After talking in class today about assimilating, I started to think about how most Americans identify themselves. Most Americans identify themselves as being a race that is un- american. However, most of those Americans are completely assimilated into the American culture and are generally many generations down the line of their immigrant ancestors. It just seems interesting that almost all Americans focus on identifying with their racial heritage, no matter how long ago their ancestors immigrated to America. You would think that after the hundreds of years the United States has been established as a country, that its citizens would start to identify themselves solely as Americans if they were born in the United States. I myself when being asked "what am I?" would never say American. Though it was interesting to see when I was in Spain everyone refered to me as being American and when I would say that I am from America but I am Spanish they all thought I was crazy. In America if you identify with the race of another country you were not born in, it is the norm, but in most other countries around the world, they identify with the country in which they live and are assimilated to. Why is it that Americans have such trouble identifying themselves as Americans when the rest of the world identifies us that way?
-Ryan Fleming
Most people don't indentify themselves as American is simply because of the way America is projected throughout the world. Most people view America in such a negative light. I don't indentify myself as American for the most part either. We're a country that is founded on saying one thing and doing another, and because of this, many people have cynical views on America and its citizens. This causes most people to disassociate themselves from the American persona.
ReplyDeleteLooking at America from a historical standpoint also sheds light on this subject. America hasn't even been around for 250 years! It isn't surprising to me that we are still indentifying ourselves with our roots. People who live in Spain and other European countries can trace their decendancy possibly thousands of years with little geographical movement. We all came from Europe and other parts of the world much more recently than most realize, and I believe this plays a large part in how we indentify ourselves. Furthermore, we all still resemble (at least partially) where we came from. Give it a while. America is still very young, and the more time passes, the more redily we will identify ourselves as Americans.