Questions liked the one my taxi driver asked make me feel uncomfortable. But I can understand why he could not see me as an American. He had a narrow but widely shared sense of the past: a history (1)_____________________________. Race has functioned as something necessary to the construction of American character and quality in the creation of our national identity— (2)_____________________. But American has been racially diverse since our very beginning on the Virginia shore, where the first group of Englishmen and Africans arrived in the 17th century. (3)___________________________.
