White Man's Burden

"The dream of imperial expansion is the nightmare of its own success, a nightmare in which movement outward in the world threatens to incorporate the foreign and dismantle the domestic sphere of the nation. Imperialism does not emanate from the solid center of a fully formed nation; rather, the meaning of the nation itself is both questioned and redefined through the outward reach of empire. (12)"



I would first like to start off with touching on the poverty cycle we discussed in class... I think the cycle is a concept that is one hundred percent accurate. If you are born into poverty there is little chance to break free of that due to the lack of resources one has with living in destitute. I think the idea of the "foreign other" helping construct our nation is a accurate ideal because I think of it like this. There are jobs that "True Americans" don't want to do and its funny this is brought up now because in the presidential debate last night Ben Carson talked about giving those jobs to the immigrants. That is a interesting concept to me because we give the leftovers to those who migrate to the United States to essentially make them earn their stay in the U.S. We have these jobs that are not suitable for you average day American citizen but we have no problem with passing them off to immigrants who come here. I think immigrants are key to the success of the United States because you have these jobs on farms that no one else would want to do and they need to be done in order to keep industries like the crop industry cycling. You have these immigrants that do these jobs and their children are automatically born into poverty becoming apart of the cycle. 

I think going back to what I said a couple of classes ago that a nation shouldn't be defined by one individual culture. The United States is known as a melting pot and I don't think it can be defined as one individual cultured nation. I think this day in age culture is defined by race because people are defining themselves as their race instead of defining themselves by country. "People that analyze poverty don't take things into consideration..." This references what I was saying early on how people born into poverty have to go outside what they are born into in order to achieve a "better" life.