Are Our Thoughts about Diversity Conformist? For this second assignment, I would like you to use two of the three texts.  You must use Appiah's essay, but you have the choice of using either Rodgriguez's "Blaxicans and other Reinvented Americans" or David Brooks's "People Like Us." You may find it useful to think of this as the process of using Appiah's ideas to open up and reconsider what Rodriguez  or Brooks write about. Applying Appiah to Rodriguez: You might use Appiah to reconsider the assertions that Rodriquez makes about American attitudes towards diversity.   Rodriguez asserts that a person can chose their ethnicity based on the way he/she wants to.  For example, the author states "since he I answered that I am Chinese, and  that is because I live in a Chinese city and because I want to be Chinese.  Well, why not?".   He discusses assimilation and how one's identity is not solely dependent on his/her ethnic background.   Rodriguez says that assimilation happens naturally as he described a story in which Laotian and Mexicans.  According to the author, these groups generally do not like one another but yet Laotians were speaking English in a Spanish accent. Applying Appiah to Brooks: You might use Appiah to reconsider the assertions that David Brooks makes about American attitudes towards diversity. Remember that Brooks opens his essay by asserting that "We don't really care about diversity all that much in America" (306), and then he goes on to accumulate a lot of evidence to support his position. You might assume for a moment that you too have noticed people living and working in homogeneous rather than diverse groups. Ask yourself what your evidence tells you about American attitudes towards diversity. To what impulses are Americans conforming? You might use Appiah's essay as you think about what persuades you to come to your conclusion (assertion). The point of this assignment is to get you thinking about how you might use the ideas you find in one text to write about another. This means that a significant part of what you will be doing is representing the thoughts of both authors with paraphrase and quotation as you explain the authors' positions. I will be looking for two things in your essays as I grade them. The first is an informed or developing opinion (an assertion) about our attitudes towards diversity and conformity. To gauge whether or not you are accomplishing this, ask yourself what you are contributing to the conversations in which Appiah and Rodriguez or Brooks are engaged. The second is the degree to which you explain and represent the words of two authors as you put together your own thoughts. To represent an author effectively, you will want to paraphrase and quote what you have read and, most importantly, explain to your reader what is relevant about the ideas of that author.