, electric grids, and digital lines, to revive the prosperity and importance of science, to increase the care and lower the cost of health care, to mend the threat of global warming, to enact peace with Afghanistan, to withdraw from Iraq, and to transform the educational system to meet the conditions of a new era (Naughton, “Inauguration speech”). Throughout his first year as president Obama has enacted many policies and regulations such as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and Health Care Bill. However, has Obama stayed true to his original promises stated throughout his campaigns, in his Inauguration speech, as well as his first State of Union speech. Has Obamba’s first year been a success or a failure? This essay will explore the history of Obama’s ascend to presidency, his success and failures, and an overall evaluation of Obama’s first year in office. ...
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...When Barack Obama stood before a cheering crowd in his home state Illinois and announced his candidacy, no believed that this guy had any chance of winning the nomination. Majority of Americans did not believe that the country was actually ready for an African American president with a promise of changing the course of politics in Washington. The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in Hawaii. Leaving the state to attend college, he earned degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Obama's father left the family when Obama was two and, after further studies at Harvard University, returned to Kenya, where he died in an automobile accident nineteen years later. After his parents divorced, Obama's mother married another foreign student at the University of Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia. From age six through ten, Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, where he attended Catholic and Muslim schools. "I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child," Obama later recalled. "And so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me."Concerned for his education, Obama's mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, and to attend Hawaii's prestigious Punahou School from fifth grade through graduation from high school. While Obama was in school, she divorced Soetoro, returned to Hawaii...
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... Barack Obama Barack Obama Biography U.S. Representative, U.S. President, Lawyer (1961–) Early Life Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where her father worked on oil rigs during the Great Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunham's father, Stanley, enlisted in the service and marched across Europe in Patton's army. Dunham's mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program and, after several moves, landed in Hawaii. Barack Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in Africa, eventually earning a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams of college in Hawaii. While studying at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, Obama Sr. met fellow student Ann Dunham, and they married on February 2, 1961. Barack was born six months later. Obama did not have a relationship with his father as a child. When his son was still an infant, Obama Sr. relocated to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University, pursuing a Ph.D. Barack's parents officially separated several months later and ultimately divorced in March 1964, when their son was 2. In 1965, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya. In 1965, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, an East–West Center student from Indonesia...
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...Further Oral Activity: Barack Obama 2012 Victory Speech Task: Analyze the rhetoric used in the speech. This is a Special News report on the 7th of November - President Obama has won second term the elections for president of the USA - we are now live in Chicago at the McCormick Centre , where President Obama just held his victory speech, and I am going to do a quick analysis of what the newly re-elected President said. It is an absolute pandemonium after Barack Obama has just delivered a 20 minute speech, during which he expressed his gratitude towards his family, his friends, his supporters, and laid out his vision of what America has already achieved, what it can achieve and what it will achieve after he has been re-elected President of the United States to Mitt Romney with 281 electoral votes to 191. Through the use of various rhetorical tools like Anaphora, rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses, President Barack Obama delivers a speech through which he fully expresses ideas like the American dream and the future. Similarly to other speeches of his from the past, as for example the 2008 speech at the Democratic Convention, this one contains different forms of repetition and "between the line political views" - for example in the first paragraphs he purposely begins his sentences with the same couple of words - "You'll hear", "We want...", "That's ", followed by his ideas for the future of...
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...Barack Obama Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States —becoming the first African American to serve in that office —on January 20, 2009. The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in Hawaii. Leaving the state to attend college, he earned degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago, where he met and married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson in 1992. Their two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha (Sasha) were born in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996 and served there for eight years. In 2004, he was elected by a record majority to the U.S. Senate from Illinois and, in February 2007, announced his candidacy for President. After winning a closely-fought contest against New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama handily defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee for President, in the general election. When President Obama took office, he faced very significant challenges. The economy was officially in a recession, and the outgoing administration of George W. Bush had begun to implement a controversial "bail-out" package to try to help struggling financial institutions. In foreign affairs, the United States still had troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and warfare had broken out between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, illustrating the...
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...Although a little over a century apart, Frederick Douglass and Barack Obama shared a passion for change and the betterment of all people that remain unswayed, even today. Many trials and tribulations they’ve encountered but through faith and strong beliefs, these two men kept themselves together and helped run a nation. The pair came from backgrounds deviating in some matters but correspondent in others. Backgrounds that could have made them lose faith and give up or not even try, were definitely apart of their past. However, due to their incredible minds and attentive grasps on life these two men made very remarkable changes in this nation for many people. “It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” -Frederick Douglass Even though this was said later on in his life, evidence of these beliefs raised their head early on in his life as a child. Douglass chose to be his own fire and find ways to learn to read. His thirst for knowledge began when his Master’s started teaching him. After she was forbidden to teach him any longer, he did not give up. Douglass decided he still wanted to learn to read, so he developed some tricks. He used bread to get poor little white boys, who didn’t have much, to teach him a thing or two in reading. He also used tricks like telling the white boys that he knew something they didn’t and when they would try and out beat him by showing him something...
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...important in the history of racial equality and sparked the world wide battle for racial equality. During the 2008 election campaign for presidency Barack Obama delivered his ’Yes we can’ speech, addressing all Americans to tell them that change was possible. Both men were black and wanted change and achieved it by delivering effective...
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...Cammie Denton Dr. Foster WR 122 April 17, 2016 Rhetorical Analysis of Barack Obama’s Remarks on Economic Mobility On December 4th, 2013 Barack Obama spoke on the subject of income inequality and upward mobility. This speech was delivered to, and hosted by, the Center for American Progress (CAP). The president uses striking language to appeal to the emotion and logic of the audience. Obama executes his appeals in a variety of ways with the express purpose of painting the issue of growing inequality and decreased upward mobility as the “defining challenge of our time.” President Obama describes these issues as what drives everything he does as POTUS. Obama’s speech was quite intellectual and technical, peppered in detail with the numbers and statistics of current social and economic inequalities, appealing to logos. While he builds his argument based on these substantial facts, the overall feeling of his language is that of compassion. This compassion seems to drive his purpose and thus emotionally connecting to his audience. Further, Obama appeals to ethos during his speech as he outlines how current market-caused inequalities are threatening everything that makes America great. Obama masterfully balances his passionate language with solid facts and straight-forward logic in this effectively persuasive speech. Before expanding upon the specifics of the rhetorical methods utilized by the president in this speech, I think it is important to highlight that the audience (CAP)...
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...In the first ten chapters of the book Dreams from my Father, Barack Obama has had a tug of war with his racial identity. He has always been conflicted on the person that he is and is aware that he doesn’t fit in any kind of neat box. During his formative years, he was exposed to a variety of cultures, ranging from his grandparents and mother living in Hawaii, his father from Kenya, and his stepfather from Indonesia. By experiencing these other cultures and ways of thinking, his own set of ideologies wasn’t exactly the same as other people he has met on his life’s journey. This causes discourse in his self-confidence. He doesn’t feel authentic enough in either his father’s or his mother’s ethnicity and he constantly has a struggle with other people’s view of him. As the story progresses, he starts to realize the influence that hegemony has within groups of people and that it is not just a simple black and white world. The passage I chose to close read was when Obama introduces Joyce in chapter five. It is because of Joyce, Obama starts to realize the divide in his identity as a mixed race person is even bigger than he imagined. He meets her freshman year at Occidental College in the dorms that they lived in. He asks her if she was going to the Black Students’ Association meeting and she is offended by his question. She states that she is not black, but multiracial and goes to explain, “It’s not white people who are making me choose… It’s black people who always have to make things...
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...The United States has passed down the bloody heirloom that indicates that whiteness is the superior and ideal standard for an American. It gave America’s white founders a privilege that to this day continues to allow whites to prevail over all other races. The bloody heirloom is introduced in the article, “The foundation of Donald Trump’s Presidency is the Negation of Barack Obama’s Legacy” by author and national correspondent for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates. In his article, he argues that Trump won the 2016 presidential election solely because of the fact that he explicitly embraced the power of the white supremacy and racism. On the other hand, journalist and playwright George Packer refutes this idea. In his article, “Hillary Clinton...
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