Essay/Term paper: Color of america

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Sociology Term Papers

Color of America Essay 1.) During the last few centuries many people have migrated to America. One of the main reasons for that is that they all hear about the American Dream and the Promise of America. The American Dream/Promise of America is pretty much a false idea. People from many different places hear that there is freedom and fairness here in this nation, and they hear that there is opportunity in America for everyone and that everyone had a word in things. This promise wasn"t really a promise though. For Native Americans, African-Americans, and other groups…this promise has been broken…mostly because the American Dream is obtainable…but very difficult to achieve. Let"s take African-Americans for example. African-Americans obviously have a very large difference compared to most others in the world. They are black. People seemed to have a difficult time accepting this and because the farmers and people working on plantations with slaves all got their slaves mainly from Africa and the blacks were chosen to be used by them to do all of their work. This made the blacks immediately a lower class of people and before they knew it they were getting pushed to the back of the bus and not allowed to use the same bathrooms or water fountains as white people. 2,) Today American life is like a tossed salad. When people starting migrating to America many years ago, this country was known as a melting pot. Meaning that everyone just pretty much blended in with each other. This became a problem though. People didn"t always mix very well, as they all had come from different cultures and had many cultural differences and also just many different lifestyles. If this country were a melting pot with immigrants from all over bringing over their culture, this country would be very difficult to live in. You could have people like the bushmen living right next door to upper class Americans that just don"t want people who walk around pretty much nude right next to them. That then has people of different groups striving for their cultural identity to be shown because they aren"t fitting into the Eurocentric ideal of an "American" culture. Saying that this country is like a tossed salad though is a lot different and a lot more realistic. This is saying that like vegetables in a salad, ethnic groups are being able to maintain their own identities while they can still participate in the culture of Americans. I feel that the tossed salad is a great way to describe America today. There are so many different groups of different people who are all held together with similarities, even though they are completely different from others that live here. The salad dressings that hold America together in the tossed salad, are democracy, freedom and liberty. As there are so many different ways of life thrown into this huge salad bowl…it just makes it taste better. Diversity is another problem of the nation. Blacks are still discriminated against, women are still discriminated, and so are many different immigrants. Through all of this discrimination, the unity of our country is harmed and because of differences, the togetherness is ruined. I feel that we can be diverse, yet unified at the same time. While it is a hard thing to go about, everyone needs to accept each other. Sure, people do wrong and there are reasons to not like some people, but the ones that come to this country to live the "American" way of life, need to be welcomed with warm smiles and help with the things they don"t know about this country yet. The only thing I feel that is holding us all together is that we live here and share the land we all walk on. Everyone also works…so we also share goods with each other, but as in cultural similarities…they still need to be worked on…as the "American Dream" does also.