James Baldwin: The Evolution Of Asian American Culture

The Evolution of Asian American Culture

The United States is not a “melting pot” of cultures but is more complex like a “salad bowl” where foreign and domestic influences combine to create a society where individual differences in gender, race religion, or ethnic background are valued. Immigrants strived to become the ideal “American” citizen, a more historically accurate metaphor is that the U.S. has had a cultural “cookie cutter” with a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, male mold; but the view of culture has changed. Today, with the increase of numerous subcultures, diversity is greater valued and accepted. The growing acknowledgment of Asian American subculture present is in social media as a result of the continuously growing Asian American population. Ever since Asians first arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, the expansion and greater exposure

Historically, Americans rejected Asian people and culture, obstructing their assimilation into mainstream American society. Integration was never a viable choice for Chinese Americans, who were excluded and denied citizenship because they were deemed non-assimilable by the white mainstream. The treatment of larger ethnic groups towards a foreign minority has a major impact on the extent of the minority’s assimilation or isolation. In Letter to my Nephew, James Baldwin, an African American writer and social critic, shows the treatment of blacks during the mid to late twentieth century and their low expectations in society. Caucasian Americans have an inability to accept minority groups. He explains to his nephew of the discrimination he experiences: