Before I walked into class on Tuesday, I had been trying to think about my definition of "America." Since I have been incredibly fortunat all my life to attend great school and live in nice, safe places, I think of America in a very positive light. However, when we discussed Crevecoeur's letter, I started thinking that maybe I made the same mistake he did. His biggest mistake in writing about America was that he wrote about it solely from his point of view and the views of people lke him. He excluded some of the large populations of America at the time, like the Native Americans, women, slaves, Jews and Eastern Europeans. I realized that I was not looking at America as a whole, I was only looking at it from the perspective of people who have been as fortunate as I have been.
As we were reading the Langston Hughes poems, I realized that my view of America completely neglected the victims of racism that still exists here. Although Hughes wrote his poems more than fifty years ago, there is still a problem with racism in our country. I still think America is a wonderful country filled with freedom and opportunity, but Hughes' poems have reminded me that America still has a long way to go to become the utopia it was orginially intended to be.
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