Preface
My principal intent in writing this book has been to create a companion text for my previously published OER text, Speaking of Culture. But Who Are We is different in both its aims and its rhetorical structure. In Speaking of Culture, my aim was to break the concept of culture down through an analytical treatment of its many associated concepts. Who Are We follows a more narrative approach as I seek to tell the stories of various cultural communities that comprise the tapestry that is the United States.
Framed as a question—Who Are We?—the book focuses on telling the stories of a handful of ethnic/national/racial groups that contributed significantly to the formation of the United States. In particular, the book revolves around the social, economic, legal, and historical contradictions that have confronted and continue to confront the American attempt to construct a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy, including a consideration of the forces arrayed against the American experiment. While the book does not tackle head-on the immediate cultural and political rifts currently on display in the United States today, it does take a hard look at many historical precursors which suggest that our current woes may not be as unprecedented as many Americans may be inclined to believe.
On a personal note, I must confess that in writing this book there were times I feared I had bitten off more than I could chew. For one thing, while I have been steeped in the liberal arts since my undergraduate days 50 years ago, I am not a professional historian or cultural studies scholar. I am, instead, an English language teacher with a wide-ranging curiosity and a voracious appetite for reading. To be sure, I knew quite a bit about some of the groups selected for inclusion in this book although I certainly learned a lot more as I took a deep dive into their stories. On the other hand, I sometimes felt overwhelmed with the volume of reading necessary to appreciate more fully the stories of those groups about which I initially knew very little.
I offer the above confession as an acknowledgment of one of this book’s limitations. Taking into account the book’s subtitle—Exploring American Identities—several other limitations should also be mentioned. First, as suggested above, the current book deals only with a handful of identities within the American tapestry, defined primarily in terms of ethnic groups generally selected for their prominence in U.S. history or their numerical prevalence relative to other groups. Ideally, I would have liked to write a book that was much more inclusive of all the ethnic groups that comprise the American tapestry, but unfortunately, such a monumental undertaking would have far exceeded the scope of this OER project.
On a related point, the narratives I attempt to convey here are of necessity incomplete. At times, I have regretted the fact that I could not more fully articulate the contributions or perspectives of, for example, women, children, multi-ethnic, multiracial, gay, lesbian, or gender nonconforming members of a particular ethnic or racial community. Sometimes this was because the source materials that I relied on were relatively silent about such identities, many of which have not been extensively represented in either academic or popular literature until fairly recently. At other times, I simply found it difficult to integrate the perspectives of a particular intersectional group, even when I did encounter it in one of my sources, without either opening up whole new subsections of text that I had no time to pursue or falling into tokenism.
Finally, I hope that the limitations discussed above will open up opportunities for students to pursue avenues of independent research that can fill many of the gaps that I have been forced to leave in this text.
