The Making of “The Other”
Have you ever felt like a lone wolf, endlessly walking through your life in a society that doesn’t feel like home? That’s how it feels to be “the other”, and you are not alone. In “Black+White…equals black” by Lawrence Hill and “The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” by Sherman Alexie, characters also undergo being “the other” in their life due to internal and external factors. Firstly, they experience being “the other” through their inner struggles with their own racial identities, and secondly, the pressure of being marginalized from the outside world is contributed to their “otherness” as well.
To start with, the internal turmoil about their self-identities results in characters’ experiences of being “the other”. When reading “Black+White…equals black”, I could not help noticing the intense inner battle about who he truly is deep inside the narrator’s heart, seeing that he, as a mixed race, studies in an elite private high school surrounding with white people and at the same time, has a strong relationship with his black side of family. He “bounced back and forth between studying Latin, playing squash and revering black American cultural icons” (Hill 19) and he asks himself, “but who exactly was I” (Hill 19)? Obviously, the narrator goes through an identity-shaping process as a young multicultural person growing up. He first found out that he would never truly be white, and then develop a mostly black identity. In this process, it is the emptiness and the loneliness inside that is keeping him up at nights and yelling at him that he is “the other”. It is never easy being mixed race and receiving rejections from both sides of his ethnic identity. Even yourself could not figure out who you are, and later on, you get frustrated, and lost in the darkness of the “third space”. To some extent, it really has nothing to do with how people around think about you, but the inner isolation and disconnection inside of you. Therefore, the struggles and anxiety in their minds about their racial identities make the characters “the other”.
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Secondly, the characters go through the experience as “the other” with the pressure of being marginalized coming from the surrounding. In “The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”, the narrator believes everyone sees him as a criminal. When buying a creamsicle in the convenience store, the clerk was very mindful of him, thinking he might draw a gun on him and rob the store because “he knew this dark skin and long black hair of mine was dangerous” (Alexie 2). He didn’t do anything but merely have an Indian appearance. And in “Black+White…equals black”, it must be heart-breaking for 12-year-old Hill to hear “don’t you think it is horrible, being mixed races like that” (Hill 12) from his best friend’s mother. We almost ignore how rude she was as she said those words so gently and indirectly. These are examples of how society is trying to marginalize them with discrimination. Lawrence Hill claims that his sensation of being the other was triggered by the environmental factors. They just don’t fit into the dominant group, and the surrounding is making them uncomfortably visible. Just imagine a world where everyone sees you as an alien and pushes you to the edge of the society by their verbal violence and their bias deep inside. And hopelessly, you cannot do anything with it because you are born this way, and you could not choose your own racial appearance. You will never feel welcomed as Alexie thinks he “didn’t really fit the profile of the country” (Alexie 2) when he gets pulled over by the police. Under the pressure from the surrounding, they become the fringe dwellers and experience being “the other”. To conclude, the characters are facing the great pressure of being marginalized by the dominant group and that’s the external factor that makes them “the other”.
All things considered, characters in “Black+White…equals black” and “The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” undergo being “the other” with inner and outer causes. To be more specific, the inner struggles about their own ethnic identities and the discriminations from the surrounding that marginalize them lead to their experience of being “the other”. As “the other”, they are drowning in the feeling of being different, strange and even unworthy. All these souls of “the other” are looking for a home they never even experienced, where they can feel completed and cherished. But I can’t help thinking about where this home is? Maybe this home is the true you. And the soul seeks to experience itself again, but this time, without the uncertainty and fear.
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