We As Americans

“Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies: they cannot change their grandfathers …. Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, in order to cease being Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, would have to cease to be.”
~ Horace Kallen

It is important to acknowledge that not everyone reading this guide identifies as American. Some of us are recent immigrants to this country, and may not be citizens; some of us find that our ethnic and racial identities are much more significant in our daily lives than the identity of “American.”

Nevertheless, and especially if you are traveling to a country in the Global South, it is important to explore how you may have been shaped by traditional American values — ones that are often invisible to many of us. Regardless of your own personal relationship to these values, consider that they may be projected onto you by the people you will be meeting.

In 1984, L. Robert Kohls created a list of commonly-held American values that has since become a classic. Created originally to help immigrants to the United States make sense of their new cultural environment, Kohls’ list makes visible some of the cultural lenses through which people raised and living in the U.S. tend to see the world.