preview

Example Of Racial Identity

Decent Essays

As a result of the white heteropatriarchy prevailing over the United States, each minority American undergoes a unique struggle to establish an individual racial identity. Minorities define themselves in relation to their races based on differentiating qualities such as ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. Two documentary films that star minority figures and describe how race shaped these figures’ stories are American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, directed by Grace Lee and O.J.: Made In America, directed by Ezra Edelman. These films differ in their content and structure because the former shares a positive story about a Chinese-American woman’s rise to success as an activist, whereas the latter explains the harrowing background and circumstances that corrupted a successful African-American male athlete. Grace Lee Boggs presents a confounding example of racial identity in that she aligns herself closely with black issues rather than Chinese-American or female causes. The articles “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924” by Erika Lee and “When Whiteness Feminizes...: Some Consequences of a Supplementary Logic” by Rey Chow offer historical context surrounding Boggs’s identity by clarifying that Boggs emerged after the height of anti-Asian immigration policies and of white feminist theory. Unlike Grace Lee Boggs’ subconscious distancing from identifying as a Chinese-American woman, O.J. Simpson intentionally

Get Access