The Essence of Hope
Hope is a very broad term that we all hold close to our hearts in some shape or form. Whether it be those hopes we carry in longshot dreams of childhood or hopes for a better future when weathering a difficult storm of tough times in life. Most noticeably for myself, I’m shining a light on the term “Hope” in detail because of its meaning in accordance with how I live my life. “Hope” to me is having the passion and faith to prosper toward great things in life, even with the odds against you. Growing up in the situation in which I did, hope was an extremely strong force within my thought process to succeed growing up. However, I lacked that physical motivator that I could see in the world as someone whose tracks I could follow.
Hope Through Role Models: Barack Obama’s Influence
That would soon change. I remember being in the fourth grade and all my friends talking about how they’d heard America was going to get a black president, and in that moment, I felt out of the loop. I had to find out who this guy was that everyone was saying was going to make history. During the Presidential race of 2007, I was first introduced to Barack Obama, who’d been running to become the first African-American President of the United States. In those days, weeks, and months leading up to that election, I’d gone to see Obama more and more, giving speeches, interviews, commercials, and merchandise.
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Hope in American History: Immigrant Dreams and Struggles
Around this time, I sensed the feeling of a mental switch happening in my community. We’d felt that we had found our guy, willing to stand on the front lines of change and pioneer to be something not many kids around me or even before I dreamed of doing. The first real appeal to that sense of hope for me was a speech Obama had given during his campaign in which he delivered the historic line that would also become his campaign slogan, stating short and simple, “Yes, We Can!” He’d talked about how we can spark change, we can chase and achieve dreams against insurmountable odds, and we can be the great country we are in unity with one another.
With the way I discovered my sense of “Hope” through a revolutionary role model accounted for, I’d like to let it be shown on record there are numerous ways to develop that internal feeling in your life. There are a handful of examples of what that faith that builds within us truly means to us and what it stems from in life. A great example of that hope we develop is that of “striving for greener pastures in life from tough situations. The sense of “Hope” in American history is arguably most strongly documented in that of immigrants moving to the United States in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Many of these immigrants were even willing to risk further hardships in the short-term sense when having to first be located at “Angel Island” prior to being allowed into the country, and contradictory to the island’s name, it was anything but pleasant.
In Ryuta Idachi’s journal article summarizing the hardships of the island and its American and Chinese historical context by authors Erika Lee and Judy Yung entitled, “Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America,” he goes into great detail about the author’s extraordinary interpretation of the hop displayed by the immigrants to hold strong in difficult situations and unfair treatments, as well as the exclusion efforts experienced by a multitude of immigrants from eighty different countries who pushed through with a glimmer of hope remaining to reach their “American Dream .” This was greatly exhibited within Adachi’s quote, “The personal accounts highlighted in each chapter are clearly the strength of this book.
The authors undoubtedly made painstaking efforts to sort through and uncover the most diverse perspectives. For a narrative that easily could have been weighed down by numbing statistics, these accounts spanning the wide range of those detained and working on Angel Island play a crucial role in re-imaging the face of twentieth-century American immigration.” This tells basically how the “hope” of immigrants has shaped American society to this day.
Prominent Figures Embodying Hope: From Sports to Cinema
A famous case of Immigrating for a Better Future is that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who emigrated from Austria to the United States to follow his dreams of bodybuilding as well as becoming an actor. The prideful feeling of hope pushed him to do something so extraordinary the people of his hometown laughed at how blasphemous his dreams sounded. But Arnold kept that hope strong, eventually achieving those dreams. Besides winning several bodybuilding championships in America, he also became the lead actor in the successful franchise “The Terminator” and later served as the 38th Governor of California.
That thought of Blasphemy and criticism surrounding the big dreams Arnold had also struck a similar chord in the backstory of another famous individual, more so striking a chord with a background more in tune with that of my own culture. That being of NBA Hall of Famer Isiah “Zeke” Thomas. Isiah channeled his “Hope” to make it out of the hood in Chicago and provide for his mother, overcoming the tough circumstances so many African-American men have fallen victim to, especially in his time growing up in a rough area of Chicago.
“Zeke” grew up learning on a “Do what’s right and not what you see” mindset, mainly from his two older brothers who’d overdosed on drugs, telling him never to do them. Despite all the pressures of his environment, the constant reminder of his loyalty and faith to find a greater, prosperous life lies within that of the game of basketball for Isiah, not only for himself but for his mother and siblings as well. During High School, Isiah would wake up every day at 5:00 AM to go across town to a private school to train in basketball and get a better education.
This would soon pay off, as he earned a scholarship to the University of Indiana. Then, after his sophomore year at Indiana, Thomas had been chosen 2nd overall in the 1981 NBA Draft by the Detroit Pistons, the team in which he’d notched great praise in a Hall of Fame career. “Hope” is a term I view with significant importance to all cultures around the world because of the fact we all value this in different perspectives and aspects of our lives. Mainly that of the desire and determination for betterment to which we can all strive to make this world and all its people better physically and mentally.
References
- Adachi, Dean Ryuta. ‘Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America.’ Journal of American
- History, vol. 32, no. 4, 2013, p. 93-95. Academic OneFile.
Born A Crime & Personal Racial Encounters: A Comparison
Trevor Noah’s Mixed-Race Childhood Under Apartheid
Born a Crime is a memoir about Trevor Noah, a mixed-race man, and his life under apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid was the minority white South African government’s way of maintaining segregation between races and discrimination over the much larger majority of blacks. Trevor’s autobiography demonstrated how he didn’t have an easy childhood, but he still continued to search for where he belonged in the world. Since Trevor’s mother was black and his father was white, he felt as if he couldn’t find his place in society and that he was born into a crime. He felt as if he was “too white to be black and too black to be white.” His memoir wasn’t presented out of anger, whereas he believed his childhood shaped the person he is today.
Challenges of Mixed-Race Relationships Under Apartheid
In Born a Crime, Trevor Noah grew up during a very difficult and segregated time period in South Africa’s history. Being from a mixed-race family, he had a tough time finding his place in society. His mother was black, and his father was white, and because of this, they could have been charged with a crime if they were caught having an intimate relationship. In fact, there were numerous times that his mother was caught associating with his father. She would be fined and even spent some weekends in jail because of it. Trevor was uncomfortable in his own skin due to the fact that he didn’t identify with one single race, and neither race would fully accept him because of it.
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When he would visit his mother, he was considered the only “non-black” in the community, and when he visited his father, he would hide his identity in the white community. Power distance was a very important theme during this time period in South Africa because it is the dimension that all individuals in society are not equal. It demonstrates the inequality between people, which expresses that all individuals are not viewed as the same. As stated in the novel, “The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart from hate, it is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all.”
The beginning of the memoir expresses how the discrimination of apartheid was for the individuals who lived in South Africa. Since the whites were in control, they would use the apartheid to control the black majority.
The Themes of Individualism and Power Distance
Individualism was another recurring theme displayed in South Africa during the apartheid. It is the dimension in which all members of a society demonstrate a specific level of interdependence. South Africa is known for their high score for their Individualist society. We can conclude that individuals in South Africa are more likely to take care of their immediate families and themselves. In Born a Crime, Individualism was also represented through Trevor Noah’s young childhood during apartheid. As Trevor stated, “The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart from hate, it is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all.” Trevor explains how racism occurs through the separation of groups. He shows that through hatred and segregation, a community is easily ruined and divided.
Indulgence, Segregation, and Childhood Influences
Indulgence is defined as the extent to which people control their desires and impulses based on the way they were raised. The whites in South Africa had a high score of 63, which demonstrated that they live in a culture of indulgence and have a very positive outlook on life. They basically were very happy with their lives and had a lot of fun.
Conversely, it would be expected that the blacks during apartheid would have a much lower Indulgence score. Their optimism would be much lower based on the society they were living in, and they would have had a much less positive attitude. When a child is raised in a very discriminated society, they are going to listen to what their parents tell them to. If their parents tell them to stay away from a certain race, they are going to do what they are told. An ongoing challenge that has sparked children in the past and present is the way that they socialize with one another. As evident in Born a Crime, the white children only socialized with other white children, whereas black children only associated with black children.
Trevor viewed discrimination as “The world saw me as colored, but I didn’t spend my life looking at myself. I spent my life looking at other people. I saw myself as the people around me, and the people around me were black. Because I had a white father because I’d been in white Sunday school, I got along with the white kids, but I didn’t belong with the white kids. I wasn’t a part of their tribe. But the black kids embraced me. ‘Come along,’ they said. ‘You’re rolling with us.’ With the black kids, I wasn’t constantly trying to be. With the black kids, I just was.” Since Trevor was half black, he was viewed negatively because he wasn’t completely white. He felt like he belonged with the black kids because he looked much more like them.
Personal Encounters with Racial Discrimination
I was raised in a predominantly white, upper-middle-class town, but I always felt that I was very inclusive of all races. In fact, I never paid much attention to race and felt that if someone was nice to me, I was nice to them, and I assumed that most people had similar feelings. However, over the past two years, I have witnessed and been affected by a certain degree of racism firsthand. My sister has been dating a great guy that she met in college. His parents immigrated to the US from Nigeria when he was a young boy, and like many immigrants, they moved here for educational opportunities with the hopes that their children would become educated and then move back to Nigeria and “make a difference.”
They had always assumed that he would marry a Nigerian girl, and more specifically, a Christian girl from their tribe. Because my sister did not meet their expectations, her boyfriend’s parents refused to acknowledge her, and in fact, she had only met them once at a wedding. It is extremely heartbreaking that his parents do not want to accept her because of racial discrimination. When I reflect on the situation, I realize that if the roles were reversed and we hadn’t given him a chance to be a part of our family, we would have missed out on meeting someone very special in our lives.
References
