How we Define Ourselves Americans come from many different backgrounds and nationalities. Of these Americans are different races and religions, which represent the United States today.
With the amount of diverse people in the United States, not everyone agrees with allowing people of different races and religions to mix. Living with people of different cultures can have a major impact on peoples’ lives. People today define themselves and others by the way they look and the things they may do or say. Things such as: Black, White, upper class, lower class, Northerner, Southerner, and Immigrant start to become the labels of others.Everyday people are judged by things such as these cultural characteristics. The different ethnicities in America start to break apart from a whole and become their own.
America must learn to become one and stop defining each other separately. America is formed of very extreme diverse people. Instead of Americans all being treated the same they are separated into groups of different: races, religions, and cultures. Discrimination has grown in America due to the mixture of the diverse people in it. I remember the very day I become colored; (Hurston 120) is a statement that represents how people are put into these categories.
When a little girl moves to a different place of mixed races, by the way that they treat her she realizes she is different. When people are around other people of the same ethnicity, they all feel equally the same. On the other hand, when you mix people of different ethnicity, they begin to realize how they are separated from others because of things such as skin color. New cultures coming to America bring new: language, music, food and beliefs. Many Americans feel threatened by, or discomfort from, these new characteristics. Every day as an American and as an individual, people face the effect of cultural stereotypes.
It is a reason within itself that as I grew up in a closed community, my exposure to diverse people was limited. What I have learned though media is basically all I have ever known about effects of the cultural stereotypes from people in America. My limit to cultural stereotypes is how I am affected by them. I never knew of anyone around me or people I met being affected by these stereotypes either.
Not knowing how it feels to be around diverse people can makes it hard to understand the effects that they can have on individuals, and America as a whole.Now that I have expanded from those limits I can see how diversity is a factor in America. Along and across the borders there remain real conflicts and real fears between different ethnicities (Rodriguez 131). Out of pride as much as affliction, they are reluctant to give up their pasts and become one in America (Rodriguez 130).
Most ethnicities say that others should not be welcome in America, because of this factor or that. These situations make it a constant battle to ever join as one. Time has come to imagine it (Rodriguez 131). Can America join forces and become one?Will we ever start to build America up, instead of tear it down? Some of those who cross the border to America, say it is not really a border but a scar. Will it heal? Will it bleed once more? Once a man worker crossed the border, and he asked, “Hasn’t this always been my land? Am I not coming back to it? Is it not in some way mine? ” I can taste it, hear its language, sing its songs and pray to its saints. Will it not always be in its bones part my land (Fuentes 249)? Most cultures feel in some way they are part of America through their heritage or other reasons.
Can Americans not accept that? We as America must stop putting labels on others! We need to define ourselves as Americans and begin to work as one. As individuals and as Americans, people are constantly giving and receiving judgment from others. People judge by things such as: skin color, clothing, and religion. In doing these things people divide American into groups of this or that forming walls between them. How we define ourselves as Americans, will be how America itself is defined.
If we as the American people cannot work as one, then America will not be as one.It is my opinion that every skin color, religion, and culture in itself has something that they can offer to form America into a better place. Giving that a chance could possibly build Americans together, regardless of their different characteristics. Works Cited Fuentes, Carlos.
“The Mirror of the Other. ” Portz 249-255 Hurston, Zora. “How It Feels to Be Colored. ” Portz 120-123 Portz, Jessica, Ed. Writing on the River. 2nd Ed.
Boston: McGraw Hill, 2009. Print Rodriguez, Richard. “The Fear of Losing a Culture. ” Portz 129-131
