American Vision and Values
Compose a personal essay of at least 1000 words in which you share what you consider to be your most significant insights about rights and patriotism and living in a good society.

In deciding what to focus on, you should consider these questions:

What has surprised you the most?
How have you changed in your thinking about any topic?
What topic bothers you the most?
What insights are you still wrestling with and trying to make sense of?
What have you become more sure of and what less sure of?

Here are my topics: Issues of Race, Issues of Sex (Gender), Issues of Immigration

Here are some resources you MUST USE (YOU DO NOT HAVE TO USE ALL):

ISSUES OF RACE

America has the incomparable advantage and benefit of being a pluralistic society, composed of many different races and ethic groups. Nonetheless, it is an understatement to say that America has had a troubled history of racial relations. The reasons are lingering human cost and impact of the dispossession, and sometimes genocide, of the original Native American tribes, as well as several hundred years of slavery and segregation. The Mississippi novelist William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, referred to slavery as America’s “original sin,” and if one broadens that to include the neglect, flouting, or outright trampling of the civil and human rights of Native Americans, the metaphor may be seen as both apt and powerful.

Many of the Founding Fathers, even those who owned slaves, such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, considered slavery as a moral abomination and as a state of affairs contrary to the will of God. Some were convinced that God would see to it that slavery would be abolished. The Founding Fathers chose not to abolish slavery when they created the Constitution. In fact, they counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining the number of representatives allowed to each state. As we know, slavery was ended by the Civil War, the bloodiest and most costly in human terms of all of the wars America has fought. Racial segregation lasted another hundred years, causing terrible damage to the fabric of American society and to the souls and sensibilities of all Americans, no matter their color. Segregation was finally ended by the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision of the United States Supreme Court and by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Our readings focus on the history of the treatment of Native Americans and African Americans, as well as on the profound implications of that history for our society today. (Future readings will examine the human and civil rights issues of Mexican Americans and Asian Americans.) A wide array of voices is presented, in a variety of forms of discourse: satirical essay, autobiography, speeches, the open letter, poetry, and personal and scholarly essays. You should find much here that provokes thought and that inspires the will to ensure that all Americans enjoy full civil and human rights and that no one is ever again denied “first-class” citizenship.
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ISSUES OF SEX

It has been a continual challenge to uphold American democratic ideals and to apply them fairly and consistently, both in the nation’s public policies and in the daily lives of citizens. The history of gender relations in the United States, like the history of race relations, has been marked by deep divisions, even hostilities, and a great of activism for the recognition of women’s civil and human rights was required.

The first great statement of women’s human rights was the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). This book, though condemned by many defenders of the entrenched patriarchy, was enormously influential. Later generations of American activists for women’s rights, such as Margaret Fuller, the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1843), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, author of the “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) employed some of her arguments and added to them in significant ways.

Wollstonecraft made in her book an inarguable moral argument for women’s equal access to education: Women could not be held accountable for their moral decisions and actions unless they received the kind of education that would train their reason and enable them to make thoughtful moral decisions. Wollstonecraft also criticizes the male-dominant power structure that afforded men rights and privileges that women did not enjoy and that kept women in positions of subservience. She takes to task prominent philosophers and men of letters who had expressed male-chauvinist attitudes in their work. Wollstonecraft also critiques women for their acceptance of inequality in gender roles and finds them complicit in their own subjugation. She argues that women had accepted the role of “sensual plaything” created for them by men, which effectively reduced them to sexual objects. Wollstonecraft saw marriage as a form of oppression for women of her time and believed that the remedy for this would be the embracing of genuine friendship and respect between marital partners.

We see the practical application of some of Wollstonecraft’s ideas in Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” the public statement that emerged from the first ever women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, July 19-20, 1848. Echoing the Declaration of Independence and altering its language in a thematically significant way, Stanton memorably asserts, “all men and women are created equal.”

After many decades of activism, organizing, public demonstrations and protest, women in America finally gained the right to vote when the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. The 1960s and 1970s saw another strong wave of public activism for women’s rights—in education, in the workplace, and in all facets of American life. Today almost 60% of all college students nation-wide are women. This is a remarkable change from the time of Stanton’s “Declaration,” when women were still excluded from institutions of higher learning.

The readings present a wide variety of women’s historical and contemporary voices, attempting to give clarity and definition to the topic of women’s rights. You should find much that is admirable here, much that is inspiring. You should also find much to provoke thought about how to apply the lessons of this history to further rights issues as they emerge in American society.
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ISSUES OF IMMIGRATION

From its inception this nation has been a country of immigrants. According to a recent National Geographic article DNA records indicate that the ancestry of Native Americans can be traced to six individual women and that this race originated in what we now know as Mongolia.

As you have already learned what began as an economic adventure soon became colonization and an escape from religious tyranny. Although everyone on this continent has the immigration experience in their family’s roots our nation remains conflicted over acceptance of immigrants. Our history is dotted with powerful anti-immigration groups which advocate immigration restriction as a method to manage the look and make-up of our society.

Perhaps the poem by Emma Lazarus, ‘New Colossus’ which is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which welcomes immigrants to the port of New York City and Ellis Island, sums up our idealized vision of the promise that the United States offers immigrants:

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The opening reading this week is by Phillip Martin and Elizabeth Midgley. The authors present an academic study of the four waves of immigration that changed and continue to shape America: colonization, coercion, immigration; both early and modern. Pay attention to how immigration policies were and continue to be used to filter those who come to our shores. Even a casual observer of the news and politics will note that many of the historical debates continue to this day in the form of qualitative and quantitative immigration and proposed reforms.

A part of fulfilling the American Dream is mainstreaming. Americans are expected to learn the language and assimilate into the middle class while shucking many of the ‘old country’ traditions and replacing them with ‘American Values and Culture.’ You may have read Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, which tells the story of a recent immigrant to Chicago. In your readings author Jacob Riis gives a first-hand account of the hardships that immigrants faced.

When you consider the universal nature of this shared experience, you are better able to understand not only the challenges facing your forefathers, but those facing immigrants today.

Until recently the celebration of America’s history has been focused on White males. Today there is a concerted effort to write other ethnicities and women into this national narrative. Some are uncomfortable with this move towards cultural pluralism. In an interview with noted multicultural author Ronald Takaki, author Joan Montgomery Halford writes how this effort for inclusion faces challenges in today’s society, including educational hurdles, evolving economic classes, bi-lingual concerns, and Affirmative Action.

You will watch videos on illegal immigration and visit the website of the American Natural History Museum for an interactive exploration of the Latino and Japanese experience.

It is important to understand the benefits as well as the concerns with immigration. By having an understanding of the promise of freedom that America offered, the challenges that immigrants faced getting here, as well as with becoming accepted here, and the highly charged issues of legal versus illegal immigration.
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