Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources Orlando Patterson quote

“[A] growing cultural and structural complexity … requires persons who have a broad grasp of what … cultural literacy: a deep understanding of the mainstream culture, which no longer has much to do with White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but with the imperatives of industrial civilization.

…The people who run the society at the macro-level must be literate in this culture. … And how does one obtain literacy in this wider sense? Only by becoming totally involved in the wider culture, by refusing to segregate oneself from it, by moving into it, capturing it, changing it.

To assume that this wider culture is static is an error; in fact it is not. It's not a WASP culture; it doesn't belong to any group. It is essentially and constantly changing and it is open. What is needed is recognition that the accurate metaphor or model for this wider literacy is not domination, but dialectic; each group participates and contributes, transforms and is transformed, as much as any other group. …. The English language no longer belongs to any single group or nation. The same goes for any other area of the wider culture.”