Anna Quindlen writes about the diversity of the United States and how it has struggled with inequality and division at times. She compares America to a patchwork quilt made up of different materials and colors representing various immigrant groups. While Americans celebrate their unity, there are still many who fear and show bias towards those different from themselves.
Anna Quindlen writes about the diversity of the United States and how it has struggled with inequality and division at times. She compares America to a patchwork quilt made up of different materials and colors representing various immigrant groups. While Americans celebrate their unity, there are still many who fear and show bias towards those different from themselves.
Anna Quindlen writes about the diversity of the United States and how it has struggled with inequality and division at times. She compares America to a patchwork quilt made up of different materials and colors representing various immigrant groups. While Americans celebrate their unity, there are still many who fear and show bias towards those different from themselves.
Anna Quindlen writes about the diversity of the United States and how it has struggled with inequality and division at times. She compares America to a patchwork quilt made up of different materials and colors representing various immigrant groups. While Americans celebrate their unity, there are still many who fear and show bias towards those different from themselves.
A Quilt of a Country Anna Quindlen ANCHOR TEXT | ESSAY
This version of the selection
alternates original text In this essay, Anna Quindlen writes about her experience living in the United States. with summarized passages. America, she observes, is unlike any country that came before it. This country came into Dotted lines appear next to being because so many different people came to live here. She compares the United the summarized passages. States to a patchwork quilt made of different materials and colors. The pieces come together to make one whole object. In theory, America is proud of its diversity and NOTES believes that everyone should be treated equally.
The reality is often quite different, a great national striving, consisting
frequently of failure. Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry.
America, Quindlen says, has a long history of practicing inequality toward minority groups. Americans want to celebrate their unity. But there are still so many who can only see how others are different from them. This is not a new trend. In the past, people from different European countries feared one another. Quindlen grew up in Philadelphia, and she remembers children of different ethnicities walking on different sides of Chester Avenue.
I was the product of a mixed marriage, across barely bridgeable lines: an
Italian girl, an Irish boy. How quaint it seems now, how incendiary then.
Ethnicities may be different now, Quindlen argues, but the conflict is still the same. Why should a nation founded on the idea of inclusion be full of people who are biased toward one another?
Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities.
One of the things that it stands for is this vexing notion that a great nation can consist entirely of refugees from other nations, that people of different, even warring religions and cultures can live, if not side by side, then on either side of the country’s Chester Avenues.
GRADE 9 • UNIT 1 • Accessible Leveled Text • A Quilt of a Country 1
Quindlen identifies several things that most Americans. One is that Americans have NOTES in common love to take on difficult tasks and do their best to succeed. Another is that many Americans understand that immigrants today face the same struggles that our ancestors did. Leonel Castillo was the director of Immigration and Naturalization Services. His grandparents were immigrants from Mexico. He talked about how local neighborhood stores used to be owned by European families. Now, the owners are more likely to be Asian or Middle Eastern. The store owners’ ethnicities may be different, but their situations are similar. Americans can peacefully live with others from different backgrounds because of their sense of patriotism. And when a tragedy such as September 11 strikes, Quindlen says, people see the similarities between themselves and the victims instead of the differences.
These are the representatives of a mongrel nation that somehow, at
times like this, has one spirit. Like many improbable ideas, when it actually works, it’s a wonder.
