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Originally Posted by August
Teddy Roosevelt once said that hyphenated Americanism could destroy this country. People need to stop thinking of themselves and their fellow citizens as "Black-Americans" or "Irish-Americans" or "Mexican-Americans" etc and start seeing themselves as just plain old "Amercians".
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Best advice I've heard in a while.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be towards individual identification and not assimilation. (sp? damn double consenants) Funny thing is, a lot of -Americans have never even been to the regions they hyphenate their nationality with.
Furthermore, what about a person who was born in England but has Indian heritage? Or a person who was born in S.Africa but is the descendant of Dutch colonists and is white? I find it hard to believe that either of them would have an easy time of claiming themselves to be European or African -American respectively.
Most of this PC garbage serves only to widen the gaps between cultures and races, rather than narrow it. I call it the "Catholic Schoolgirl phenomenon" (sry Catholics, no offense. Please let me know if I am out of place.) The more you make natural tendencies of people taboo or try to control their lifestyles the more impassioned and contrary they become, despite what you may see them doing under scrutiny of others.
Now I've gone and ranted on too long again. Well, thanks for reading this and other overly verbose posts
