Dersimiz İngilizce

The American Culture Post-WWII

The United States Between 1960-1970

Imagine a milkshake in which there are plenty of fruits. It would be probably refreshing in the summer time and ofcourse “nutritive” in terms of vitamins which your body needs. On the other hand, you can be sure that its taste will not be delicious as you expect because different kind of fruits mixed and created a varied taste. When this method is applied to societies, it is called cultural diversity or cultural pluralism which means lots of groups of people who brought its own customs traditions from their country live together, share a common territory. Now when we examine the cultural diversity in America, which rised dramatically with the new immigrations after the World War II, it can be seen that this diversity has led many, negative or positive, alterations, causes and effects on American people and their life.

Majority of immigrants were coming from European countries at about 1700s, particularly after the American Revolution. Yet, new immigrants were from Chinese or Japanese when the year was 1800s until 1900s. In 1965, the Immigration Laws began to change, and people started to flow to the U.S. in 1990s. Most of those assimilated to the American culture, and lost their ethnic identity.

People living outside of the U.S. perceive America as the land of opportunity. There are many reasons which attract immigrants from all over the world. Most remarkable ones are can be lined up so:

1) The chance of individual freedom: after the declaration of the human rights in America, people pay more attention to have more freedom, they wanted to express their ideas and behave freely.

2) Equality of opportunity: immigrants have an American Dream, they believed that when they reached the U.S. they would become suddenly rich and powerful without caring about how hard to realize this. However the U.S. was engaged this demand of people, who has no a good life standard and labored in their country. So they prefer to try to take their chance in America instead of resisting difficulties.

As it is mentioned before, there are various problem and benefits of the cultural pluralism in the U.S. First of all, diversity means crowded cities, buildings, busses, neighborhoods and so on. There is an old Turkish idiom which explains this situation: “where is crowd, there is dirt”. As it can be guessed people have different habits of living, and surely it would be hard to deal with this issue and diseases can be emerged and spread easily. Furthermore, people would like to apply their own customs and traditions and beliefs. To illustrate, it is forbidden in the holy book for Muslim women to sit on the next of men, and it will probably creates serious problems among people who have different religions. As another example, it is normal to eat hore meat for Jews or Christians but an Iranian or Hindu would refuse and criticize this condition. On the other hand, it is a must to accept that this cultural diversity has contributed to the American economy and to its cultural and technological developments a lot. And though, American Indians and black people, have been in a long conflict for years, it seems they have got used to cultural pluralism. They now move on living like a full fruited milkshake, waiting for facing new good or bad changes in the future.

p.s. : this writing is my own work, and I would like to share it with you hoping it will help you in your studies.