American Identity

In Creating America, Joyce Moser and Ann Watters suggest that, “In understanding American identities, we need to come to terms with unity and division, with separateness and common ground.” America. A country which has an seemingly infinite amount of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Yet no matter how different they might seem, they are all still a part of the American identity. It is this rift between the seperateness of the various cultures and the one unified “American” culture that is tearing the American identity apart - and one that needs to be closed and fixed to truly have a grasp at what being an American is. The people must find a balance between juggling their cultural traditions and customs and their American citizenship to discover their identity.

The Founding Fathers knew that America would be a land of immigrants, a land of outcasts - and they prepared accordingly. Our very own Declaration of Independence starts with “We the people”, not “The government” or “Us white men”. It then goes further to assert that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” where the Founding Fathers wanted America to not be a land of civil unrest, where their European predecessors had failed miserably at. Yet, in the present day, our society seems to have completely ignored what our founders had set in the Declaration of Independence, with class wars, racial inequality, ethnic discrimination, and so on. We as a people have to come to terms that not everyone will look or act the same, but that everyone is a member of the species Homo Sapiens, or if that idea is to big to wrap around for some people, that everyone is a citizen of the US.

Many people describe America as “a melting pot”. This is how the US “escaped the divisiveness of a multiethnic society” like many other nations in the world. It allows the Americans to create their own identity from their own culturally diverse backgrounds. This fluidity...