My main goal for writing this paper was honestly to express something that I had not ever really expressed to others but felt very strongly about. I wanted to write something that I could be proud of and that other people could read and hopefully understand what I had previously struggled so hard to say. When I started writing this paper I had thought that I would just talk about how society shouldn’t be allowed to affect your identity but as I wrote I realized that that’s not the case. My original opinion on societies affect on identity became a little different, and I now think that society and identity can go hand in hand, as I explain in the paper. I’m happy with the outcome of my essay and think that I did reach my goals from the beginning.

Final Draft

As a child I never understood why people from school who I had known for years would be surprised when my dad came in for parent teacher conferences. “Your dad's black?” Their face would be contorted with shock and disbelief. This would always confuse me. I never thought of my dad as black or mixed, or any race really, he was just my dad, but as these situations grew more in frequency I also grew to expect the shocked expressions. I would stand proudly next to my father, my broken elementary school smile there for all to see, and when conversations of ethnicity came up I was more than happy to state that my grandfather is from Jamaica. It suddenly seemed like for all of the previous times the question, your dad is black? were asked, there was an equal, if not greater amount of comments along the lines of, “It doesn’t count because you look white,” or “He’s light skinned anyways, you’re not really mixed” What does that even mean? I remember thinking. But as these phrases were drilled into my mind by my peers I started to wonder if I was mixed. I tried to correct people at first, but they would roll their eyes, say “Yeah, ok, but since you look white I’m just gonna say you’re white. It’s easier that way.”

Recently I have wondered how you get your identity. Do you receive it? Or do you create it? For most of my short life I have been under the impression that what others say about you, is what is true. Convinced that other people knew something that I would never be able to understand about myself, their words rang true in my mind, opinions turning to facts. In this way, society creates your identity and you then, receive it. This is not a bad thing; it can be helpful to get insight from others on who you are. It only becomes a bad thing when society refuses to acknowledge what you’ve decided is a part of your identity. So perhaps it’s the opposite, perhaps you create your identity and society is then the one who receives it. How they receive it, is not up to you.

What I notice more and more is that identity is influenced by both oneself and society. It is a give and take relationship, a balance that more people should understand. In a TED talks by Thandie Newton she says, “But the self is a projection based on other people’s projections.” I find that this quote has two meanings. The first being that you can show and express who you are, but you can also be shown parts of yourself that you didn’t even know existed. The second, that your identity comes only from what others have told you is your identity. The latter is what I experienced as a younger child. So many other people telling me what I am and what I am not that I accepted their opinions as correct and forgot my own.

Just because it’s a convenience for you to remember, and to put me in a box, doesn’t mean that you can. I am proud that I’m biracial. I love every part of my ethnicity and I am not ashamed to say that when you look at my family, you’ll see people whose skin contrasts their strong, dark brows and whose shoulders and cheeks turn a rosy pink in the sun. But that you will also see faces of cocoa and coffee, hair that twists, turns, and coils in the most intricately beautiful way. I am proud that when I stand with my cousins on my mother's side people say we have the same eyes and that when I stand with my grandfather on my father’s that no one can deny the resemblance. The shape of my brows, and placement of freckles a near replication. It is not just these physical similarities that connect me to all sides of my family, but our inner likeness, mostly overlooked. Little quirks that are more embedded in my DNA than any race. I know who I am and for anyone who tries to take away my identity, you can sure as hell bet that I’ll tell you, that I am a special breed of proud.

Pinterest is a platform for all things DIY and any other interest you might have. It is a fairly simple concept, you search through pins that you like and things that you want to buy or ideas that you want to try later, you can pin ideas on boards that may have on different topics and genres. It was a cool fall night and I was trying to find the perfect outfit for my fall birthday. My eyes were squinted trying to block out the blinding light, still shining under the dimmed brightness. My finger was sliding through the thousands of pins of white women modeling fall fashions, and pins that are used to execute that perfect fall smokey eye for blue eyed girls. At first I didn’t think anything of it, so I went to the search: fun fall looks. What came up was pages and pages worth of blond women, with intricate updos meant for long thick flowing hair. I searched for ten minutes and nothing came up. My tired fingers typed, black hair, to see if I would have any luck. The next five minutes were spent trying to weed out fair skinned women with long fine black hair. Finally I typed in natural hair, and black women filled the the screen, black women with all different hair types and skin tones. I was overjoyed, I thought I’d hit the mother load, my very own lookbook right at my fingertips. Only now do I realize what a despairing day it was.

I can’t expect to walk down the street without being a novelty and someone outside of the norm. My hair, lips, nose, eyes, and skin tone have never been seen as regular, regardless of how long people with similar features have been around in this country. Everytime someone stares at the kink in my curls I want to scream/ I wonder what a world would be like without black people? Whenever I look on TV, social media, and media in general I am conditioned to think that the world would be so much better and simpler without me in it. I started analyzing my favorite shows, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and Modern Family. All three of these shows demonstrate different types of white people and families. There’s so much diversity between these shows, but only within the white race. “The problem is there's nowhere near the diversity that our white counterparts have. We're still not allowed to be fully human in the ways they are." (Ariel Cheung, USA Today) Fortunately, in the past couple of years black people have started to be seen more frequently on our screens, but at what cost?

“Younger Black women are more exposed to the extremes. They are more likely to see the negative typologies due to their higher media consumption in general, their higher tendency to look into popular culture for cues and their interest in broad self expression.” (Krissa Thompson, Washington Post) Fortunately for us people are eating up the few representations of melanin that they have been seeing on screen, but unfortunately we are only seeing the single story. When the influx of black skin reached mainstream media it only showed, back talking, loud mouthed, sassy, booty shaking black women, and aggressive and defensive men. Only recently have the people showing up onscreen been an accurate representation of all the different types of black people in reality, such as Black ish, Scream Queens, and Empire.

However I am afraid that it may be too late. After years of being ignored by the media and forced to conform into a box constructed by men who have never walked a day in our shoes, black people are really suffering. Colorism and interracial discrimination is an increasing issue in the black community and some things just can not be reversed. Since media is seeming to turn a corner and put complex black characters on the screen, there may still be a chance for black people to claim a place in this country’s story.

As the son of an immigrant, I always feel like a little something special. I don't have the right to; I didn't brave a new world, leave my family behind, and live a new life. I have been settled peacefully in America for my whole life, and I always have felt connected to America, but I've also felt connected to Germany. My mother spent a year abroad, and spent that year in America from Germany. That same year, my father spent his year abroad in Germany from America. They got married and attended college in the US, eventually settling down in sweet, sweet Philadelphia, and raising a family. Now my mother has lived here for more time than she has lived in Germany, and I wanted to investigate how she feels about national identity.

My mother has always seemed like the perfect immigrant (I know this sounds strange, but let me explain). Theodore Roosevelt said “Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.” My mother learned English within that time, and after 20+ years of living here, she has barely the whiff of an accent, and can speak English flawlessly and fluently. Often times I will forget a word (in English!) and she will remind me what that word is. She came here legally, got a green card, and kept it, meaning she didn't commit a SINGLE crime. How many Americans can say that much after 20+ years? No DUIs, no pirating music or movies, she's not a rapist or a murderer as Donald Trump would like to suggest. She obtained her citizenship just last month. She has been the model immigrant.

She spoke with me recently to help with this project, and I asked her to describe how she felt about national identity, being someone with multiple nationalities and coming from multiple national backgrounds and experiences. She told me about how she will always be a German, even though she now has both a German citizenship and a US citizenship. She said she was reluctant to get the US citizenship, and would only become a US citizen if she could keep her German citizenship. A quote from Ronald Reagan perfectly applies to this situation: “[A man said] you can go to live in France, but you can’t become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can’t become a German, an Italian. He went through Turkey, Greece, Japan and other countries. But he said anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American.” - Ronald Reagan. She is still, in her heart, a German, and can never give that up or become something or someone else.

I also spoke with her about her “belonging,” meaning how she felt in the new world of America, and whether she felt like she belonged. She immediately snapped back, “Never. I never feel at home, like I belong.” She then went on to talk about her recent trip back to Germany to see her mother one last time, and then to arrange and go to her funeral. She said how, even after all these years of being away from home, she felt at home in her mother’s house. We all feel that way when we come home, like no matter what, we feel welcome. My mother has never really, truly belonged among Americans, but when she went home she felt like she belonged. Her national identity will forever and always be German, and while she feels at home in our house, with us, she really feels at home at her childhood home, in her childhood country, with all of the faces she has known since childhood.

Introduction:

This essay centers around how cartoons can be used as a tool for self discovery. Here I asked myself were some key factors in my development and how these same factors may play a role in the development of others. I’m very proud of the evidence used in this essay. I would like to further my analytical ability in future writing assignment.

Advanced Essay #3:

When I was ten, I loved weekends. Saturday mornings were filled with the  color and noise of children’s cartoons.  My Saturday nights were spent hanging out with my dad. I would pick his brain for hours on the nature of existence. On Sundays I would wake up around ten o’clock. I would do anything to fill the time. Two hours before sunset, I would open up my brick of a computer and watch anime for hours.  The world seemed to be quiet and peaceful  in the warmth of that orange spotlight and for brief moments it allowed for me to immerse myself in that cartoon world. I saw these strange, giant eyed, animations as very real. Intellectually I knew that they were just drawings projected in pixels on my screen, but I could empathize with them. The connection that I felt towards these characters was founded on a sense of belonging. I could identify traits in myself that also lay in these characters.
I’m now sixteen and proud to say that I am still a cartoon enthusiast. There is a broad constituency of people who find themselves engaged in cartoons. The diversity of the cartoon fan base has recently been growing. In 2006 “Cartoon Network ranked #1 among boys age 9-14 during early primetime hours” according to anime news network, but as of 2015 “Ratings among girls in January spiked more than 50% from the previous year.” according to Variety.
In American animation, cartoons are becoming more real, characters have deep seated flaws and are more like real people rather than superheroes and this has only added to the popularity of cartoons.
Take for example, one of my favorite shows, Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe. It’s  about a boy named Steven who is half human and half “gem”. The gems are aliens, their bodies are projections of light that come from stones that hold their consciousness. Steven’s mother fell in love with his father and gave up her physical form to give birth to Steven. Steven’s mother was the leader of the Crystal Gems, a team of four gems who fight to protect mankind. The Crystal gems also deal with real issues that affect real people like body image and grief. One thing that makes Steven Universe so groundbreaking is that all gems identify as women and even though it's never actually said it's evident that some gems are lesbians.
This attracts a demographic that has never been targeted by the cartoon industry, the LGBT community. It allows an LGBT viewer to closely identify with these characters. By being aligned with these characters one is given the chance to embrace that piece of their identity.
“Expert after expert says that when kids see people like them positively portrayed in the media they consume, they are positively impacted, .... Especially when we’re still developing, and especially when we are still discovering and exploring our genders and sexuality” says Mey, a transgender, lesbian, writer for Autostraddle in her article “Steven Universe and the Importance of All-Ages Queer Representation”  

I theorize that cartoons make it easy to explore the depths of one’s identity. When presented with a cartoon character it’s easy to find qualities that resonate with the viewer. That is because what makes the cartoon characters different from those of books or movies is their limited dimensionality. Although this could be thought of as the result of bad storytelling; often the objective of cartoons is to be simple. In this new type of American animation, characters often are limited to one dimension which makes thinking objectively easier. This mixed with the passive nature of watching television makes coming to an unconscious conclusion about one’s own character and identity seem fluid.   
As a toddler, I had a mild obsession with the Powerpuff Girls. The Powerpuff Girls are a group of girls who battle the forces of evil. Each is powerful in their own right. I easily identified the qualities of each character that I too had. As a toddler, I identified with  Bubbles, the kind and gentile member of the group and Mojo-jojo, the super genius monkey. I recognized things that we had in common and wanted to cultivate those parts of myself.
Childhood is a very tender time for the development of self, where every little thing could be internalized. Cartoons are useful tools for the discovery of not only social identity but also self identity. Self discovery is a key part of growing up and giving children tools for that purpose is important.

Most of us have been in a position at some point in our lives where we’re nervous, and someone tells us, “just be yourself,” as if it is so simple as to just do it. But it’s almost never that clear. It’s more than likely that there is something in the way of that, whether you haven’t had enough time to develop those ideas clearly, or you’re being influenced by something else outside of the current scenario. Bottom line, you are being influenced by something else in your life. From the start, from the moment you’re born.

After all, the only point of reference you have in life is what you perceive. In the words of Emile Durkheim, “Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.” So the conclusions that you make about yourself and your identity are always influenced by something. Thandie Newton talks a lot about, “The self”, or in this context self identity, in her TED talk. I kept waiting for some evidence to back up all the claims she was making, because many of them had serious implications about human nature and were spoken so matter of factly, but I was never given any.

That’s not to say I disagreed with everything either, she talks about the function of self identity in society and communication, but in general, she spoke about the self and “oneness” as if they were concrete. Fact. But the way she describes, it’s hardly concrete. I’ll admit a lot of the claims I will make in this essay are opinions, and are completely debatable. She was being more idealistic than anything. But, I don’t disagree with that.

Even if the things she was saying didn’t have a solid base, they make sense in the way that they can be used to better yourself, and give someone satisfaction over who you have chosen to be and the choices you have made in life. Even if you never will get to a 100% uninfluenced self identity, that doesn’t mean trying to won’t help. Even though having 100% self identity won’t be realized, it makes sense as an ideal. A good example of this is Muhammad Ali, who before he converted to Islam was named Cassius Clay.

He says, “I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.”  Is he 100% free of society’s influence? No. And I don’t believe anyone or anything ever will be. But he is certainly deciding for himself, and taking at least some control of his self identity. He won’t get there, but that doesn’t mean that chasing after it is a pointless endeavor. He has control in some way, and from his perspective, he bettered himself. He was presumably happier in life than he was with the name Cassius Clay and even know that isn’t uninfluenced, it payed to off to chase it. Just because something isn’t realistic doesn’t mean it’s not worth chasing.

Being black while going to a private school is like being an exotic animal at the zoo. You’re a spectacle for the people there, because they rarely see black people. Because of your race’s rarity in these areas, stereotypes are given and expectations are laid out for you that you don’t understand or simply disagree with. For some, coming to these schools provide a challenge like no other:Increased workloads, more tests, etc. However, the most difficult part isn’t the class work, but rather what happens outside of class. If you’re not good at the sport assigned to you stereotype, it’s even harder to fit in than if you had. If you don’t act like your stereotype it’s hard to even be socially accepted. My only example can be my personal one, from when I went to private school.

Body paragraphs:

I’d been going to private school since lower school, but none had been like the middle school I ended up transferring to. The school was called Chestnut Hill Academy, or CHA and it was built like a college campus. Possibly the most memorable event i’d had at CHA was when I was waiting for my father to pick me up. A boy, A.J came up to me and I glanced over, unsure of what he was going to say. He was kind of popular, being a varsity player in every sport he played and even played on the high school team for baseball in middle school. “Do you like, wash your hair?”  He asked. I was appalled and responded “Well yeah, it’s hair...do you?”, hoping he was joking but knowing he wasn’t. “Well I heard you couldn’t like wash your hair for years to get dreads. How do you wash it?”, he responded. “I use shampoo like you.”. We went back and forth like this for awhile until I got tired of answering his questions and tried to cut the conversation short. Apparently I wasn’t quick enough, because now he felt comfortable to give me a nickname. “Mophead. Yeah, that’s what you are, a mophead!”. If i’d been a little older, this wouldn’t have affected me at all, but at the tender age of 12, it felt like a punch in the gut. What right did this random boy have, to prod at my culture and completely disrespect what I wore around as my pride and joy? I was a hotheaded kid, and had already thought of a response to his branding, but my father pulled up so I left without a word. This wasn’t the only time stuff like this happened, and I’d even had a teacher with dreadlocks like mine who was asked the same questions. He was stronger than me though, and knew how draw the line between joking and strictness. He soon became my advisor, and through him I learned to numb myself to the stereotypical, borderline racist comments spewing from teacher and student mouths alike.

This book, A Hope In The Unseen is a story about a young African American boy who miraculously gets into an Ivy League college and follows his story from the process beforehand to his college life after getting in. The first time the author talks about Cedric Jennings as a student is in the beginning of the book, as an  introduction of sorts. “Cedric Jennings is not, by nature, a loner, but he finds himself evermore isolated, walking a gauntlet through the halls, sitting unaccompanied in class, and spending hours in this room.”(page 5)

I chose this quote because it spoke to the lifestyle the protagonist had received when he decided to try to be his best self. This scene is still in public school, but you can tell that based on the way he’s described, he’s an outsider. It is made clear later in the book that it’s because the other kids are afraid he thinks he’s better than them, and because of that they try not to associate with him or if a they do, insult his intelligence. However, when he gets to Brown University, a different, but equally as isolating encounter awaits the protagonist

When I went to SCH, it was fairly eye opening for me about finding myself. I noticed that overall, black people going to white schools has always been a life changing moment, and not always for the better. Going to these schools puts you in between two worlds, and you can never fit perfectly in either. At home, people begin to think you’re bourgeois, or simply trying to be better than them, while at private school, people think you’re a spectacle. One to be poked, prodded, tested, but not to make friends with. There will be the rare occasion where there are people who you’ll be friends with, but it’s not always the case. I was fortunate to be one of the people who did make friends at my school. However, In A Hope In The Unseen, Cedric struggled to make any friends and went through his entire high school years with only the support of his mother and his faith in church. Through the corroboration of these two sources, I believe that the only true way to find and hold onto your identity as a black student in a private school or even just being the best student you can be is to find what makes you happy and then the rest will follow (friends, jobs, camps, etc.).That, in a nutshell, is a peek inside of the world of a preppy black student.