Who isn't American, but is American?

America is the melting pot of the world and everyone can be American. Right? Is the African Soca singer considered American? Or the Japanese man wearing a kimono? While America is extraordinarily diverse, everyone is blend of people that all come together at a cultural compromise and that's what makes the melting pot of America. Everyone else is treated with respect, but if anyone that strays too far from the blend can't be identified as American. America isn't a mixture like a salad.  The effect is a uniformity and a distinct American "range" of people who can be identified as American instead of just one group of people who are definitely American.

In Huckleberry Finn, Huck is seen as a little bit different from the rest of the boys who are "respectable", or at the very least don't have drunken missing fathers. He's part of the group and all, but doesn't completely fit in with that group of people. Huck is one of the them, but at the same time isn't. "They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn't be fair and square for the others"(Twain 256). He doesn't make his situation any better, later on, by helping out a slave.

Just like in the early to mid 1900's, African Americans weren't the most "American" citizens. They were the people who lived in America and spoke English, but they practically had their own little society going on. There was a divide between many of the different racial groups. They had to prove themselves, admittedly over a much longer period of than Huck's initiation, to the country with hard work because they didn't have a Widow Douglas to "kill"(Twain 256).