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Sample Student final exam answers 2016 (2016 final exam assignment) Part 1: Essays: dominant culture overview |
LITR 4340
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Dylan Putt
10 December 2016
“One Nation”
The dominant culture of the United
States of America brings to mind different ideas for different people. One thing
that will likely be related to this term in at least some capacity by just about
anyone you ask though, is a color: White. This color has been used for
generations to describe multiple European people groups who have immigrated and
assimilated into the United States over the years as one homogenous race.
Regardless of prior European descent and history, the “White people” are all one
race under the nationality of “American”, and are more often than not associated
with the dominant culture, “The Man”, or any other type of tyrannical social
entity in the United States. This culture is in truth a tapestry of immigrants
in just the same way that the state of the union’s social complex is today;
albeit a more seamless one. Many European peoples came together to form this
dominant culture, over much time and much strife between them, and so by
examining this dominant culture, we see a reflection of our country’s current
immigrant-dominant culture relationship, and begin to understand our modern
circumstances therein all the better.
To begin with, we must understand the
roots of this dominant culture in the United States; we must seek it out at the
source. And as is the case with any dominator, attitude is key. We ironically
find the ultimate social tyrant in the humble people group portrayed in William
Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation”, a collection by the settlement’s governor.
These people, the Puritans, were greatly displeased with the Church of England,
and the Holy Roman Catholic Papacy in general: “The
tyrannous bishops are ejected, their courts dissolved, their canons forceless,
their service cashiered, their ceremonies useless and despised; their plots for
popery prevented, and all their superstitions discarded and returned to Rome
from whence they came, and the monuments of idolatry rooted out of the land”
(Bradford).
Seeking
freedom from religious persecution from their own
country’s dominant culture/religion, the
Puritan pilgrims of England set out from country to country within continental
Europe, only to find that their best course of action to freely worship their
god was to settle the frontier known as the Americas an ocean away. In their
desperation to establish a land of their own, an attitude was born: an attitude
that would come to shape the very future of their country, and even the entire
world. By arriving in the United States with a non-assimilation mindset, and
ultimately success in that venture, these pilgrims would help start the initial
push of “White” dominant culture in the Americas, and the eventual United
States. “Lastly (and which was not least), a great hope and
inward zeal they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some
way thereunto, for the propagating and
advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world;
yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for the
performing of so great a work” (Bradford).
What would follow this initial
penetration of the Americas would prove to be the growth and expansion of the
various European immigrants who would come to form the dominant culture as we
know it today. Hector St. Jean de
Crevecoeur, a French-American immigrant during the founding generation of the
United States (circa 1780) places this phenomenon well in his “Letters From an
American Farmer”: “I
wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts which must agitate the
heart and present themselves to the
mind of an enlightened Englishman, when he first lands on this continent.
He must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair country
discovered and settled; he must necessarily feel a share of national pride, when
he views the chain of settlements which embellishes these extended shores. When
he says to himself, this is the work of my countrymen, who, when convulsed by
factions, afflicted by a variety of miseries and wants, restless and impatient,
took refuge here. . . .” (Crevecoeur). While he refers to the English in this
instance, he himself embodies the growing influx of other “White” immigrants
into the budding new United States of America. With their success in taming the
landscape, and rebelling against the homeland in favor of a new nation,
opportunity was ripe for the picking and those who were already in the Western
hemisphere and otherwise sought it out ever since the country’s inception.
With the “White” culture clearly
dominating the social landscape of the United States in the years to follow its
creation, it is important to note that the people within it have come full
circle, in a sense. In other words, there is still plenty of socio-economic
division within the “race” known as “White”, as we see in the example of J.D.
Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”. “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs
of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white
Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks,
poverty is the family tradition-their ancestors were day laborers in the
Southern slave economy, share-croppers after that, coal miners after that, and
machinists and millworkers during more recent times” (Vance 3). The culture
might seem all-dominating, but the people within it are often no less oppressed
than “brown” or “black” skinned immigrants are. Instead, money is key, and
social status is earned only by paying enough dues to the powers that be. This
is upward mobility. This is how one joins the modern dominant culture. This is
America.
What then is the modern citizen to make
of this? If an immigrant is to leave his homeland for greener pastures, should
he then become a cultural slave to the “White” man? It would seem, however, that
even this isn’t the case, as White men have enslaved other White men in this
case, to fuel the capitalist machine that keeps the rich rich, and buries the
poor beneath their feet. If anything is to be gained from understanding the
roots of the dominant culture, it is the knowledge that it was never and is
still not one single culture. It has become as much over the years by a group of
like-minded individuals who shared a common skin tone: what some would call
white supremacy. Here then we see an example of differing people groups coming
together, much in the same way that New World immigrants, Asian immigrants and
others of varying minority groups today can do. “Like Mexicans, I thought. I
remembered the Molinas and how the cats clung to their screens-cats they shot
down with squirt guns. On the highway, I felt happy, pleased by it all. I patted
Carolyn’s thigh. Her people [Japanese-Americans] were like Mexicans, only
different” (Soto 304). In this quote by Gary Soto, from his short story “Like
Mexicans”, a modern retelling of the dominant “White” culture’s coming to power
through unity can be gleaned. If the varying cultures-Red and Yellow, Black and
White- can come together as a cultural rainbow, the sort of unified neo-dominant
culture that would subsequently form may very well be unstoppable.
