The Impact Culture Has on Personal Identity in The United Stated of America - Essay Example

Due to the ethnical diversity in United States, the social cohesion is chiefly based on common social beliefs and values. Culture is a critical factor in shaping one’s identity. In this new era, there is interaction between the social media and the cultural identity. The cultural identity not only means an individual’s association in a particular group but also a social meshing of individuals copying and adopting the social customs presented by the media. An individual can be identified by the ethnic background.

This refers to people who share a common heritage, culture or language. Owing to the ongoing racial favoritism and history in the United States of America, ethnicity carries a different meaning from the other countries. Various groups from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the pacific Islands have been looked down at as minor racial groups. The history of United States as a conqueror, slave society and settler and the informal and formal lettering of racism into the law and social stratification strategy have added unto race a key identification function of the races in United States.

This has been portrayed by both Wright and Rodriguez. According to the Jim Crow laws as indicated in Wright’s “The ethics of Jim Crow”, they seemed to separate the blacks and the whites since they did not portray equity. This inequality is indicated by Wright when he says that the black woman was beaten up for not having paid her bills and then dragged to the police station on the false accusation that she was drunk (Wright, 1937, pp.159). In 1980’s, the word “African American” was found to the most suitable for referring to anyone who had a colored skin regardless of the location of origin.

This was intended to wipe away the racial differences that existed by then and were related to the historic view of “Black race”. The word Caucasian was also developed to refer to the people who came from the Middle East, Europe and the northern part of Africa. Nationality can also be used in personal identity. It refers to belongingness of a person to a certain state or nation that is always determined by their ethnicity, citizenship or their residence. An individual’s citizenship can be identified by naturalization or by birth.

In the United States, people have been identified by the different nationalities they hold. The law states that an individual is free to change his nationality at will. This is what has greatly contributed to the many nationalities in the United States of America. In Richard Rodriguez ‘Aria: A memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, he tries to find his identity as a Mexican-American since he only knew how to speak Spanish. He only learns to write English when he joins school. The first sentence of the essay, his flash back “I remember, to start with, that day in Sacramento, in a California now nearly thirty years past, when I first entered a class room able to understand about fifty stray English words” (Rodriguez, pp. 447) The other children in his class identified him as an Hispanic.

Race refers to an assortment system that is employed in sorting individuals into large and different groups by geographic ancestry, physical traits, ethnicity and inheritable phenotypic traits. Due to these