American culture has become very blurred. Your perception of American culture might depend on the way you think. You may think of a white, mean, gun-owning man if you hold a bias against recent American politics and might want to disassociate yourself from that conception. Or, you might be proud of that stereotype. Upon giving it deeper thought, however, American culture might not be so straight forward. There are a multitude of ways we celebrate diversity without even knowing it. Popular fast-food chains like Taco bell, Del-Taco, Chipotle, and so on are all examples of food we might associate with everyday America, yet they’re not so American. Even the most American foods out there like hamburgers or donuts might not be so American as you might think. With that being said, why is their such a huge wave of white prejudice going on? Why do we separate ourselves from other cultures when they have had an equal impact on our culture then ourselves? A factor that might play a role in such oneness is motivation to have a unique sense of identity. Rather than being lost in a slew of other races and ethnicity, someone may want to cling on just one sense of self and to maintain a feeling of uniqueness or be different. I encounter a lot of people who go on about how they’re “10% Italian and 20% German” blah blah blah. I liked holding on to my one ethnicity because to me having that one identity meant more to me. I feel like being too racially mixed would make it harder for a person to just practice a certain culture which would make them lose their self-identity. I think this is where this sense of oneness comes from. When it comes to choosing variety and diversity about food or other things, that’s to me just being human and not only strict to one society. Just like you wouldn’t want to listen to the same song repeatedly, you wouldn’t want to live the same life over and over. We have the tendency to move on to different things, try new TV shows, read different books, and that mirrors our desire to make different choices. Even then, we would not consider ourselves to be Mexican or Italian just because we eat their foods or experience other aspects of their culture. We still hold on to that idea of oneness while still enjoying the variety of our lifestyles. Therefore, a person, depending on their background, might choose to identify with culture as being white, heterosexual, etc., but still wanting a diverse life.
Nealon and Giroux build an interesting point when talking about multiculturalism. When we think of multiculturalism, we usually lean towards inclusion, as to not leave anybody out. They think of multiculturalism as exclusion. For there to exist many cultures, there must be some sort of context built around it. The act of identifying as Mexican-American, per say, is also the act of excluding everyone who is not of Mexican descent. Exclusion is necessary because it gives us context. If we simply say that a culture includes everyone, that is more towards assimilation, and will people to lose their sense of ethnicity or culture. Therefore, exclusion is important since it gives us something to identify with. Every culture has some sort of exclusion in it. Some one says their country is majority this culture. They are already supposing that some sort of minority exists for there to be a majority of something.
Hussein Chammout 