AP English Language & Composition

Sample Responses to Questions on Samuel Huntington’s “The Challenges to America’s National Identity.”

In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, SamuelHuntington argues that core American values are rooted in the country’s Anglo-Christian foundations and that Americans question these values at their peril.“The Crisis of National Identity,” the opening section of the book, lays out thecompeting identities that challenge and weaken a national identity: allegianceto other countries; to race, ethnicity, or gender; or to the global community.After September 11, 2001, Huntington saw national identity resurging, andhe wonders whether it will be sustained.

QUESTIONS ON MEANING

1. Salience means “prominence, significance,” so low salience means “lackof importance.” Huntington attributes this “low salience of nationalidentity” to competing identities — as he puts it in paragraph 4, to“[g]lobalization,” “ethnic, racial, and gender identities” and “dual

citizenships,” the “celebration of diversity.”

2. “Other-national identities”: the loyalty of immigrants to their birth countries.“Subnational identities”: the loyalty of nonwhites and non-Europeansto their race or ethnicity. “Transnational identities”: the loyalty of“elite groups” to the global community. Unlike a traditional national identity,these identities are not first and foremost “American,” according toHuntington, and are not based on a crucial unifying common culture.

3. Huntington’s thesis is that competing identities have eroded the sense ofnational identity so that “[b]y 2000, America was, in many respects, lessa nation than it had been for a century” (par. 4). His purpose is to urgereaders to identify themselves first and most fundamentally with thenation as a whole rather than any narrower entity.

QUESTIONS ON WRITING STRATEGY

1. The introductory description of the marked increase in the number offlags after September 11 captures the renewed patriotism and sense ofunity at that time. The concluding description of the reduction in flagscaptures what Huntington sees as a worrisome decline in that national

feeling.

2. Rachel Newman exemplifies Americans who had weak national identitybefore September 11: She would earlier have seen herself not as Americanbut as “a musician, a poet, an artist and . . . a woman, a lesbian anda Jew.” Ward Connerly, in contrast, identifies himself as “all-American,”

although the reporter persistently tries to label him “African American.”

3. Huntington begins his discussion of subnational identities by quotingfrom two presidential inaugural poems that, for him, represent the shiftfrom a national identity in the early 1960s to more fragmentation by1993. The traditional “glories” of the American identity had come to be

viewed as threats to “the well-being and real identities of people withtheir subnational groups.” Then he contrasts the reporter’s attempt tolabel Ward Connerly an African American (and Rachel Ward’s initial classificationof herself) with Connerly’s “passionate affirmation of his nationalidentity.”

4. The questions challenge readers to think through the answers and byextension to act.

5. Each of the six executives quoted explicitly rejects a national identity forhis corporation. Huntington perhaps includes all these examples to emphasizehow “vociferous” and unified the executives’ objections were.

QUESTIONS ON LANGUAGE

1. Huntington’s tone is urgent, as in the parallel sentences itemizing theassaults on national identity (par. 4) or the questions at the end (14). It isalso sometimes sardonic about those who espouse other identities, as inhis quotations from Angelou’s inaugural poem (9) or from the businessleaders responding to Ralph Nader (12).

2. The language of the poems provides a sharp contrast: Frost’s referenceto “freedom’s story,” “glory upon glory,” and a “golden age” suggest affirmationand optimism, whereas Angelou’s “bloody sear” and “wedded foreverto fear, yoked eternally to brutishness” suggest a very differentattitude.

3. The ampersand () is a stylized rendition of the Latin word et, meaning“and.” It was at one time considered part of the English alphabet. Schoolchildrenadded the Latin phrase per se (“by itself”) when reciting letterssuch as a and i that were also words, so was recited as “and per se

and,” evolving into the word ampersand.