CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN AMERICA

Cultural Diversity in America

Cultural Diversity in America

Cultural Diversity

The United States boasts the greatest cultural diversity of any nation in the world. Among these cultures are African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian Pacifics, and European immigrants. The common ground these groups share is their belief in the American Dream. Diversity is found even within ethnic groups. Native-born blacks as well as recent immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa are classified as African-American. The term "Hispanic" refers to a wide range of groups including Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and immigrants from South and Central America. (Mexican-Americans represent the largest group among the Hispanic population.) Native Americans are identified according to their tribal affiliation, which includes Sioux, (Michael 2006)Cherokee, Chippewa, and Navaho. European immigrants hail from countries as diverse as Ireland, England, France, and Germany. (Among Europeans, the Irish have emigrated to America in the greatest numbers in recent years.) An Asian-American could have Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or Southeast Asian ancestry. The United States truly represents a salad bowl of humanity: "America does not belong to one race or one group . . . Americans have been constantly redefining their national identity from the moment of first contact on the Virginia shore" .

Discussion

In today's disordered world, the collision of cultures with global trends is in evidence everywhere. Ethnic nations, fragmented faiths, transnational business, and professional groups find both their inward loyalties and their international contacts leading them to question the political structures by which the world is still, if tenuously, organized. The results are sometimes symbolic caricatures ("In Rome, can a Moslem minaret be built taller than St. Peter's dome?") and sometimes broken mosaics like the human tragedy in what used to be Yugoslavia. More people moved in 2004 than ever before in world history, driven by fear of guns or desire for more butter and more freedom. (Naggy 2002) (This was true even before a couple of million Rwandans left their homes in terror--and some were floated out of the country as cadavers.) This more-mobile world multiplies the incentives for individuals to develop "multiple personalities," to become "collages" of identities, with plural loyalties to overlapping groups. Many millions of people believe that their best haven of certainty and security is a group based on ethnic similarity, common faith, economic interest, or political like-mindedness.

Societies based on fear of outsiders tend toward "totalitarian" governance. Fear pushes the culture beyond normal limits on individuals' behavior. "To say that you're ready to die for cultural identity means that you're also ready to kill for cultural identity. (MelfiC 2000) The ultimate consequence of what's called 'cultural identity' is Hutus and Tutsis murdering each other. The fear that drives people to cleave to their primordial loyalties makes it harder for them to learn to be tolerant of others who may be guided by different faiths and loyalties. But isolating oneself by clinging to one's tribe is far from a stable condition; these days, the tribe itself is highly ...