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The American Melting Pot

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The mantra of the United States advertises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as inalienable rights in the quest for the dream of living free to follow your aspirations. Our founding fathers could not have foreseen the greed of today’s capitalism, the challenges of individual identities not native of her people, nor the discord that would come from the ability to follow those individual dreams while following the entrenched Americanized social systems. The truth may be found in a mantra, which was never meant for all Americans. “Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, a great ideal, but one which seems to apply only those born into privileged white families, and who are considered the elite within the social stratification. …show more content…

485). Immigrants who are legitimized as “white” within the racial definition can be seen to have greater access and considered a lesser threat than those who are considered non-white immigrants (p. 507). The ideology can be construed, the more a group’s ethnic appearance conforms to the perceived whiteness of society in the United States; the less likely they are to suffer from obvious institutionalized bias. The work of Hagan, Shedd and Payne: Race, Ethnicity, and Youth Perceptions of Criminal Injustice (2005), makes an argument of the correlation between the amount of encounters with law enforcement officials and adolescent minority groups, and the psychological effects of those encounters. Events, based on the frequency and outcome of those encounters, which leads to a continuation or hypersensitivity to the feelings of bias and discrimination. The recall of these events, which may in actuality be an exaggeration of the contact, brought on by the experiences in early childhood, serve as a reminder of the individual’s lack of “whiteness”. The basis of the internal conflict would be continuous, even if the non-white individual were able to change their socio-economic status, the effects of their social ethnic stratification in early life formed their world view (p 385). Changing minority social location, being located within a multi-diverse or white communities with whom non-whites

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