Journal #1- My Definition of an American

Prior to the readings assigned in class, my personal definition of an American would the same, stereotypical as the next person. When we were asked to throw out words we thought were American I wanted to say Apple pie, white picket fences, well kept green lawns, double cab pick- up trucks, kids playing on a merry-go-round, and busy people walking to and fro in a downtown metropolitan type setting. Overall my American definition was a very positive mesh pot of these images and related others. After reading de Crevecoeur’s What is an American? , slowly the details of the images I had previously associated with being American came to light, like the kids on the merry go round were all young Caucasian kids in a “good” suburban neighborhood, the green lawns were being well kept by Hispanic immigrants sweating buckets in the summer sun for low wages, and the anonymous faces of business people walking downtown slowly turned into white males in their late twenties with a single solitary woman getting all kinds of oogling stares from her male superiors. I slowly became irritated as we continued on to read the Langston Hughes poems, bringing to light once again that not too long ago, my mother,  sister, father, and grandmother all would have been denied the opportunity to take part of these positive images. I thought of my grandmother as the mammy type housekeeper in the kitchen spending all day cooking that apple pie now cooling in the window frame that evokes such strong patriotic feelings. At the end of everything, I left with the notion in my mind that nowhere in the definition of an “American” was a negro like me included.