America's Hypocritical Identity

I better understood the implications of being American after analyzing Ta Nehisi Coates’s argument that the black male body fuels the “Dream” as it cannot exist without the marginalization of others. While black bodies built today’s America, the “Dream” of a nuclear family with a white picket fence disenfranchises those who instilled its idealization. I expanded my perception of America’s hypocritical identity by relating “Between the World and Me” to Eduardo Galeano’s poem “1492.” Galeano’s piece discusses forced acceptance of indigenous identity. They were not “desnudos,” “indios,” and did owe “obediencia a un rey y a una reina de otro mundo” for those terms did not exist. Visceral detachment from one’s sense of identity stems from forced faith rather than independent self-reflection. By reading “Decolonizing the Mind” by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan and “Aria” by Richard Rodriguez, I distinguish culture from identity. Culture is independent; it is everything: food, art, love, mannerisms, and behaviors of a group. Culture can infiltrate other regional traditions to create new fusions. While culture and …show more content…
My thesis stated that if the United States and other countries accept English as the lingua franca and adopt an isolationist, monolinguistic outlook, they overlook and exclude the citizens that make up the country. This essay concluded the unit on language and identity, and when you read it as the sample to the class, my writing affirmed my growth as a thinker. The second essay questioned whether public schools should be bound to a national school curriculum. My argument favored an open curriculum, where class book list is a living document, tailored to reflect contemporary culture. For this essay, I referred to the equal funding of Finnish public schools and the Zapatista education systems in