Colson Whitehead's novel Sag Harbor (2009) and Barack Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (1995) both tell part of the complicated history of race and race relations in America. The main characters in both of these novels have experiences of being the "tragic mulattos" in their cultures. For Benji Cooper of Sag Harbor, he must find a balance between the black community he is a part of in the summer and the white community he lives in during the school year. Barack Obama, a mixed-race man, tries to find an identity and a place in his family and as a black man in America. Both the stories of Benji Cooper and Barack Obama blur the reader's perception of conventional racial boundaries to demonstrate that race is not an easily defined or constrained issue, but rather has many connotations and permeates different societies. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay During the school year, Benji Cooper attends a predominantly white elementary school in Manhattan. The school has a dress code that students must wear ties and dress in class. Benji describes another person's reaction to her appearance when she dressed for school as: “an old white man stopped us on the corner and asked us if we were the children of a diplomat. Little princes of an African country. The UN is half a mile away. Because why else would black people dress like that” (4)? Yet, despite the clothes he wears not allowing him to fit in on the street, and the fact that 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 town in the Hamptons which generations of African Americans have claimed as their sanctuary. He knows that this lavish lifestyle is not that of a typical young African American man. He states: “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black kids with beach houses. On the outside it is a paradox, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange” (57). While this type of affluent 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 life is completely normal, because it's all they they have ever known. Benji occasionally looks back in hindsight at these moments in Sag Harbor and notices that he and his friend overcompensate to try 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 observes: “We spoke one way at school, one way at home, and another way to each other. We have weapons. One summer we took some weapons for a few days and then got rid of them. Later some of us got real guns” (147). As Benji reflects on the difficulties that come with being a cultural mulatto, he realizes that the different ways of dealing with their race ended up better for some of his friends than for others. At one point in the novel Benji notes, “You could embrace the black side, take an idea you had about what real blackness was… acting tough, acting over the top, acting in a way that would be called gangsterish, committing little crimes… Or you could embrace contradiction, for example, what you call paradox, I call myself” (59). overly romantic but almost impossible, the reader gets the feeling that Benji did just that withoutapologize to move on to his friends, family and classmates. Instead of worrying too much about racial issues, he chooses to simply be himself, whoever he may be at any given moment. Barack Obama's race history is also unique in relation to many other African Americans, and this is something he is quite aware of. From. With a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, he understands that his lack of “inner city” experience makes his story different than other stories of race. He explains self-consciously in his book's introduction: "I can't even consider my experience as somehow representative of the black American experience" (xvi). While some may agree with this statement, there is no one story about race, nor is one person's story more effective than the next. The reader is led to the fact that perhaps some ideas of race and confusion on such a difficult topic are the same everywhere. For example, when Obama's father visits his son's class in Hawaii, he tells the children about race relations in Kenya. Obama describes this explanation like this:…He told us about Kenya's struggle to be free, how the British had wanted to stay and rule the people unjustly, just as they had done in America; how many had been enslaved just because of the color of their skin, just like in America; but that Kenyans, like all of us in the room, longed to be free and develop through hard work and sacrifice (70). In a way, this statement from his father allows the reader to see Obama's history of race as the history of race in America. He may not have had a class struggle or “street experience,” but he struggled to fit into society. He may not be able to trace his family back to pre-Civil War slaves in America, but that doesn't mean his family wasn't enslaved. In fact, it is likely that they had experienced oppression from white men, whether European or American, just as slaves in America did. While the injustices faced by Obama's family may be a little messier than in other black Americas, that doesn't make them nonexistent or less important than other stories of race. The problem for Obama is that he cannot simply dismiss whites as oppressors and oppressors. the ones who caused problems for his race because he is both black and white. Being both a white and a black man, he must attempt to embrace both of these sides in himself. Yet he finds it difficult for many reasons, including the fact that he has few examples of the black community in his life. He observes that: “Far from my mother, far from my grandparents, I was engaged in an intermittent internal struggle. I was trying to become a black man in America, and regardless of how I looked, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant” (76). Obama's struggle is further complicated by the fact that he must also deal with the white side of his race. He describes this complication of his life in the context of a conversation with a black friend. She says, “Sometimes I found myself talking to Ray about white people this or white people that, and suddenly I remembered my mother's smile, and the words I spoke seemed awkward and false” (81). Just as he is unable to negatively stereotype African Americans, Obama also cannot make generalizations about whites without betraying himself and his family. In the end, Obama comes to terms with his multifaceted identity. At the end of the novel he realizes that all his parts come together in a way that is unique to him and that completes him. He states, “I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the.