what color is your hair?

The essay "Hold your Nose", written by Lisa Miya-Jervis really got me thinking about what an American women looks like. Or what the "stereotypical" American women looks like? Or even what does an American women want to look like?

The line the struck me the most was, "Can it be that for all the strides made against racism and anti-semitism Americans still want to expunge their ethnicity from their looks?"

I think that the reason this question seemed so odd to me is simply because America is known as the nations "melting pot" or as more recently stated a "fruit salad". That's what I was taught in elementary school and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Even as a young girl I was taught that even though we are all American, we are different.

This article pointed out to me that in modern day society people seem to be a little less excepting of their trates that in that past would have made them unique or original. According to the article "Hold your Nose", "Jews make up only 2 percent of the American population." Aside from this statistic being suprising to me it got me wondering what type of people make up the American population and then what it is that people outside of America see the average american women as. So, I did some research.

According to Wikipedia.com and the Census of the United States of America below is the demographic of the United States in 2008 with a total population of 304.1 million:

Race and Hispanic or Latino origin	Percentage	Number
White alone (of which 29.2 million are White Hispanic and Latino Americans. Excluding these, this category comprises 65.4% or 198.9 million)	75.0%	228.2 million
Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, of any origin	15.4%	46.9 million
Black or African American alone	12.4%	37.6 million
Some other race alone	4.9%	15.0 million
Asian alone	4.4%	13.4 million
Two or more races	2.3%	7.0 million
American Indian or Alaska Native alone	0.8%	2.4 million
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander alone	0.14%	0.43 million

75% of the American population is made up of white or Caucasian people, but what about the other 25% which is rarely represented in pictures of the "typical" American women.

It bothers me that rarely women of other races are used as an icon to represent America. In my last blog post I posted a picture of Rosie the Riveter who is portrayed as a strong American women, who is white. I think that even though the other races that compose the makeup of America may have less numbers than the Caucasian race they should be equal represented as an icon of the American people.