Research PaperCultural Intersections Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Research PaperCultural Intersections - Essay ExampleSince the process if bettering oneself is just that - a choice, when the black sub group chooses to pursue another heathen path within the Ameri canister culture, smock the States often shows little tolerance or understanding.For black America, the melting pot and land of opportunity images catch never been allowed to be generate the cultural icons with which white Americans co closely identify. The black experience of American culture did not begin with voluntary immigration in the pursuit of a better life. Black Americans were forcibly taken from their homes and brought to America as slaves. Black Americans, duration no longer alive as slaves, and living in a free country, still struggle to establish a distinctly American and successful identity. Their path was forced, not voluntary. Their emigration was from freedom to bondage, while white Americans, to a great extent, left religious and social bondage to establish freedom. From these two different paradigms, two different American cultures have emerged. At the seam where these cultures meet, friction and misunderstanding atomic number 18 the norm. As a result, a homogeneous America currently does not exist for either group, and both sub-cultures angle to carry a chip on their shoulder, blaming the other as the source of the discord.For both of these cultures, the idea of choice should be taken into consideration so that the individuals can begin to move past their individual ideas of how America should look. White Americans and black Americans each have made choices on how to cover their country and culture. Each has come to an individual understanding based on their choices and personal experiences. Unfortunately, at the intersection of these two paradigms, the individuals often try to justify their perceptions as something bigger than choice. White America lifts up their own experience as how and what America is. America is the melting pot, the la nd of opportunity, and any individual or people group that does not perceive it similarly is understood as attacking America. Black America similarly can understand the country as an oppressive culture, bent on winning from them their individuality and uniqueness as it tries to squeeze them into the white cultural mold. Working under this perception, black Americans can easily turn aggressively hostile to the white paradigm, which leads to conflict, and disunity.Reike and Sillars, in their work on critical decision making (1993) address this phenomenon by accurately identifying it as the product of choice. They say that our individual belief systems are made up of two components, beliefs and value. Individuals settle on core value as both an individual and as a larger group. Often these values within a culture are similar, even though they are worked out in different ways. Americans as a group tend to agree the value of independence as a universal value. Individuality is also a sh ared cultural value. According to Reike and Sillars, built around these core values are individual belief systems which shape and affect our understandings of our values. Belief systems are most often learned behaviors. Belief systems are based on what is important to us, our values, but they also reflect our personal experiences, and our belief systems also shape our executes. We will rarely make decisions or choose a course of action which is in violation to our belief system, even if the belief system inaccurately reflects