https://padlet.com/anandasquire/9zl6k57nx7dupzc0 A Discussion around Beneatha Younger's struggle to find her cultural identity as a black woman in America. en-us 2020-12-14 00:04:56 UTC 2020-12-14 04:25:11 UTC hello@padlet.com https://padlet-uploads.storage.googleapis.com/904824362/7c5e71173b55ffd1bab0e9a3c3807552/download.png anandasquire https://padlet.com/anandasquire/9zl6k57nx7dupzc0/wish/1014382696 The play A Raisin In The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry was important for several reasons. One of the primary reasons for the play's importance is the manner in which it portrayed Black Americans. Until this play, black Americans were always typecast in stereotypical roles based on how the Whites saw them. America did not understand the true identity of Black Americans but to be fair Black Americans didn't even know their own identity.  Hansberry, within her play, asks questions about assimilation and black identity. Africans were taken to America as slaves; they were prevented from their cultural practices and encountered new cultures, religion and language. Therefore, their African heritage and identity is impaired and distorted by passage of the time. Later generations of African Americans could not gain the same cultural experience, neither the same identity as their white counterparts due to their Africanist past as well as the racial discriminations in America. They, thus, live in a "double consciousness" which according to W.E.D Dubois is a term that defines Black Americans’ struggle to identify according to their own set of values and culture, while at the same time striving to be accepted by white society in order to share equally in the fruits of the American dream. Black American’s identity under the influence of two different and in some cases opposing cultures are composed. They could never possess the full sense of belonging and integration into either culture; therefore, they are in constant attempt to reconcile African heritage with American upbringing. Hansberry reveals this concept within young African-Americans through her character Beneatha and uses her romantic pursuers, George Murchison(the assimilationist) and Joseph Asagai (the Africanist) as representatives of the two cultures.
Beneatha, otherwise known in the play as “Bennie’, is the daughter of Lena Younger (Mama) and the protagonist, Walter Lee Younger’s, younger sister. She is a  twenty-year-old college student who aspires to become a doctor. She is the only “educated” person in her family. Her education coupled with her youth causes her to hold modern views on gender and to show great interest in her African heritage, unlike the other members of her family. She is not afraid to express her opinions on religion,  feminism, and racial assimilation. However, though she is very sure of her stance on all these social matters  and shows interest in her African heritage, she is unsure of what to identify with culturally. Her suitors, Joseph Asagai, who is her schoolmate from Africa and George Murchison, who is African-American like her but is very rich and “white-washed” or assimilated give physical form to her options. Initially, to the audience it appears as though her choice of suitor and her choice of identity are one and the same. However, we find soon enough that her identity really wasn’t a matter of a single choice of either extreme. 
George Murchison challenges the thoughts and feelings of other black people through his arrogance and flair for intellectual competition. His own self-hatred manifests itself as contempt for other blacks and anything remotely African.  . When George meets Beneatha to go out, Beneatha removes her headdress to reveal the hairstyle that Asagai had encouraged her to wear, “close-cropped and unstraightened,” George is shocked. George believes that Beneatha in Nigerian costume and natural hairstyle looks eccentric. These natural hair and costume reveals Beneatha’s attempted connection to Africa. But she gets too African that is not proper for an African American girl. Before they leave for their date, George changes his mind when he sees Beneatha dressed in a cocktail dress, deciding that the hair is stylish: “I like it. It’s sharp. I mean it really is.” To him, when she is wearing a Western dress, the hair looks stylish, but when she is dressed in the African robes, the hair makes her look too “African”. Beneatha dislikes his willingness to submit to white culture and forget his African heritage and this is because she looks to Africa for her identity. She resents the idea that anyone could abandon their African heritage and take on the culture of their oppressors so she disassociates herself from her American heritage and this can be seen in her calling Jazz music which is a black music genre assimilationist. She essentially believes African to be her true identity and George's behavior towards her solidifies this idea for her. However, although Beneatha desires to identify with African cultures and to live outside the dominant white culture she enjoys, and experiences middle-class luxuries and extracurricular activities which are often considered “white” pursuits including acting lessons, horseback riding, and playing guitar. It all proves the duality of her consciousness that partly is African and partly American 
Beneatha is unaware of her double consciousness and seeks to find her "true identity" in one extreme as opposed to both. Through her other suitor, Asagai, she hopes to learn about her African heritage.  She says to Mr. Asagai that she is looking for her identity; she wants to talk with him about Africa; she is in search of her identity in Africa .  Even though he is presented in a more favorable light than George, he is still presented as patronizing and even sexist. Asagai is a classmate of Beneatha’s from Nigeria, which gives his character an alternative perspective on America’s race problem and a distinctly Afrocentrist point of view, given that he comes directly from Africa and is described by Beneatha as an “intellectual” . However, his embodiment of African culture distances him from American ideals and causes him to make insensitive remarks to Beneatha throughout the play, showing that an emotional rift from African American people and culture can be problematic. The point is that Beneatha sometimes forgets that she is an African American not an African and not an American alone. Her identity is the merging of Africanism and Americanism and none of them should be sacrificed. Beneatha’s searching for her true identity represents that she is in hesitations and doubt.  In her hesitations of being an African or American, she looks more to Africa and Negro blood and says that she wants to be "the queen of the Nile". In fact, she misses the influence of America. In the scene that Beneatha tries on African robes that Asagai has bought her, Hansberry described her ‘emerging grandly from the doorway so that we can see her thoroughly robed in the costume Asagai bought […] she is coquettishly fanning herself with an ornate oriental fan, mistakenly more like a butterfly than any Nigerian that ever lived". While Beneatha may seek to affirm her African identity untouched by the American culture, Hansberry emphasized on the incongruity of her African signs in America. 
 Hansberry portrayed Beneatha's mixed identity in distinct ways several times despite of her unawareness of it. Through Beneatha she conveys the absurd nature of asking African Americans to choose one of two unattainable ideals: rejecting their own culture or fully embodying a foreign one. By showing Beneatha getting “all mixed up” (1526) after Asagai’s proposal and omitting any closure to this confusion, Hansberry shows that there is no way to make a concrete decision one way or another. The freedom of African Americans to choose what they want to do rises above all. Beneatha’s choice to straighten her hair does not make her an assimilationist, and her choice to embrace Nigerian music does not make her an Afrocentrist. By placing Beneatha in between assimilationism and Africanism, Hansberry seems to be making a claim that African Americans are able to exist between these two extremes.  Dubois responded to the African American identity hesitation; he noted that Negroes are Americans by birth, citizenship, their political ideals, their language, and their religion. Their Americanism does not go further, and they are Negroes, members of a vast historic race. Beneatha needs to find her own identity, which lies somewhere between the Americanness of George and the Africanness of Asagai. Mistakenly, she is looking for her identity in African heritage alone. Her belief that her identity is rooted in her ancestry and her enthusiasm to know more about Africa implies the African part of her identity while it does not refute the role America plays in her identity.

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