Cultural Assimilation Essay

When asked on what makes someone truly American, the answer you usually get is freedom, patriotism, and loving the “American way”. Culture, defined by the mannerism of what a person does, cannot be condensed into a simple phrase or quality. In the past, other cultures such as the African and Native Americans were viewed as a nuisance to achieving Uniformity as an American Country, and were sought out and assimilated to try to fit in with the norm of society. This was done to ensure that cultural diversity would not become intergraded, so that the Anglo Saxon traditions would be the dominate example. To this day, cultural bias is still present, but should cultural assimilation be acceptable in this day and age. Heritage and tradition from other …show more content…
With this said, an assortment of varying lifestyles, ranging from Hispanic to native Americans way of life is not meant to breed discords among American society, but rather build upon it and fortify the morals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Inner conflicts toward other cultures have hostile consequences, like the discrimination of race or ethnicity during the times of turbulence, where Native Americans would “find intolerable” the way the culture was labeled inferior to the Anglo-Saxon American and the author states on how this is reminiscent of “the process recalls the bad old days in the South… and doled out rights based on quantities of blood.”(Kamins 114) Similar to how African-Americans were treated during the times of slavery, this caused uproar with how Natives wanted not to cause trouble, but rather live as equals and show the wonders of the Native culture, and its peaceful nature. The question remains, had Americans seen it that way, would the bloodshed of conflict have been avoided? While this can be rather ambiguous, one aspect is true; the adaption of other culture to the American way would have a promoting factor to the American name as a