Don’t get me wrong: I love my country. I love our freedom, the brave men and women who fight for us to keep our freedoms, what we stand for, our stubborn independence. “Estados Unidos” is even my favorite thing to say in Spanish. I LOVE AMERICA.

But my love for America does not blind me from the black stains in our over romanticized “great” reputation. The United States has always been seen as a safe haven for outsiders to find their place and make a better life. The Andrew Carnegie story -- a poor immigrant who managed to work his way up the American system to become one of the richest men in our country’s history -- has become a perceivable dream to many who relish in the American ideals of hard work and independence. But that dream, and any other American misconception, remains only a dream for many. These American fantasies create a hazy, sugar-coated fog over our nation. When the citizens of our country grow tall enough to peak above the haze, they are astounded to see their country littered with negativity, racism, sexism, and persecution, reeking of the rotten stench of hate. Likewise, newcomers are also caught off guard when they find what’s often swept under the rug in our shiny, showcased American standard.

If we start from the beginning of our little American story, there will not be any Americans like we know today. In fact, the first people that our little first graders would recognize as “Americans” did not want to be “Americans” at all; they wanted to be Englishmen. That English pride remained well after most of the colonists weren’t even born in the mother country. It wasn’t until after the French and Indian War that the relationship between the colonists and the crown began to sour. However, through all of the taxes and acts, many colonists still remained loyal to the British crown, and shouts for liberty did not ring through the mountains like the story books suggest. In fact, during the war, only about 40% of the colonists were “Patriots” -- happily helping the fight for independence -- while 20-30% were loyal to England, and the rest tried to remain out of the conflict.

As you can see, our roots are not the “great” patriotic masterpiece we proclaim it to be. But if anyone was truly lacking the American spirit during this time, it was the actual Americans -- native tribes such as the Sioux, Algonquian, and the Iroquois Confederation. With the discovery of the “New World” by Europeans, these people’s ways of life were about to change forever. Some interactions with foreigners, such as those with the French and Dutch, were mostly diplomatic and friendly. As for the Native American relations with our founding fathers, most were violent and cruel. The English colonists’ self-righteous views about the “savage” natives and their refusal to understand or at least be tolerant of a different culture led to many unnecessary deaths and fierce tensions. These violent confrontations between the natives and the United States continued until 1890 when a tribe of Sioux was massacred by American soldiers at Wounded Knee.

While the US stopped physically shooting at the tribes, bullets continued to rain on their culture. Earlier efforts to “white wash” the Native Americans concluded with the Dawes Severity Act which created a new reservation system designed to split up tribes. In 1924, to try to amend this broken past, US citizenship was given to all Native Americans, and the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 was created to encourage rejuvenation of tribes and their unique cultures. So while some amends have been made, socially, there still is cultural appropriation and disrespect of the Native American culture. Halloween costumes like “sexy Indian” and the wearing of traditional headdresses as a fashion statement to musical festivals are just a few examples of the insensitivity of Americans to the culture.

Of course the irony of “land of the free” is the loudest for African Americans. Slavery was introduced to the American colonies in the early 1600’s and remained in practice until the passage of the 13^th Amendment after the Civil War. The Republicans then crusaded for the rights of African Americans for a while, but their legal gains such as the 14^th and 15^th amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 could not overcome the social strength of racism. The Klu Klux Klan was founded in 1867 and terrorized the black community as they attempted exercising their new rights as freedmen. African American power in the country took and even further step back with the important Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson that ruled that “separate but equal” was fair and accommodated with the “equal protection of the laws” required in the 14^th Amendment.

From there, segregation became an accepted practice with the Jim Crow laws along with the disfranchisement of voting rights for African Americans. Things such as literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes kept blacks out of the voting booths. Despite the oppression, blacks fought resiliently. The 1950’s, a time remembered by whites for its affluency and "happy days," were not a time of defeated acceptance by African Americans. Brown v. Board of Education, sit ins, and the Montgomery bus boycott were just a few of the ways blacks were fighting every day to make “all men are created equal” true in the USA. Even with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, African Americans had to continue to struggle to be regarded as true Americans. Racism was and certainly still is prevalent today and the fact that it must be emphasized that black lives matters show just how far we have to go until African Americans can relish in what they can define as a “great” America.

For those entering the country, the American reality has always been very different from the classically distorted American dream. The first immigrants that poured into the country up into the 1880’s shared many qualities with the American people: Anglo Saxon, Protestant, literate, mostly English speaking, and coming from countries shared with American ancestors. These traits made them more acceptable to the American people. But in the 1890’s people of a different kind were coming to America. These new immigrants mainly arrived from southern and eastern Europe and brought with them their own un-American like cultures. Uneducated and poor, many lived in ghettos or areas like “Little Italy” and “China Town”. These places allowed ethnic groups to make home in a country where they were looked down upon and persecuted by Americans who accepted Social Darwinism and used that belief to justify the hateful treatment of immigrants.

With nativist demands, even being able to become a foreigner in America became difficult. Restrictions on who was allowed in began in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned any hopeful Chinese dreamers from crossing the American borders. Other efforts were made to keep out any “undesirable” people, such as the mentally ill, out of the country. In 1892, a new procedure required newcomers to pay a tax and pass medical exams before going any further than Ellis Island. A literacy exam was then added to the process in 1917. Then came the quota laws of the 1920’s which had the purpose of limiting the amount of unwanted people, by nativist definition, from entering the country. These quota laws were removed by 1965, but the continued discrimination and racism immigrants experience continues into today. By just the color of someone’s skin or the trace of an accent, some Caucasian citizens discriminate against those of different ethnicities, even going as far as to look down upon other whites who do not pay attention to such minuscule differences. For a country labeled as "the melting pot," nothing in the pot has really been melted together until recently. Interracial marriage is still quite new and is greeted with plenty of hate and intolerance.

It is not America itself that is great nor is there ever a point in our history where American was great for everyone. There is simply not enough time to spell out the hate and inequality experienced by women, the disabled, homosexuals, and basically anyone different from the educated, white, males who originally constructed this country. But the American ideals of freedom, equality, justice, and bravery are what is great about our nation. We have not yet grasped those ideals from the mist of our day dreams and brought them down to our hard, concrete streets of reality, but we are getting closer. Every day, more and more people join the fight to carve the American future into one that can be called finally and truthfully be called great.

All of the historical information and facts came from United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination by John J. Newman and John M. Schmalbach. As you can see, this book has experienced a lot of love and helped me get a 5 on the APUSH exam!