In the poem America by Walt Whitman, He highlights the goodness of America and how it is the center of many things. The diversity it has and how America is the embodiment of freedom, law and love amongst several other qualities. However, although that can be said there is also this part of America that is experienced by other individuals like Langston Hughes, who wrote his poem Let America Be America again .Hughes talks about how America has sold many a dream that it cannot and has not attempted to fulfill. He talks about America in the same way that Walt does but the only difference is throughout the poem, he is highlighting how America is only America the great, the free for people like Walt, which is a few. Of course America has fulfilled its prophecy in the eyes of Walt because he is an ideal American, he was a  white cis man, so of course America is ideal to him because America caters to him. However, for people like Langston Hughes, he sees America as some kind of hoax or some kind of lie because America to him is a place where he can work twice as hard and get half of what Walt has. That is not only an experience that Hughes  shares it’s an experience that many share in America. Few have the privilege of viewing America as the land of the free. For those that are oppressed in America and that are minorities, Langston highlights the lack of freedom that they feel. You are never your own self, you belong to some other entity or group.You are rarely living the American dream but chasing it.You aren’t really free and most importantly America isn’t the great America for you. When Langston says “I am the farmer bondsman to the soil,I am the worker sold to the machine ,I am the Negro servant to you” all he is saying that you are not you in America you are bound to these things, not the other way around.

He is criticizing America. That it has sold the great magical idea of individualism and that in America you can do anything whatever you set your mind to.Yet due to the lack of freedom that experience is not an option for many. You have no space to dream when you are trying to make ends meet or being oppressed. If there is a limit to your success then  the American dream is not a part of the equation in fact the American dream has done nothing to erase that. In that same way, Fisher in Paradoxes Of American Individualism talks of the same concept. We pride ourselves on the idea of American individualism but really all we are actively pushing forward and actively doing is voluntarism. We are so used to being used  and loyal to America, we would never sacrifice our own well-being if it meant going against the greater good. That is because America has done a great job of branding loyalty so great that Americans are often loyal even if it means sacrificing their own well being. Your loyalty to the nation is ranked higher than anything else. The nation is ranked higher than the well-being of its people. Within his conclusion Fisher says that “A person really choose to associate with one another to attain their ends doing so voluntarily, they commit themselves to adhere to the association and its collective rules and needs to be its agent. They are morally free to leave but not morally free to  trespass the implicit contract period, to leave the nation, but not to betray it“. Which is much like what  Langston was saying, that even though he sees America for what it truly is and he doesn’t have freedom because he is bound to the oppression and his servitude ,he cannot leave because he’s American, so he hopes of a better America instead. Much like a lot of minorities they know that there really isn’t this American dream for them but they cannot leave even though they are free to, they have this loyalty to America. So they commit to America and collectively somehow indirectly agree to adhere to the rules and do whatever has to be done.Which is absolutely not individualism but America then again makes you think that to make it appear as if you have some sort of freedom. However, if we were to let America be America as it was sold to many of us, we would truly be individualist, truly be able to leave, and we wouldn’t think more so of the greater good but we would think for ourselves and most importantly we wouldn’t have to hope for a better America.