America faces issues regarding cultural pluralism all the time. There are race and culture conflicts that persist in everyday life. Two big issues that I have noticed are racial bias in sports and Asian American child-rearing practices. American history prooves that sports have shown the shifting views of race from segregation to integration. Today, athletes may have unfair advantages or disadvantages because of their race. Race does not affect their athletic abilities, but it can affect the bias that other people have towards athletes. When some people see a black quarterback or a white running back, they say that’s odd. Race should not distinguish what position someone plays in a sport. History also shows how Asian Americans have received the stereotype of “tiger moms." Their children are raised so strictly that it eliminates all fun from their lives. Children become math whizzes and music prodigies by having freedoms taken away. Issues like this need to be solved if America is going to be more culturally pluralistic.
To understand the racial bias in sports today, one must know the history of it as well. American issues are almost always a result of their history. The history of racial bias and discrimination in sports dates all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century. College football was emerging and becoming very popular, but it served as a venue for the articulation for whiteness. According to Sports in America from Colonial Times to the Twenty-first Century, the two fathers of college football, Walter Camp and Caspar Whitney, both agreed that it should be a “gentleman’s game.” In this scenario, “gentleman” was not referring to a grown man who was chivalrous, courteous, or honorable; they thought only white men were capable of that. Camp thought that football should prepare young men for the “growing bureaucratic and corporate demands of industrialization.” Walter Camp was the coach for Yale ...