The Impact of Our Race and Ethnicity on Our Identity - Personal Statement Example

Hurston's sense of separation from her warm and safe familial life and her subsequent departure from Eatonville to Jacksonville begin a lifetime of wandering from and returning to her roots. Although Zora returns to Eatonville after her father's second marriage, she is never able to return to her mother's home; it has become simply a house. Zora's knock-down, drag-out fight with her stepmother, whom she never forgives for usurping her mother's place, emphasizes Hurston's displacement from her home and family.

In one sense, however, her alienation precipitates her journey from Eatonville to Washington, D.C., and later to New York City to gain education and a better life. This journey echoes that of many Negroes who moved from the black belt of the South to the North. Hurston's journey repeats in a way the migration by slaves to gain life and freedom, followed by subsequent migrations made by Blacks to find work in northern factories and to improve life for themselves and their children. The plot development of Hurston's autobiography, then, owes much to a black tradition, going back to slave narratives and to early black autobiographies.

The toll of substance use and abuse among black males, noted by social scientists since the earliest decades of this century, continues to waylay many men's struggle to effectively parent. Over a decade ago, Robert Staples explained that among black people, abuse of both drugs and alcohol is a product of an exploitative economy that offers minimum wages, little employment, and a lack of educational opportunities. Since then, the economy has become more distressing for working-class and poor black Americans, and these men's accounts seem to confirm Staples' analysis.