Race and the White American Community Term Paper

Race and the White American Community - Term Paper Example One factor that is common amongst all people in my community is that we have all immigrated to America three, four or five generations ago. We have been struggling over the generations in order to decide whether we want to adopt the identity of a pure American or at least remain, in part, associated with our background. There are few people amongst our community that is reluctant to break ties with their original homeland and thus, introduce themselves to the society as Italian Americans, French Americans or Scottish Americans. In my own family, we prefer to be called Americans, although we are originally Dutch. A vast majority of White Americans like me choose to be called Americans because this is what we are today. My ancestors were Dutch, but I am as American as anybody with the ancestors residing in this place for centuries is. In an attempt to adjust in this society, my ancestors have been working quite hard trying to dismantle their original identity, and I want to take their efforts to a further level. From the very moment my ancestors entered America, they were strongly urged by the society to forget their past, their original language and also make sure that we don’t get to learn or speak that. ...   Many people in my community are xenophobic, and they have the most unusual and strangest reason for being xenophobic than anyone can imagine. Conventionally, people develop xenophobia because they fear that the immigrants would consume the job and other opportunities that would otherwise have been available to them, but in this case, people of my community are xenophobic because they think that in-pour of the immigrants into the US from all parts of the world would suppress white Americans as a community. White Americans have conventionally maintained an edge over other races in America because of the white American majority. Whenever we talk about minority, we generally mean the people of color. However, with the rapid increase in the number of immigrants, multiculturalism is heavily cultivating in America and people of my community fear that one day, the population of the people of color would be so much that it would be sufficient to outnumber the white Americans as a majority . Thus, people of my community are xenophobic because they see themselves as a minority in the near future (Blake, 2011). This is the fundamental reason why many amongst them want to make racism a norm because they see the display of racism as a way out of the problem. I am anti-racist. I am a white American but my thoughts are way different from those of the majority of people in my community. When I tend to study the cultural experiences of people belonging to other races, I find that they are quite inconsistent with the way we suppose a democratic nation to be.