American Identity

What is American Identity?

American Identity is basically many different races, cultures, and lifestyles all mixed into one nation. Being “American” doesn’t mean your skin has to be White or the only language you speak is English, being American means to simply live freely under the country’s rules. In Creating America, Joyce Moser and Ann Watters argue “In Understanding American Identities, we need to come to terms with unity and division, with separateness and common ground” This argument is stating that living in America is a contradiction because of the two different ideas “Unity and Division” and “Separateness and Common ground.” In other words it means separateness and togetherness. We as Americans are separate because of our different cultures and races but we learn to come together and be one. Moser and Watters’ arguments relate to Rodriguez, Schlesinger, Serrano and “Diversity Day” because of judgment. We are being judged by how we look, talk or who we are as a person. In Rodriguez and Serrano’s stories they explained how people would label them and assume they weren’t from America because the color of their skin or as Serrano explained they would label her as “Hispanic” when she actually wasn’t. In “Diversity Day” Michael Scott wanted everyone to treat each other differently by the race they had on the cards. In Schlesinger’s argument he explained that the 1908 “The Melting Pot” not everyone melted and mixed in the pot because of racism and judgement that caused a lot of people not to mix well together.

The Office episode “Diversity Day” Michael is upset that corporate sent Mr. Brown to talk to the employees about diversity and Michael doesn’t take it seriously because he feels like knows everything. He starts to treat Mr. Brown with no respect because he’s jealous that he gets to talk about diversity when in Michael’s mind it was his idea to talk about it. In the episode when Mr. Brown introduces himself as “Mr. Brown” Michael says “Is this the first...