Comments on: Building American Identity

By: Nora

Nora — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:33:00 +0000

I like that you bring in a bit of the codified language used to discuss problems of race and class, like ‘personal responsibility.’ I’m an enormous proponent of personal responsibility in life, but in discussions of poverty and race, I find it is often used as a code-term for ‘their poverty is their own damn faults, and thus I should have no role in correcting it.’

I also enjoy discussions of educational inequities that turn to justifications of property values. The Oprah set drops their ‘It takes a village’ mindset fairly quickly when the folks on the other side of the village want equal resources for their schools….

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:09:00 +0000

You say that you talk about racial identity as part of your American identity, which I am all for — I think you can’t begin to talk about one without the other, because different Americans have completely different experiences based on their racial identity. We often live in very different Americas.

But in this article, you don’t actually say what your race is, what your background, and what that means. Who are you talking to and how are they perceiving you when they say you “divide” Americans from one another?

I don’t think we can begin to talk about race and identity in a larger sense, until we start first claiming it on an individual level.