Friday, February 11, 2011
Americans
We talked a lot about what being white meant, and what being a "white ethnic" meant, on Tuesday. In today's lecture, Professor Fink talked about the country music movement and its strong ties to white Southern culture. This got me thinking–it's interesting that cultural differences among what people consider established "white Americans" exist as well. The disparities among WASPs, even, are fairly evident if you compare the cultures of those from Alabama with those from New York City. More disparities emerge, of course, with the incorporation of different ethnicities into the patchwork of American culture and values. It just made me think how slippery the term "American" was, and how there really was no set of values that you can ever use to determine whether someone was truly an American or not. What the heck is, exactly, an American?
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There was a long thread about this earlier in the blog, but to answer your question specifically, i think no one really knows. You are an American if you call yourself an American. If you identify with this country in some way. I'm taking the fiat lux:immigration debate through film, and we were discussing just this last class. There have now been so many more "-"Americans (ie, chinese-american, mexican-american, etc), that actually being "American" is so different than any other country really, because were such a heterogeneous population. No one thing can describe us all, except for the fact that we identify as American.
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