In the journal "Whose Culture Is It, Anyway," author Henry Louis Gate Jr. outline the connection between race/ethnicity and secondary education or higher learning institutions. However, that is that topic is more geared towards the opening part of the purpose of his journal entry. Henry is more focused on opening Americans eyes to the fact that there is no one culture in America like many people desire. America is comprised of people who ancestors are from all around the world. He states, "To demand that Americans shuck their cultural heritages and homogenize themselves into a 'universal' WASP culture is to dream of an America in cultural white face, and that just won't do." Therefore I believe he was encouraging us to see multiculturalism as being American, and recognizing that there can't be one accepted culture for all Americans to practice. As Americans author Henry Gates Jr. would like us to recognized that America is comprised of multiple cultures and we should work on integrating all of them into an overall American culture. Simply saying its is a predominately white culture will never be accepted.
One of the reasons I chose this article is because I believe that the message has a great value for all Americans. I believe that part of the reason, as mentioned in the article, that a lot of the cultures are overlooked is because they are simply trying to meet certain quotas and only consider other ethnicity's and cultures when trying to meet certain diversity requirements. In my opinion the United States should all be considered a diverse continent and I believe we should all be accepting of all different cultures as being an American culture. Multiculturalism is what makes America who they are. Everybody has a certain culture from which there ancestors came from. People are Scottish, African, Mexican, Polish, Asian and much more and there is no such culture as being just American. Therefore I believe we should all work on exploring more cultures as Americans. I am partially frustrated when the only thing most people think of when giving me certain jobs or offering me certain positions is the fact that I am an African American female. As a nation we all need to be more focused on learning how to have values of tolerance and understand and accept culturally based issues that arise in our nation. As stated in the article we should all attempt to explore the complexities of our culture and discover what it may actually be composed of. We would all get a lot of of our American experience once we look past the fact that we are all different and have something different to contribute based on our gender or ethnicity.
