Katherine Rearick

Defining America’s Dominant Culture

To understand the immigrant experience, one must make an effort to define the dominant culture into which immigrants hope to assimilate. Is America’s dominant culture an elite – educated, wealthy and powerful; or do demographics, population majority or sheer numbers define the dominant culture? American culture falls somewhere between these two groups, but its values and their origins are fairly easy to pin down.

In this course, we looked at the Exodus story of the Ancient Hebrews as the primary model of national migration for the Pilgrims, who later established America’s White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominant culture. These immigrants did not have any intention of assimilating; instead, sheer numbers gave them the power to be the dominant society. Both Hebrews and Puritans had a common religious identification and often demonstrated attitudes of divine providence. For this reason, the question must be asked: whether conscious or unconscious, does the dominant culture somehow feel that its power is derived from the power of God? If one looks carefully at some core values of America’s dominant culture—education and literature, hard work, religion, family, order, and subtlety—it becomes obvious that they have their roots in Protestantism.

The idea of the nuclear family is one major value that has roots in these two stories. In Exodus 20.12, the commandment that states, “Honor thy father and mother,” there is no reference to the extended family. Emphasis on the nuclear family is appropriate to a wandering society like the Jews and fits with modern America’s emphasis on mobility. The nuclear family does not discount the importance of the larger community; but in a highly mobile society, extended family can be hindering. The nuclear family also worked for the Pilgrims and the Jews as a way of resisting intermarriage. In Deuteronomy 7.2, God warns the Ancient Jews that they are not to intermarry with the Canaanites: “…thou shalt make no covenant with them…neither shalt thou make marriages with them.” Intermarriage is the key to assimilation; the American “melting pot” is the result of intermarriage, but modern dominant culture continues to resist this ethnic blending.

In considering another dominant culture value, education, Course Objective 5C asks: Is literature the fundamental human activity essential to modern civilization? There is no question that the dominant culture has presented reading and writing as the principal path to empowerment in America. As a result, writing has always been a way for the dominant culture to maintain the status quo; consider the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20.1-17) and the Mayflower Compact (Bradford 83-84). Ancient Jews equated religion with the “word”—all of their spiritual teachings were based in literacy. Both Jews and the Pilgrims have been referred to as “people of the book.” In the Bible, Moses is shown numerous times as a writer; in Numbers 33.2, “Moses wrote their goings out,” and later he transcribed the Ten Commandments, the “word of God.” Bradford, as chief historian of the Pilgrims, is also a writer. Literature of both Jews and Pilgrims frequently contains the term “covenant,” a written agreement. In Joshua 24.25-26, “…Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and set them a statute and an ordinance in Schechem…” When thinking about the immigrant experience in the United States, “covenant” is another way to think about the social contract discussed in this course.

A reason for dominant culture’s dependence on writing is that it helps to hold past and future together. In this course, we looked at writing as a means of continuity, a way of holding onto the past while looking forward toward the future. This is essential to the dominant culture in that it lends stability. Dominant culture is held together by a marriage of capitalism and Protestantism; they work in opposition to one another, but capitalism could not exist as it is without Protestantism. As dominant culture moves forward while maintaining stability, capitalism supplies momentum while Protestantism puts on the brakes. The result is steady progress that never lets the past be forgotten.

Writing is conservative in that it helps make permanent our history, but it is also revolutionary in that it allows people to think freely. When one writes, he is not in direct conversation with another, but with himself. Writing in this way is a libratory act and fundamentally useful to the dominant culture.

Another dominant culture value is subtlety. If the immigrant is “marked,” as I posited in my first essay, then dominant culture is distinctly “unmarked” – colorless, plain, inoffensive, and non-confrontational. The more elite a group becomes, the more they can afford to be non-confrontational. In fact, the more privileged one is, the more it behooves him to remain out of sight, where he can wield power and reap rewards without upsetting the status quo. Protestant values provide the power and moral justification the dominant culture needs to do this.

The “mark” of the immigrant can be the color of his skin, the “colorful” language of his native tongue, the spiciness of his native food, the volume and flamboyance of his conversation, and even issues of personal space. On the other hand, Protestantism, the basis of dominant culture values, is equated with the “plain style,” which connotes cleanliness, an “unmarkedness.” In Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford says he is going to tell his story in the “plain style,” which will reveal “simple truth” (1). He speaks of the “light of the gospel” (clean, unmarked) versus the “darkness of popery” (evil, marked) (1). The Bible itself contains references to this idea. In Exodus 20.4, there is reference to “graven images” and in Numbers 33.52, God tells Moses to destroy any pictures and “molten images” to completely displace the Canaanites. These early allusions to the idea of being marked or unmarked (chosen by God or unchosen) have led to a dominant culture inclusion of the concept within its values. American dominant culture has adopted this idea of marked versus unmarked as way of maintaining balance and control; it is a source of “neutralization” that can be used to defuse potentially “dangerous” situations that may arise in a diverse society.

Public education is the primary tool used by the dominant culture in America to erase ethnic marking. Through education, the dominant culture is able to ensure that the immigrant moves away from ethnic identity and toward assimilation. In Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez describes his feelings as his American education eventually “cleanses” him of his ethnic identity: “Pocho then they called me, an adjective meaning ‘colorless’ . . . a noun, naming the Mexican-American who, in becoming an American, forgets his native society” (230).

One final idea has risen in my mind this semester. I do not think anyone can deny that the ideals of American dominant culture are positive; however, in reality, their manifestations are often negative. Unlike modern immigrants, early Americans did not have to assimilate to anything that was already here; it is part of the American character that our forefathers were creating something new and, as a result, good. Immigrants are now expected to conform or they are considered failures, or “problem” minorities.

The American Dream asserts that a person can achieve absolutely anything if he is willing to work hard. Consequently, anyone who does not succeed has no one to blame but himself.  If you agree, you are buying into the dominant culture’s basic premise. The value of immigrant and minority literature is that it challenges the basic premise, calling into question the foundation of America’s dominant culture.

Dominant culture presentations this semester have questioned whether or not there is an unspoken conspiracy orchestrated by the dominant culture. Someone asked, “Does the immigrant narrative apply to all Americans equally?” This class has helped me realize that the answer is no. So, where does the “logic” of the American Dream myth fall apart? The answer may lie with the insidious nature of the dominant culture, and the Immigrant Narrative is instrumental in bringing that point to light. The model immigrant, exposed to dominant culture, should ideally decide it is something he wants for himself. Yet there is something in it not everyone wants – something wrong, unfair. In “The Lesson,” by Toni Cade Bambara, the young black narrator sums it up–“White folks crazy”—when confronted with the idea that some people will buy a toy for the same price as a week’s worth of groceries (IA 151). The narrators in poems like “Blonde White Women” by Patricia Smith and “When I Was Growing Up” by Nellie Wong, speak of the injustice that blonde hair and blue eyes afford privilege in America.

The examples are many; the point is that immigrant literature shows us that other stories challenge American concepts of assimilation, individualism, and achievement of success. There are people who seek a dominant culture that looks more like they do, cares about the things they care about. Over time, I believe that culture may arise.