United States: At Home With Foreign Cultures

“Best Friends, Like It or Not” (editorial, April 27) asserts that “Americans are, shall we say, not famous for their sensitivities toward foreign cultures.” The Times is, shall we say, famous for its elitist nonsense, like the statement above. The United States is a nation of immigrants and children of immigrants. Americans are supremely sensitive to foreign cultures, while foreigners, to their detriment, are ignorant of ours.

In the U.S., schoolchildren are taught as a matter of policy about foreign societies, cultures and customs. Most Americans are intermarried in a kaleidoscope of ethnicities, races, religions and cultures. Even the bulk of the most honorable Americans--those who put their Americanism above their personal ethnic roots--strive to maintain a relationship to their ancestry. It is editorial writers spouting myths and jealous foreigners whose homogeneous populations cannot match American tolerance and prosperity who spread the fiction that Americans are not sensitive to foreign cultures.

Charles K. Sergis

Calabasas