What is an American?

What is an American?
I would like to start by stating the obvious: an American is someone who lives in America.
While this definition may seem obvious, to many people who live in The United States, they don't necessarily consider themselves "American".
All the time, I hear people talking of their nationalities. When someone asks a caucasian person "What's your nationality?" it's always answered with something like, "I am 20% German, 5% Polish, 7% French, 0.05% Russian, 0.0009% Dutch, etc." People go to extreme lengths to avoid even the slight notion that they may be in any way connected to America, for whatever reason, whether it be that they don't want to lose their other cultures, they're embarrased about being connected to the United States, or just that they think being a different nationality is cool. Either way, no one seems too "Proud to be an American".
Maybe it's justified. Other countries in the world certainly don't view our nation in the happiest of lights, sure. But there must have been some reason that our ancestors (who make up the 0.009% of  our nationality) came here in the first place! There are still many countries in the world, in this day and age, who persecute large groups of people, based on things like gender, race, religion, and many other absurd things. We are one of the few countries who has equality for all those things, even if we didn't start that way.
Our constitution was the first of its kind, in the world. For the first time, there was a new idea that the peoples rights are "endowed by the creator", and then the people grant rights to the government, or the famous phrase "Of the people, by the people, for the people". The American government is ours! We control it. It's written down on a 300+ year-old piece of paper, in Washington D.C. In my opinion, that's definitely something to be proud of.
Yes. It's no secret that Americans do some bad things. (I.e. polution, taking things for granted...releasing idiotic songs on youtube that make no sense...) but we still have things to be proud of. We should still all feel lucky we're living in a country where no one is persecuted because of the color of their akin, where women don't have to treat men as their superiors, where everyone is entitled to an education. We should all be proud to be who we are, Americans.