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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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Jennifer Robles
Iceberg Domination
America’s dominant culture, at surface-level,
is the cookie-cutter image of Anglo-Saxon, white Protestants who run our
country. It is what most people envision when they think of who the successful
people are that make the laws for the nation as a whole-- and, for the most
part, this is a correct vision. This image of the dominant culture is definitely
the tiny tip of the iceberg we can all clearly see, but does not touch on the
magnitude of the dominant culture’s elusive presence hidden beneath the surface.
Symbols and values of the dominant culture are deeply embedded and hidden in the
cultural make-up of America by hundreds of years of influence. And it is those
that we compare how all other immigrants will assimilate to. In order to
understand the dominant culture as we know today, we must be able to understand
the history and evolution of how the dominant culture has come to be.
The dominant culture has been influenced
through waves of European immigration. The first wave was the immigration of a
group of people from eastern England known as the Puritans during the 1620s-30s.
They settled in the New England area of America. Essentially, this group was the
very first group to actually immigrate to America and brought with them the very
first building blocks of the present-day dominant culture iceberg--
Christianity, the English language and an unnerving will to not assimilate into
any other culture. Puritans were escaping England due to religious persecution
and first immigrated to Holland, where they stayed for a few years. William
Bradford in “Of Plymouth Plantation,” explains that the Puritans could not
handle seeing their very own children slowly assimilate into the culture by
being “drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses,
getting the reins off their necks and departing from their parents.”
Assimilation was dangerous and the Puritans could not handle it anymore. At the
same time, the Puritans were feeling a calling from God of “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.” The Puritans made their way to the
new land of America in order to not assimilate, but, rather, spread
Christianity-- ironically, these two ideas are the very cornerstone of the image
of the dominant culture.
The next wave of European immigrants to America
were a set of people from southern England called the “Cavaliers,” who came to
settle in the southern “Dixie” area of America, just a couple of decades after
the Puritans. Contrastingly to the Puritans, the Cavaliers were not escaping
England but were rather part of England’s aristocratic society who came to
America holding true to the king of England and English values. These values
included a sense of entitlement and slaves. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur in
“Letters from an American Farmer,” wrote about the entitled Cavaliers and their
slaves, “The chosen race eat, drink, and live happy, while the unfortunate one
grubs up the ground, raises indigo, or husks the rice; exposed to a sun full as
scorching as their native one; without the support of good food, without the
cordials of any cheering liquor.” Right away we see this early idea of the
“chosen race” who exploits others for their gain. They rise in wealth off the
backs of those they feel superior to. This attitude is part of the iceberg we do
not see, yet it has served as an integral foundational support of the culture’s
rise to dominant status.
The third wave of European immigrants known as
Scotch-Irish came 100 years after the first two waves. These were immigrants
from Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland who came to settle in the
Appalachian Mountains-- just west of the East coast elite Cavaliers. These
immigrants had conflicted relationships with “dominant-culture elites” yet
identified with the earlier European immigrants because, they too, were Northern
Europe Protestants who were culturally and politically conservative. They just
did not seem to fit into the stable, orderly communities that the earlier waves
had established and often live under the status-quo, undervaluing education and
science and who have a mistrust for centralized authority. The Scotch-Irish come
to mostly identify with the dominant culture due to appearance and their
Protestantism, yet they never feel like they truly belong. JD Vance in
The Hillbilly Elegy, states that
“There was, and still is, a sense that those who make it are of two varieties.
The first are lucky: They come from wealthy families with connections, and their
lives were set from the moment they were born. The second are the meritocratic:
They were born with brains and couldn’t fail if they tried.” Vance sets up this
idea that there is really only two types of the dominant culture, the Puritan
values of education or those “born with brains” and the aristocratic Cavaliers
whose “lives were set from the moment they were born.” With the Scotch-Irish
influence and ambiguity to the dominant culture, we start to realize there is a
much larger piece of the iceberg floating under what we can see from just
appearances of “whiteness” above.
But what about all the other people who have
lived amongst these immigration waves? There are people who did not come from
northern Europe who were either forced to come to America (slaves) or who were
here when settlers first came (American Indians), minorities. They did not fit
into the color code of the dominant culture because of distinctive physical
markers, mainly skin color and facial features. Both the Puritans and Cavaliers
brought over a sense of superiority over any other group of people, and asserted
that dominance or “the tyranny of their culture” (Anzia Yezierska, in
Soap and Water) through exploitation
and pressuring to assimilate into their lifestyle and values. But minorities
resist any type of assimilation, “preferring death to such a life of misery”
(Olaudah Equiano in “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, .
. . the African”). Perhaps
they are the only group to see the iceberg in its entirety.
To other immigrant groups, they perhaps only see the tip
of the iceberg, the very glimpse of something grand, something they want for
themselves. Model minorities are the perfect example of immigrants assimilating
to the dominate culture. They are representative of a “don’t rock the boat”
mentality and tend to submit to the hierarchical system of the dominate culture.
The key difference between minorities and model minorities is mostly in regards
to whether they assimilate into the dominant culture or not.
New World immigrants seem to fit into the pattern of that
of the Scotch-Irish, except that they identify with the minority color-code
instead of the dominant color-code like the Scotch-Irish. They too come to
America for the reasons like all immigrants, to gain opportunity and freedom,
but, like minorities, see that the dominant culture is well hidden beneath
everything America has been built on.
America is a giant iceberg of a dominant culture. The
values, traditions, and beliefs that came over with European immigrants all were
cemented deep when they refused to submit to the culture’s that preexisted the
area. Much like John Winthrop says in “A Model of Christian Charity,” “We shall
find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist
a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men
shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘may the Lord make it like that of New
England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes
of all people are upon us,” they did build a city upon a hill, or rather an
iceberg so grand and wondrous that people are drawn to its magnificence.
