Race And Culture Essay

Tom Brady once said, “Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.” This quotation means that living in America doesn’t mean living the same way people live, we need to express our cultures and be diverse. This quotation relates to the theme race and culture because living in America does not express one’s culture of being diverse. Culture is complex, it is learned through daily interactions, relationships with others, and its conflicting and contradictory. Our knowledge of culture, race, and identity is subconsciously internalized on a daily basis through constant social interactions.

Many people are not aware how much racism still exists in our daily lives in which we surround ourselves. Many people believe that it depends on if a person was brought into the world as a racists or not but this isn’t the case at all. A person cannot be born as a racist but can only learn to become one as he or she grow from child to adulthood. Throughout my life I have always been taught to respect one’s culture although it is different from myself. Growing up, I am a victim receiving racist thoughts because of my culture and religion. Similar to the essay, “Notes of a Native Son” written by James Baldwin. James Baldwin writes about his childhood while he was in school growing up in a time of segregation. He talks about what it was like for him to grow being African American, and the hardships which came with his ethnicity. He states at the end of his essay on page 70, “I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.” This quotation means that Baldwin wished his father was alive so he could’ve helped him in a situation of hard times. It states, “The situation in Harlem had grown bad enough for clergymen, policemen, educators, politicians, and social workers to assert in one breath that there was no crime wave and to offer, in the very next breath, suggestions as to how to combat it.” (“Notes of a Native Son” p.60) This quotation means that the

For more than two centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin worried that too many German immigrants would swamp America’s predominantly British culture. Immigration is not undermining the American experiment; it is an integral part of it. America is a diverse nation full of immigrants. America can affect many foreigners through there customs and the way they used to live. For example, the essay “Two Ways to Belong in America” written by Bharati Mukherjee, the character Bharati is an American citizen who married outside of her culture, leaving her customs and traditions for an American life. Unlike her sister Mira, she is a resident of the United States, and married an Indian student keeping her traditions and customs. After 36 years as a legal immigrant to the United States, Mira would not give up her rights as an Indian citizen because she hopes to go back to her county India when she retires. This shows how both sisters have different perspectives in life with keeping customs and becoming a civilized American. It states, “In 33 years of marriage, we have lived in every part of North America. By choosing a husband who was not my father’s selection, I was opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans, and T shirts, and renouncing 3,000 years of caste observant, pure culture marriage in the Mukherjee family.” (Two Ways to Belong in America, p.291) This quotation means that Bharati is living an