He wanted European immigrants to assimilated into American citizens as soon as possible – but what exactly does that mean? In my previous paper, I mentioned how white Americans have this fascination with simultaneously breaking away from English monarchy while still have an unconscious obsession with it (the imperial use of measurements instead of the metric system, yet we still followed similar education, etiquette, and money rituals that the English had done for years). As has probably already been a comparison in the past, America colonists always seems like a rebellious teenager who left home but was still completely reliant on their parents (and a complete bully to everyone else around them). Throughout this selection, Roosevelt seems in complete naivete to those without any privilege whatsoever. Like a horse with blinders on, it's almost as if he really believes all one has to do is just absolve themselves of their old heritage and become American – no anarchy and love the flag (Roosevelt 1153-1156).
Where does that leave African Americans, who when this was published, had just been absolved from slavery thirty years prior? Their heritage belongs in a continent overseas and in a time a century has faded away. Paul Dunbar's "Sympathy" paints this metaphor between him and his race, the gap and loss of this time, and the brutality it leaves upon the souls generation after generation of black families whose ancestors were once slaves. Dunbar understands the pain of the caged bird, because his parents were former slaves, and he had to grow up learning to understand that his world was not the same as the pale kids that were his age (like an iconic photo of when Martin Luther King, Jr. had to explain to his daughter that a famous amusement park she really wanted to go to was "for whites only").
