Who we really are Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Who we really atomic number 18 - Essay ExampleIn the case of a country such(prenominal) as the United States, the exercise of locating and ascribing identities to individuals can be a complex member. A country renowned for being the melting pot of cultures, languages and races, people here can nonplus upon a range of national, cultural and linguistic heritages. The literary formulates chosen for this essay deal with such complexities. By perusing these literary sources and by performing further analysis upon them, the rest of this essay result attempt to answer the topic Who we really are?. The question mark in the title is interpreted as a rhetorical device, meaning that it implies a lack of clear-cut answer to the purported question. In other words, the thesis is that socio-cultural markers used to describe an individuals background cannot be given too much importance and should not be taken as definitive of the person there are dangers and risks in doing so, and there are ma ny advantages in treating identity as a fluid concept. (Evidence/Support 1) In the write-up The People In Me by Robin D. G. Kelley, the author talks about his own multicultural background and in the process makes a valid observation about Americans in general Although folk had trouble naming us, we were never blanks or aliens in a black world. We were and are polycultural, and Im talking about all peoples in the westerly world. It is not skin, hair, walk, or talk that renders black people so diverse. Rather, it is the fact that most of them are products of assorted cultures - living cultures, not dead ones. These cultures live in and through us every day, with almost no self-consciousness about hierarchy or meaning. Polycultural works better than multicultural, which implies that cultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist status by side in a kind of zoological approach to culture. Such a slew obscures power relations, but often reifies race and gender differences (Kelley, 2011, p.483) (Evidence/Support 2) The above passage clearly illustrates how identities work in real-life as opposed to how governmental institutions perceive of them in their census statistics. Indeed, polycultural heritage peckms the more plausible trait of individual identity, as opposed to rigid categorizations. Similarly, in the poem Executive Order 9066 by Dwight Okita, what we see is an instance of the malleability of ones identity - in this case particularly that of national identity. Fourteen year gray-haired Ozawa, who is of Japanese descent, is nevertheless fully acculturated as an American girl. And this reflects in her food habits and other interests. (Okita, 2011, p.187) The poem does actuate us of the dangers associated with stereotyping through the example of Denise OConnors hostile reaction to her friend Ozawas heritage. For example, at the tender age of 14, immature Ozawa must have found it extremely distressing to have been rebuked, snubbed and treated as a a bominable by her closest friend Denise. Even if some members of the Japanese American community had been spying for the make of a war enemy, it is totally not acceptable to include children in the suspects list, let alone the stallion community. The rounding up of Japanese Americans during the Second World War is a real event, albeit a sinister one in American history. Hence the poem by Dwight Okita has socio-historical significance. And the lesson we can take away is this the governments distrust of a section of the population is a gross violation of basic rights of its citizens. And Denises adverse reaction toward Ozawa is meet one example of the unfairness of it. In this case of unwarranted distrust, the victimizers were the ones who acted and felt indignant toward the victims. With the unraveling of more information, it