Essay: Culture and values in America (presentation notes)

When we think of American culture often visions of Americana come to mind. MacDonald’s, Disneyland, Coca-Cola, blue jeans, white picket fences, and apple pie make us think that we know and understand American culture, but do we?

A) Looking from the outside at America and seeing how many of its cultural values have been adopted world-wide, it would appear that there is only one strong American culture. Take a deeper look however, and you will find a very complex culture made up of hundreds of other ethic cultures and subcultures.

b) Values are standards that people use to label what is good or bad, moral or immoral, acceptable or unacceptable. In a specific culture, values are shared by the population and help to give people general guidelines for behavior. The American culture is made up of values that rest upon the Declaration of Independence, specifically the following section:

Therefore, one could say that equality, autonomy, freedom and success are the main values which form American culture. This idea is backed up by American sociologist Robin Williams who in 1970 identified twelve core American values:  individualism, achievement. (Benokraitis, 2016) If you look at each of these values you can link them back to the above statement from the Declaration of Independence.  For instance, individualism, humanitarianism, democracy and equality can all be traced back to: “…all men are created equal…”

The only value identified by Williams that cannot easily be tied to the Declaration of Independence is racism and group superiority, but we can understand them through history because the American Revolution was founded on the new Americans’ belief that they were superior to their British rulers.

• The Americans felt that the British monarchy was just using the colony as a bank with no regard for the lives of new Americans.
• This made the population feel that they were separate from their old culture and they began to identify with a new one – American culture.  (Price, Jr, 1992)
• The genocide of the Native Americans by early settlers and the widespread use of slaves from Africa also planted the seed of racism and group superiority in early American culture.

This seed unfortunately continued to grow and entrench itself in America to the point of segregation of African Americans and continued prejudice against Native Americans.  The segregation of these populations from the dominant white American one, could be seen in schools, universities, public places, buses, court houses and any other milieu where citizens congregated. Although, gains were made in the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960’s, and American society became more integrated, some would argue that there are still two main American cultures: an African American culture and a white American culture.

Although these two cultures share the core values which were born out of the Declaration of Independence, some academics suggest that African Americans have two different sets of values: the African American cultural value system and the white American cultural value system. (Young, 1974). Having two cultures can lead to a schism in the African American individual as it results in a specific socialisation from a young age.

African American children are taught how to adapt to various situation and environments, obviously born of their ancestors’ need to survive slavery, but also taught to have a strong sense of individual self, a value rooted in the dominant white American Culture.

As such, African American culture can be said to be a subculture of American Culture.  A sub culture “Is a group within society that has distinctive norms, values, beliefs, lifestyle, or language.” The American culture has many different sub-cultures based on the following group memberships: ethnicity, religion, politics, sex and gender, age, occupation, music and art, social class, recreation. (Benokraitis, 2016)

Summary of Specific points to be covered in report and presentation:

1. Therefore, not only is American culture unique because of the presence of two strong, separate cultures, African American and white American, but it is also unique because of the amount of sub-cultures found within it.
2. Again, this can be understood through the eyes of history.  America is a country that was founded by immigrants looking for the pursuit of happiness on its shores.
3. Thus, different ethnic groups with distinct cultures of their own, settled down and established their specific subcultures within the larger American Culture.

We could call this multiculturalism.  “Multiculturalism is the coexistence of several cultures in the same geographic area, without one culture dominating the other.” (Benokraitis, 2016) Therefore, many Americans consider themselves deeply part of American culture but also part of their own ancestral culture.  We have already discussed African American culture but there is also strong Latino, Italian, and Irish communities along with other more recent immigrant populations.

Multiculturalism can be a problem as it engenders counter cultures within the greater culture. “A counter culture is a group within society that openly opposes and/or rejects some of the dominant culture’s norms, values or laws.” (Benokraitis, 2016) In 1960’s America a huge counter culture of youths emerged which was characterised by their opposition to the Vietnam war, use of recreational drugs, opening up of sexual norms and other values that were in essence, rejections of their parents more conservative ones. This counter culture movement helped to form a new modern version of American culture, the one which is shared by many Americans today. (Duncan, 2013)

Some of the Americans that still cling onto the old fashioned values of their forefathers however, have fostered division and hate within American society.  America is home to a large number of hate groups founded by these citizens and they are anti-immigration, anti-Islamic, anti-African American, anti-homosexual, among other things. Bolstered by the internet, these Americans have founded their own distinct identity within their American cultural value system and founded yet another subculture. (Josey, C, 2010)

Thus, American society seems more divided than ever presently, a fact demonstrated by the recent election of Donald Trump to President of the United States. Trump’s presidency has divided the population along cultural values as his supporters hold values totally opposed to the more liberal ones held by those citizens identifying with the modern American culture born out of the 1960’s counter culture movement.

In conclusion, we can see that the idea of culture and the values it rests on is not as clear cut in a country such as America.  In more homogenous societies, its citizens have one dominant culture from which to pull their values.  In America, a country made up of different ethnic groups, the concept of a dominant culture is less certain.  Not only is there a division between African American and white American culture, there are also divisions amongst all of the ethnicities that make up this multicultural society.  Finally, even within this diversely constructed culture, there are subcultures born out of groups that reject the dominant culture’s values and so form their own culture with its distinct values.

Understood like this we can see that America far from being a homogenous society with one strong dominant culture, is in fact a plethora of cultures co-existing in one country.  The present American culture is a growing changing concept born out of its founding father’s values and formed by its ever-changing culturally distinct population.

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