Define American

With my juniors, I'm teaching American Literature, and I realized very early on that I can't teach American Literature without getting to the heart of what that word "American" means. We did an exercise where I asked them what does it mean to be American. So if we stop being everybody, and we start being everybody except "blank," especially if "blank" is a particular shade of person, I think we stop being America, or we stop being the America I love, the America I want to teach about.