What It Means to Be American

During high school, I worked at a Boys and Girls Club in central Massachusetts. Many of the kids that came to the club after school were from families that had just immigrated from Brazil or Portugal or who were of this ethnicity. When talking to the kids, it was always very interesting to see how they treated the issue of nationality: not one child claimed “to be American” or “to be from America,” despite the fact that all of these children now lived in America and that the majority were born here. Without exception, each one insisted on being “Brazilian” or “Portuguese.”

Though America is coined “the melting pot,” it seems that ethnic identities never really melt away. The concept of “ethnicity” is ingrained in our minds from a very young age. In grade school it is typical to explore the various ways that different ethnicities celebrate holidays and to share our own “family traditions” with our peers. And as we learn to associate surnames with certain nationalities, it is impossible to ignore the variety of ethnicities that surround us (with a last name like ‘Jakubowicz’ it was impossible to deny my Polish background, and it was just as difficult for my best friend to hide her Irish background with a name like Boyle). However, I believe that to some extent we are conditioned to believe that we are more our ethnicities than we are American.

For most Americans, it becomes a kind of fascination or fetish to hold so strongly onto our ancestors’ ethnic origins. While studying in England this past semester, we American students were teased for this nation-wide habit: to assert that we were “Italian” or “Irish” or “German” was obviously false because we were not born in Italy, Ireland, or Germany- we were born in America. What the English students inadvertently struck at, through good-humored yet earnest gibes, was that Americans should not give more weight to the combination of their ancestors’ ethnicities than they do to their own. In other words, as Americans born in the melting pot, we must consider ourselves equally a mixture of ethnicity and American.

American heritage is rooted in many ethnicities, and it is my opinion that no person should be required to abandon their cultural identities in order to melt into a “homogeneous” American identity, mainly because I do not believe that a “homogeneous” America exists. To be American presupposes ethnic diversity. Therefore, we should continue to celebrate our many ethnicities. But, at the same time, we must also learn to identify ourselves as simply “American.”