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Index
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LITR 4340
 American Immigrant Literature Model Assignments |
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Dylan Putt
10 December 2016
“Whitewashing”
In preparation for the course’s final
examination, it is critical to assess the nature of the “dominant culture” of
which the essay portion centers around. Furthermore, in understanding all of
American immigrant literature, one must know enough about the culture these
people flock to in the first place: in order to know what the immigrants become,
one must first examine those who are already thriving in their destined
country-to-be. Thus, I will endeavor to explore various prior students’ work in
discovering just what the dominant culture is, how it came to be, and bring
clarity to the “whitewashed” cultures which came together to form the United
States’ dominant culture.
In her 2013 essay “Lead, Follow or Get
Out of The Way”, Carrie Block outlines the attitude which would come to define
our country’s dominant culture. What we know as “White” people were actually
several different European people groups, one of which was the English pilgrims
of the famous Plymouth Plantation. “Fleeing religious
persecution in England the Pilgrim’s first went to Holland but after twelve
years noticed that their children were starting to assimilate to the Dominant
culture or that of the Dutch. This was very unsettling for the Pilgrims and
hence they decided that America might be where their people could prosper”
(Block). As insinuated by this quote, and expanded upon by Block in her essay,
this meant that the pilgrims were not, under any circumstances, looking to
assimilate into a new culture to escape their religious persecution: this would
be the attitude that would establish the foundation of the dominant culture in
the eventual United States of America. For years to come, the United States
would have, and continues to have, a mentality that those who come into our
country should assimilate to our way of life, our culture, and bring in only as
much diversity as doesn’t interfere with these things.
Looking deeper into the roots of this
culture, Dorothy Noyes’ “What is ‘White’ and Why?” seeks to explain who these
different peoples were that ultimately came together as one race over the years
of American immigration. She delves into the intricacies of how this one-colored
puzzle came to be, describing the early resistances of the Scotch-Irish
colonials to the English Puritan pilgrims: “(…)
when the Scots-Irish began immigrating and settling
in America it caused great problems with the Puritan settlers from England whom
had previously begun the establishment of the dominant culture. Though the
Scots-Irish immigrants met many qualifications for being categorized as racially
similar, and they did not need to assimilate to the spoken language of the new
dominant culture, it was in their differences that they were almost completely
rejected” (Noyes). In this essay, we are able to see that the unified front of
“White” people was not always the way it is now, and was just as riddled with
prejudice and conflict as today’s various racial struggles in social situations
are.
By examining its past, we are more able
to understand the present of the dominant culture in the United States. In his
essay “Universally Bland Yet Appealing to All”, Cesar Cano hits upon many of the
same subjects as the former essays mentioned here do: “White” culture’s roots in
puritan English settlers and the Scotch-Irish. However, he brings up an
interesting point, which to me helps one to understand the natural next step
these people groups took to become the culture we have today: “The
success of America’s conquest prompted many other ethnic groups to also migrate
to the young nation. These new waves of immigrants did not fit the WASP label as
they hailed from other European nations besides England. The United States
became a cosmopolitan country with a cocktail mix of races” (Cano). It is this
“successful conquest” as Cano puts it that sealed the dominant culture’s place
in history as we know it today: success brought in the masses, as they spied
opportunity of their own on the coat-tails of those who had settled the untamed
Americas before them. So in a sense, the dominant culture dominated the native
population with its superior technology and educational edge, and once that job
was done, various other cultures, displeased with their own lots in life
overseas, followed to fill the void left by those natives. That is to say, they
themselves arrived to be dominated.
Ironically enough, there is a glimmer of hope in the midst of this vicious cycle
of domination and subjugation. “White” people today are no longer known as
“Scotch-Americans”, or “English-Americans”: they are simply Americans. Though it
was hard-fought, and has begotten some ill fruit, these diverse people groups
from Europe have banded together over the years in a way that no other immigrant
cultures have. Thus, the hope lies in the possibility that other groups, be they
brown, black or any other color under the rainbow may one day too, with a bit of
struggle, be just as strongly unified under the label of American.
