Other- Hailey Hughes

While reading Chapter 5, I made a connection with my Sociology class that I currently teach. Sociology is a social science that studies groups of people, and culture is an important topic that is covered in my class. I asked the question if it is possible to be "100% American"? Several students nodded and agreed that this concept was possible. However, their opinions changed after reading an article from their Sociology textbook. The article was titled "The 100-Percent American?" It began with asking have you ever thought about how much of American culture was borrowed from other cultures, both past and present? Anthropologist Ralph Linton explored this question in a humorous way in the 1930s. For example, he explained how the American citizen awakes in a bed built on a pattern which originated in the Near East but which was modified in northern Europe before it was transmitted to America. Then, the American citizen throws back covers made from cotton, domesticated in India, or linen, domesticated in the Near East, or wool from sheep, also domesticated in the Near East, or silk, the use of which was discovered in China. The story moves on to a restaurant, which he eats his orange from the eastern Mediterranean, a cantaloupe from Persia, and a piece of African watermelon. At the end of the essay, Linton writes about how the "100% American" reads the news of the day, imprinted in characters invented by the ancient Semites upon a material invented in China by a process invented in Germany. As he absorbs the accounts of foreign troubles he will, if he is a good conservative citizen, thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-Euroean language that is 100 percent American.
I think that we are guilty as Americans to be ethnocentric about our culture. However, if you looked at the tag of your shirt at this very moment, I guarantee that it was made from a different country. We need to take into consideration that even though we may have different languages, religion, and lifetyles around the world, we are are still connected. As Strike and Soltis mentioned in Chapter 6, we need to respect the right to choose, and not the adequacy of the choice.