What Is American Identity?

What is an American identity? Where do you get one? Does it form when you learn right from wrong, or is your status formed when you are born? Identity- everyone has one, yet no one has the same. The description of American identity has no distinct definition. The question can be interpreted in a thousands ways, nevertheless, one similarity remains the same. Our variety of culture, religion, and beliefs is what makes us American.
Diversity has, and will eternally be a major role in our society. As Americans, we thrive on conflict. It gives us a sense of power in a world where everyone, including your own relatives, are disparate. In the story “With A Little Help From My Friends,” the young girl talks of how her relatives who immigrated to America

after the Iranian Revolution, did not encounter the same America she did (Dumas pg. 92). The “new America” was one built with boundaries in which you did not invite people into your home. Kindness was no longer expected due to distrust in others. This exposition is what brings us together as well as it tears us apart. In “The Writing On The Wall,” the phrase, “Imagine you saw not just one poem written on or etched into the walls, but hundreds,” (Dungy pg. 80). The inscriptions carved into the walls were placed for communication. If you were to look at a paragraph of words, scribbled into a wall, written in chinese, you will simply see pictures. Now, if a person speaking the language looks into those marks, they will see history. In their minds they will picture dialogue between immigrants. The words are left for people like you and me to wonder and accept their idea of coming into America because they are one of us.
Philip Gleason, an American Historian, quoted, ”To be or to become an American, a person did not have to be any particular national, learning languages, religious, or ethnic background. All he had to do was to commit himself to the political ideology centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism. Thus the universalist ideological character of American nationality meant that it was open to anyone who willed to become an American.” The original question, scrambled in an assortment of distinct puzzles, was pieced together, forming a united nation in which you are whoever you desire. America, the home of the brave, and the land of the free, is home to all who choose it, putting aside race, culture, ethnicity… We are one.