Hi, need to submit a 1500 words essay on the topic Emma: Portrait of Racial Confusion through Biracial Experience.One of her first experiences in Harlem left her feeling compassion that brought her to

Hi, need to submit a 1500 words essay on the topic Emma: Portrait of Racial Confusion through Biracial Experience.

One of her first experiences in Harlem left her feeling compassion that brought her to tears, but unable to explain this to her father. The isolation that Emma feels because of the racial ambiguity leaves her questioning her place in society.

Emma describes her life from her perspective. The one person she is most attached to is absent from her life as he is now a vegetable. The word vegetable is used to describe the vegetative state that her brother Bernie is in because of an accident. Bernie is the one person that she can identify with because of the way in which they share racial components in their looks. Furthermore, she looks up to Bernie because he has advantages that she doesn’t really think that she has developed. She also thinks of him as her anchor in the world. She describes this when she talks about how after they have moved and she has her own room she feels as if without him sleeping in the bunk bed above her that she “had nightmares of the house blowing down” (Raboteau 11). Once he is no longer mentally there for her, she becomes a bit unfettered.

The importance of Bernie becomes more poignant after he returns from his experiences with the Million Man March in Washington. Bernie was being mentored by an associate of his father, a professor who saw the potential racial identity that was growing in Bernie. Bernie was embracing the African American side of his cultural experience. When he returned from the March, Emma felt a separation that was between them through his identification with the ‘black’ culture. The fact that he understood his association to that identity as he said “We were light…like we weighed nothing, and we were lifting up” (Raboteau 18).