Rereading america 10th edition reddit

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REREADING AMERICA Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and

Writing

ELEVENTH EDITION

EDITED BY

Gary Colombo

Emeritus—Los Angeles City College

Robert Cullen

Emeritus—San Jose State University

Bonnie Lisle

University of California, Los Angeles

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For Bedford/St. Martin’s

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Acknowledgments

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PREFACE FOR INSTRUCTORS ABOUT REREADING AMERICA Designed for first-year writing and critical thinking courses,

Rereading America anthologizes a diverse set of readings

focused on the myths that dominate U.S. culture. This central

theme brings together thought-provoking selections on a broad

range of topics — family, education, technology, success,

gender, and race — topics that raise controversial issues

meaningful to college students of all backgrounds. We’ve drawn

these readings from many sources, both within the academy

and outside of it; the selections are both multicultural and

cross-curricular and thus represent an unusual variety of

voices, styles, and subjects.

The readings in this book speak directly to students’

experiences and concerns. Every college student has had some

brush with prejudice, and most have something to say about

education, the family, or the gender stereotypes they see in

films and on television. The issues raised here help students

link their personal experiences with broader cultural

perspectives and lead them to analyze, or “read,” the cultural

forces that have shaped and continue to shape their lives. By

linking the personal and the cultural, students begin to

recognize that they are not academic outsiders — they too have

knowledge, assumptions, and intellectual frameworks that give

them authority in academic culture. Connecting personal

knowledge and academic discourse helps students see that they

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are able to think, speak, and write academically and that they

don’t have to absorb passively what the “experts” say.

FEATURES OF THE ELEVENTH EDITION

A Cultural Approach to Critical Thinking Like its predecessors, the eleventh edition of Rereading

America is committed to the premise that learning to think

critically means learning to identify and see beyond dominant

cultural myths — collective and often unconsciously held beliefs

that influence our thinking, reading, and writing. Instead of

treating cultural diversity as just another topic to be studied or

“appreciated,” Rereading America encourages students to

grapple with the real differences in perspective that arise in a

pluralistic society like ours. This method helps students to

break through conventional assumptions and patterns of

thought that hinder fresh critical responses and inhibit

dialogue. It helps them recognize that even the most apparently

“natural” fact or obvious idea results from a process of social

construction. And it helps them to develop the intellectual

independence essential to critical thinking, reading, and

writing.

Timely New Readings To keep Rereading America up to date, we’ve worked hard to

bring you the best new voices speaking on issues of race,

gender, class, family, education, and technological progress. As

in past editions, we’ve retained old favorites like Gary Soto,

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Stephanie Coontz, John Taylor Gatto, Mike Rose, Sherry Turkle,

Barbara Ehrenreich, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Kilbourne, Rebecca

Solnit, Sherman Alexie, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. But you’ll also

find a host of new selections by authors such as Amy Ellis Nutt,

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Peggy Orenstein, Yuval Noah Harari,

Jean M. Twenge, Ellen K. Pao, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Marc

Lamont Hill, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, and José Orduña. And like

earlier versions, this edition of Rereading America includes a

healthy mix of personal and academic writing, representing a

wide variety of genres, styles, and rhetorical strategies.

Visual Portfolios In addition to frontispieces and cartoons, we’ve included a

Visual Portfolio of myth-related images in every chapter of

Rereading America. These collections of photographs invite

students to examine how visual “texts” are constructed and

how, like written texts, they are susceptible to multiple readings

and rereadings. Each portfolio is accompanied by a series of

questions that encourage critical analysis and connect portfolio

images to ideas and themes in chapter reading selections. As in

earlier editions, the visual frontispieces that open each chapter

are integrated into the prereading assignments found in the

chapter introductions. The cartoons, offered as a bit of comic

relief and as opportunities for visual thinking, are paired with

appropriate readings throughout the text.

Focus on Struggle and Resistance Most multicultural readers approach diversity in one of two

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ways: either they adopt a pluralist approach and conceive of

American society as a kind of salad bowl of cultures or, in

response to worries about the lack of “objectivity” in the

multicultural curriculum, they take what might be called the

“talk show” approach and present American culture as a series

of pro-and-con debates on a number of social issues. The

eleventh edition of Rereading America, like its predecessors,

follows neither of these approaches. Pluralist readers, we feel,

make a promise that’s impossible to keep: no single text, and no

single course, can do justice to the many complex cultures that

inhabit the United States. Thus the materials selected for

Rereading America aren’t meant to offer a taste of what “family”

means for Native Americans or the flavor of gender relations

among immigrants. Instead, we’ve included materials like

excerpts from Sheryll Cashin’s Loving: Interracial Intimacy in

America and the Threat to White Supremacy or Ta-Nehisi

Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” because they offer us fresh

critical perspectives on the common myths that shape our

ideas, values, and beliefs. Rather than seeing this anthology as a

mosaic or kaleidoscope of cultural fragments that combine to

form a beautiful picture, it’s more accurate to think of

Rereading America as a handbook that helps students explore

the ways that the dominant culture shapes their ideas, values,

and beliefs.

This notion of cultural dominance is studiously avoided in

most multicultural anthologies. “Salad bowl” readers generally

sidestep the issue of cultural dynamics: intent on celebrating

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America’s cultural diversity, they offer a relatively static picture

of a nation fragmented into a kind of cultural archipelago. “Talk

show” readers admit the idea of conflict, but they distort the

reality of cultural dynamics by presenting cultural conflicts as a

matter of rational — and equally balanced — debate. All of the

materials anthologized in Rereading America address the

cultural struggles that animate American society — the tensions

that result from the expectations established by our dominant

cultural myths and the diverse realities that these myths often

contradict.

Extensive Apparatus Rereading America offers a wealth of features to help students

hone their analytic abilities and to aid instructors as they plan

class discussions, critical thinking activities, and writing

assignments. These include:

A Comprehensive Introductory Essay The book begins with a comprehensive essay, “Thinking Critically, Challenging Cultural Myths,” that introduces students to the relationships among thinking, cultural diversity, and the notion of dominant cultural myths, and that shows how such myths can influence their academic performance. We’ve also included a section devoted to active reading, which offers suggestions for prereading, prewriting, note taking, text marking, and keeping a reading journal. Another section helps students work with the many visual images included in the book.

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“Fast Facts” Begin Each Chapter Several provocative statistics before each chapter introduction provide context for students and prompt discussion. For example, “Following the 2016 presidential election, 64% of Americans said that fake news stories online had left the nation confused about basic facts. However, 84% also feel either ‘very confident’ or ‘somewhat confident’ that they can recognize fake news when they see it.”

Detailed Chapter Introductions An introductory essay at the beginning of each chapter offers students a thorough overview of each cultural myth, placing it in historical context, raising some of the chapter’s central questions, and orienting students to the chapter’s internal structure.

Prereading Activities Following each chapter introduction you’ll find prereading activities designed to encourage students to reflect on what they already know about the cultural myth in question. Often connected to the images that open every chapter, these prereading activities help students to engage the topic even before they begin to read.

Questions to Stimulate Critical Thinking Three groups of questions following each selection encourage students to consider the reading carefully in several contexts: “Engaging the Text” focuses on close reading of the selection itself; “Exploring Connections” puts the selection into dialogue with other selections throughout the book; “Extending the Critical Context” invites students to connect the ideas they read about here with sources of knowledge outside the anthology, including library and Internet

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research, personal experience, interviews, ethnographic- style observations, and so forth. As in past editions, we’ve included a number of questions linking readings with contemporary television shows and feature films for instructors who want to address the interplay of cultural myths and the mass media. Also as in past editions, we’ve included a number of questions focusing on writers’ rhetorical and stylistic strategies. Identified as “Thinking Rhetorically” for easy reference, these questions typically appear as the final item under “Engaging the Text.”

“Further Connections” Close Each Chapter Located at the end of each chapter, these questions and assignments invite students to undertake more challenging projects related to the chapter’s theme. They often provide suggestions for additional in-depth research or activities that require community engagement.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Critical thinking is always a collaborative activity, and the kind

of critical thinking involved in the creation of a text like

Rereading America represents collegial collaboration at its very

best. Since publication of the last edition, we’ve heard from

instructors across the country who have generously offered

suggestions for new classroom activities and comments for

further refinements and improvements. Among the many

instructors who shared their insights with us as we reworked

this edition, we’d particularly like to thank James Allen, College

of DuPage; Deborah Bertsch, Columbus State Community

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College; Ruth Blandon, East Los Angeles College; Nancy Botkin,

Indiana University South Bend; Tony Bowers, College of

DuPage; Michael Duncan, University of Houston–Downtown;

Irene Faass, Minneapolis Community and Technical College;

Rebecca Fleming, Columbus State Community College; Karen

Forgette, University of Mississippi; Melanie Gagich, Cleveland

State University; Rick Garza, Reedley College; Joshua Giorgio-

Rubin, Indiana University South Bend; Sara Heaser, University

of Wisconsin–La Crosse; Owen Kaufman, Quinebaug Valley

Community College; Julia Klimek, Coker College; David

McCracken, Coker College; Alisea McLeod, Rust College; Ilona

Missakian, Fullerton College; Stan Porter, Merced College;

Pegeen Powell, Columbia College Chicago; Edwin Sams, San

Jose State University; Jasna Shannon, Coker College; Abha

Sood, Monmouth University; Jeffrey Susla, University of

Hartford; Kerry Taylor, Anne Arundel Community College;

Bronte Wieland, Iowa State University.

For their help with the tenth edition, we’d like to thank the

following: Douglas Armendarez, East Los Angeles College; Tolu

Bamishigbin, University of California, Los Angeles; Sheena

Boran, University of Mississippi; David Bordelon, Ocean County

College; Jane Carey, Quinebaug Valley Community College;

Kirsti Cole, Minnesota State University; Rachelle Costello,

Indiana University South Bend; Virginia Crisco, California State

University, Fresno; Peter DeNegre, Tunxis Community College;

Tiffany Denman, Sacramento City College; Peter Dorman,

Central Virginia Community College; Chip Dunkin, University

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of Mississippi; Randa Elbih, Grand Valley State University;

Maria Estrada, Mt. San Antonio College; Karen Forgette,

University of Mississippi; JoAnn Foriest, Prairie State College;

Kimberly Hall, Harrisburg Area Community College; Barbara

Heifferon, Louisiana State University; Cristina Herrera,

California State University, Fresno; Robert Imbur, University of

Toledo; Danielle Lake, Grand Valley State University; Catherine

Lamas, East Los Angeles College; Danielle Muller, Los Angeles

City College; Pamela McGlynn, Southwestern College; Charlotte

Morgan, Cleveland State University; Eduardo Munoz, East Los

Angeles College; Kylie Olean, University of Hartford; Heather

Seratt, University of Houston–Downtown; Phil Wagner,

University of California, Los Angeles; Jessica Walsh, Harper

College; Vallie Watson, University of North Carolina at

Wilmington; Judith Wigdortz, Monmouth University; Mary

Williams, San Jose State University.

For their help with the ninth edition, we’d like to thank the

following: Janice Agee, Sacramento City College; Fredric J. Ball,

Southwestern College; Chantell M. Barnhill, Indiana University

South Bend; Norka Blackman-Richards, Queens College, City

University of New York; Candace Boeck, San Diego State

University; Mark Brock-Cancellieri, Stevenson University;

Audrey Cameron, North Idaho College; Catheryn Cheal,

Oakland University; Kirsti Cole, Minnesota State University,

Mankato; Sean P. Connolly, Tulane University; Jackson Connor,

Guilford College; Myrto Drizou, State University of New York at

Buffalo; David Estrada, Fullerton College; Jacquelyn Lee

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Gardner, Western Michigan University; Rochelle Gregory,

North Central Texas College; Gwyn Fallbrooke, University of

Minnesota; Philip Fishman, Barry University; Naomi E. Hahn,

Illinois College; Rick Hansen, California State University,

Fresno; Nels P. Highberg, University of Hartford; Amy Lynn

Ingalls, Three Rivers Community College; Asao B. Inoue,

California State University, Fresno; Amanda Katz, Worcester

State University; O. Brian Kaufman, Quinebaug Valley

Community College; Barbara Kilgust, Carroll University;

Carolyn Kremers, University of Alaska Fairbanks; Catherine

Lamas, East Los Angeles College; Sharon A. Lefevre,

Community College of Philadelphia; Alisea Williams McLeod,

Indiana University South Bend; Tanya Millner-Harlee,

Manchester Community College; Ilona Missakian, Rio Hondo

College; Roxanne Munch, Joliet Junior College; Katrina J.

Pelow, Kent State University; M. Karen Powers, Kent State

University at Tuscarawas; Kevin Quirk, DePaul University; Alex

Reid, State University of New York at Buffalo; Brad C. Southard,

Appalachian State University; Terry Spaise, University of

California, Riverside; Sarah Stanley, University of Alaska

Fairbanks.

We are also grateful to those reviewers who helped shape

previous editions.

As always, we’d also like to thank all the kind folks at

Bedford/St. Martin’s, who do their best to make the effort of

producing a book like this a genuine pleasure. We’re especially

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grateful to Edwin Hill, Leasa Burton, and John Sullivan. We

thank Cara Kaufman, our editor, whose patience and

professionalism have helped us immensely throughout the

development of this new edition. We also want to thank Pamela

Lawson, who served as content project manager; Lumina

Datamatics, Inc., who managed copyediting and composition;

William Boardman, who produced our new cover; Mark

Schaefer, for clearing text permissions; Candice Cheesman and

Krystyna Borgen, for researching and tracking down art; and

editorial assistant William Hwang who helped out with many of

the hundreds of details that go into a project such as this.

Finally, we’d like to acknowledge our spouses, Elena Barcia, Liz

Silver, and Roy Weitz, for their love and support.

Gary Colombo

Robert Cullen

Bonnie Lisle

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CONTENTS PREFACE FOR INSTRUCTORS

INTRODUCTION: Thinking Critically, Challenging Cultural Myths

1 HARMONY AT HOME

Myths of Family

LOOKING FOR WORK, GARY SOTO

“For weeks I had drunk Kool-Aid and watched morning reruns of Father Knows Best, whose family was so uncomplicated in its routine that I very much wanted to imitate it. The first step was to get my brother and sister to wear shoes at dinner.”

WHAT WE REALLY MISS ABOUT THE 1950s, STEPHANIE COONTZ

“What most people really feel nostalgic about . . . is the belief that the 1950s provided a more family-friendly economic and social environment, an easier climate in which to keep kids on the straight and narrow, and above all, a greater feeling of hope for a family’s long-term future, especially for its young.”

THE COLOR OF FAMILY TIES: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND EXTENDED FAMILY INVOLVEMENT, NAOMI GERSTEL AND NATALIA SARKISIAN

“Marriage actually diminishes ties to kin.”

WHEN SHOULD A CHILD BE TAKEN FROM HIS PARENTS?, LARISSA MACFARQUHAR

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“When a child has been left alone because his mother can’t afford childcare and has to go to work, is that poverty or neglect?”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF AMERICAN

FAMILIES

FROM BECOMING NICOLE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY, AMY ELLIS NUTT

“I am the proud father of identical twins. One is a boy and one is a girl.”

FROM LOVING: INTERRACIAL INTIMACY IN AMERICA AND THE THREAT TO WHITE SUPREMACY, SHERYLL CASHIN

“White people who have an intimate relationship with a person of color, particularly a black person, can lose the luxury of racial blindness . . . and gain something tragic, yet real.”

FROM BEYOND MONOGAMY: POLYAMORY AND THE FUTURE OF POLYQUEER SEXUALITIES, MIMI SCHIPPERS

“What if having more than one long-term partner was available to wives as well as husbands, and tolerated or even expected across and within all races and classes?”

2 LEARNING POWER

The Myth of Education and Empowerment

AGAINST SCHOOL, JOHN TAYLOR GATTO

“School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children.”

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“I JUST WANNA BE AVERAGE,” MIKE ROSE

“I was placed in the vocational track, a euphemism for the bottom level. Neither I nor my parents realized what this meant.”

FROM SOCIAL CLASS AND THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM OF WORK, JEAN ANYON

“Public schools in complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes.”

CHOOSING A SCHOOL FOR MY DAUGHTER IN A SEGREGATED CITY, NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES

“Legally and culturally, we’ve come to accept segregation once again. Today, across the country, black children are more segregated than they have been at any point in nearly half a century.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF EDUCATION

AND EMPOWERMENT

EDUCATION: ATTENTIONAL DISARRAY, SHERRY TURKLE

“Other generations passed notes, doodled, or zoned out. [Oliver’s] generation can send texts and go to Facebook. He calls his generation ‘lucky’: ‘We have the awesome new power to erase boredom.’”

BLURRED LINES, TAKE TWO, PEGGY ORENSTEIN

“A paramedic who responded to some UC Berkeley calls . . . told a reporter that he had personally stopped a group of these top-tier college boys as they dragged an

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unconscious girl out of a party. . . . ‘Who knows what their intentions were?’ the paramedic mused.”

CITY OF BROKEN DREAMS, SARA GOLDRICK-RAB

“‘Money has a lot to do with stress. . . . People obviously start thinking, should I just stop going to school? This is a lot of money I’m paying for classes, I shouldn’t be here.’”

3 THE WILD WIRED WEST

Myths of Progress on the Tech Frontier

OUR FUTURE SELVES, ERIC SCHMIDT AND JARED COHEN

“Soon everyone on Earth will be connected. With five billion more people set to join the virtual world, the boom in digital connectivity will bring gains in productivity, health, education, quality of life and myriad other avenues in the physical world.”

HAS THE SMARTPHONE DESTROYED A GENERATION?, JEAN M. TWENGE

“There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives — and making them seriously unhappy.”

LET’S GET LOST, KENNETH GOLDSMITH

“I think it’s time to drop the simplistic guilt about wasting time on the Internet and instead begin to explore — and perhaps even celebrate — the complex possibilities that lay before us.”

ZOË AND THE TROLLS, NOREEN MALONE

“Gamergaters had not only created a whole new set of

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celebrities, like [Milo] Yiannopoulos and [Mike] Cernovich; it had solidified their methods . . . and their grudges had calcified into a worldview.”

TWITTER AND WHITE SUPREMACY, A LOVE STORY, JESSIE DANIELS

“On Twitter, Trump and white supremacists are in a racists-loving-each-other-feedback-loop through retweets while they simultaneously use the platform to bully, harass, and threaten black women, Jews, and anyone else who opposes them.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF WIRED

CULTURE

HOW WE SOLD OUR SOULS — AND MORE — TO THE INTERNET GIANTS, BRUCE SCHNEIER

“It’s the location of your phone, who you’re talking to and what you’re saying, what you’re searching and writing. . . . Corporations gather, store, and analyze this data, often without our consent. . . . We may not like to admit it, but we are under mass surveillance.”

YOU WILL LOSE YOUR JOB TO A ROBOT — AND SOONER THAN YOU THINK, KEVIN DRUM

“No matter what job you name, robots will be able to do it. They will manufacture themselves, program themselves, and manage themselves. If you don’t appreciate this, then you don’t appreciate what’s barreling toward us.”

BIG DATA, GOOGLE, AND THE END OF FREE WILL, YUVAL

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NOAH HARARI

“Proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data . . . and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data- processing system — and then merge into it.”

4 MONEY AND SUCCESS

The Myth of Individual Opportunity

CLASS IN AMERICA, GREGORY MANTSIOS

“From cradle to grave, class position has a significant impact on our well-being.”

SERVING IN FLORIDA, BARBARA EHRENREICH

“I had gone into this venture in the spirit of science, to test a mathematical proposition, but somewhere along the line, in the tunnel vision imposed by long shifts and relentless concentration, it became a test of myself, and clearly I have failed.”

FROM A TANGLE OF PATHOLOGY TO A RACE-FAIR AMERICA, ALAN AJA, DANIEL BUSTILLO, WILLIAM DARITY JR., AND DARRICK HAMILTON

“What explains the marked and persistent racial gaps in employment and wealth? Is discrimination genuinely of only marginal importance in America today?”

FROM HOW THE OTHER HALF BANKS, MEHRSA BARADARAN

“Approximately 70 million Americans do not have a bank account or access to traditional financial services. That is more people than live in California, New York, and

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Maryland combined.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF INDIVIDUAL

OPPORTUNITY

FRAMING CLASS, VICARIOUS LIVING, AND CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION, DIANA KENDALL

“The poor do not fare well on television entertainment shows, where writers typically represent them with one- dimensional, bedraggled characters standing on a street corner holding cardboard signs that read ‘Need money for food.’”

FROM RESET: MY FIGHT FOR INCLUSION AND LASTING CHANGE, ELLEN K. PAO

“So many super-rich people I encountered in the corridors of power believed that the rules didn’t, or shouldn’t, apply to them. Any of the rules.”

THANK GOD IT’S MONDAY, KATE ARONOFF

“A few trends surface: a near-total collapse of work-life balance, marathon working days, unclear job descriptions, a cult-like enforcement of the company’s mission, and a senior management that’s as demanding and raucous as it is disorganized.”

WHY WE SHOULD GIVE FREE MONEY TO EVERYONE, RUTGER BREGMAN

“It is now within our means to take the next step in the history of progress: to give each and every person the security of a basic income.”

5 TRUE WOMEN AND REAL MEN

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Myths of Gender

GIRL, JAMAICA KINCAID

“Try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.”

HOW TO DO GENDER, LISA WADE AND MYRA MARX FERREE

“Somewhere between reaching out to learn the rules [and] learning . . . what rules were ‘meant to be broken,’ we manage to develop a way of doing gender that works for us.”

GUYS’ CLUB: NO FAGGOTS, BITCHES, OR PUSSIES ALLOWED, CARLOS ANDRÉS GÓMEZ

“I want more than this narrow slice of humanity I’ve been given permission to taste. . . . I’m tired of needing to throw hurtful words like ‘faggot’ or ‘bitch’ or ‘pussy’ around to prove that I’m a man.”

SISTERHOOD IS COMPLICATED, RUTH PADAWER

“Where . . . should Wellesley draw a line, if a line should even be drawn? At trans men? At transmasculine students? What about students who are simply questioning their gender?”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF GENDER

FROM THE GENDER KNOT: “PATRIARCHY,” ALLAN G. JOHNSON

“We cannot avoid participating in patriarchy. It was handed to us the moment we come into the world. But we can choose how to participate in it.”

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“TWO WAYS A WOMAN CAN GET HURT”: ADVERTISING AND VIOLENCE, JEAN KILBOURNE

“Ads don’t directly cause violence, of course. But the violent images contribute to the state of terror . . . a climate in which there is widespread and increasing violence.”

THE LONGEST WAR, REBECCA SOLNIT

“Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

FROM RUSH LIMBAUGH TO DONALD TRUMP: CONSERVATIVE TALK RADIO AND THE DEFIANT REASSERTION OF WHITE MALE AUTHORITY, JACKSON KATZ

“Conservative talk radio, like Trumpism, champions the reassertion of an idealized, throwback White masculinity as the solution to America’s myriad problems at home and abroad.”

6 CREATED EQUAL

Myths of Race

THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS, TA-NEHISI COATES

“An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

THEORIES AND CONSTRUCTS OF RACE, LINDA HOLTZMAN AND LEON SHARPE

“While race itself is fiction, the consequences of racism

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are a historical and contemporary fact of American life.”

GENTRIFICATION, SHERMAN ALEXIE

“I waved to them but they didn’t wave back. I pretended they hadn’t noticed me and waved again. They stared at me. They knew what I had done.”

NOBODY, MARC LAMONT HILL

“The stories of Ferguson, Baltimore, Flint, and countless other sites of gross injustice . . . spotlight the nagging presence of the exploited, the erased, the vulnerable, the dehumanized — those who are imagined, treated, and made to feel like Nobody.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF RACE

FROM MUSLIM GIRL, AMANI AL-KHATAHTBEH

“I was suddenly confronted by my own suffocating vulnerability: the intense self-realization that, among the three of us, I was the only one wearing a headscarf — the only one ‘visibly’ Muslim.”

PASSPORT TO THE NEW WEST, JOSÉ ORDUÑA

“In this border region, the horizon between natural violence and state violence has been collapsed. The arid climate, the flash floods, the diamondbacks, the mountain impasses, the distance, and the heat of the sun have all been weaponized. . . . This is murder without a murderer.”

HOW IMMIGRANTS BECOME “OTHER,” MARCELO M. SUÁREZ-OROZCO AND CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO

“Unauthorized immigrants live in a parallel universe.

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Their lives are shaped by forces and habits that are unimaginable to many American citizens.”

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND TITLES

31

THINKING CRITICALLY, CHALLENGING CULTURAL MYTHS

BECOMING A COLLEGE STUDENT Beginning college can be a disconcerting experience. It may be

the first time you’ve lived away from home and had to deal with

the stresses and pleasures of independence. There’s increased

academic competition, increased temptation, and a whole new

set of peer pressures. In the dorms you may find yourself

among people whose backgrounds make them seem foreign

and unapproachable. If you commute, you may be struggling

against a feeling of isolation that you’ve never faced before. And

then there are increased expectations. For an introductory

history class you may read as many books as you covered in a

year of high school coursework. In anthropology, you might be

asked to conduct ethnographic research — when you’ve barely

heard of an ethnography before, much less written one. In

English, you may tackle more formal analytic writing in a single

semester than you’ve ever done in your life.

College typically imposes fewer rules than high school, but

also gives you less guidance and makes greater demands —

demands that affect the quality as well as the quantity of your

work. By your first midterm exam, you may suspect that your

previous academic experience is irrelevant, that nothing you’ve

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done in school has prepared you to think, read, or write in the

ways your professors expect. Your sociology instructor says she

doesn’t care whether you can remember all the examples in the

textbook as long as you can apply the theoretical concepts to

real situations. In your composition class, the perfect five-

paragraph essay you turn in for your first assignment is

dismissed as “superficial, mechanical, and dull.” Meanwhile,

the lecturer in your political science or psychology course is

rejecting ideas about country, religion, family, and self that

have always been a part of your deepest beliefs. How can you

cope with these new expectations and challenges?

There is no simple solution, no infallible five-step method

that works for everyone. As you meet the personal challenges of

college, you’ll grow as a human being. You’ll begin to look

critically at your old habits, beliefs, and values, to see them in

relation to the new world you’re entering. You may have to re-

examine your relationships to family, friends, neighborhood,

and heritage. You’ll have to sort out your strengths from your

weaknesses and make tough choices about who you are and

who you want to become. Your academic work demands the

same process of serious self-examination. To excel in college

work you need to grow intellectually — to become a critical

thinker.

WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING? What do instructors mean when they tell you to think critically?

Most would say that it involves asking questions rather than

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memorizing information. Instead of simply collecting the

“facts,” a critical thinker probes them, looking for underlying

assumptions and ideas. Instead of focusing on dates and events

in history or symptoms in psychology, she probes for motives,

causes — an explanation of how these things came to be. A

critical thinker cultivates the ability to imagine and value points

of view different from her own — then strengthens, refines,

enlarges, or reshapes her ideas in light of those other

perspectives. She is at once open and skeptical: receptive to

new ideas yet careful to test them against previous experience

and knowledge. In short, a critical thinker is an active learner,

someone with the ability to shape, not merely absorb,

knowledge.

All this is difficult to put into practice, because it requires

getting outside your own skin and seeing the world from

multiple perspectives. To see why critical thinking doesn’t come

naturally, take another look at the cover of this book. Many

would scan the title, Rereading America, take in the surface

meaning — to reconsider America — and go on to page one.

There isn’t much to question here; it just “makes sense.” But

what happens with the student who brings a different

perspective? For example, a student from El Salvador might

justly complain that the title reflects an ethnocentric view of

what it means to be an American. After all, since America

encompasses all the countries of North, South, and Central

America, he lived in “America” long before arriving in the

United States. When this student reads the title, then, he

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actually does reread it; he reads it once in the “commonsense”

way but also from the perspective of someone who has lived in

a country dominated by U.S. intervention and interests. This

double vision or double perspective frees him to look beyond

the “obvious” meaning of the book and to question its

assumptions.

Of course you don’t have to be bicultural to become a

proficient critical thinker. You can develop a genuine sensitivity

to alternative perspectives even if you’ve never lived outside

your hometown. But to do so you need to recognize that there

are no “obvious meanings.” The automatic equation that the

native-born student makes between “America” and the United

States seems to make sense only because our culture has

traditionally endorsed the idea that the United States is America

and, by implication, that other countries in this hemisphere are

somehow inferior — not the genuine article. We tend to accept

this equation and its unfortunate implications because we are

products of our culture.

THE POWER OF CULTURAL MYTHS Culture shapes the way we think; it tells us what “makes sense.”

It holds people together by providing us with a shared set of

customs, values, ideas, and beliefs, as well as a common

language. We live enmeshed in this cultural web: it influences

the way we relate to others, the way we look, our tastes, our

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habits; it enters our dreams and desires. But as culture binds us

together it also selectively blinds us. As we grow up, we accept

ways of looking at the world, ways of thinking and being that

might best be characterized as cultural frames of reference or

cultural myths. These myths help us understand our place in

the world — our place as prescribed by our culture. They define

our relationships to friends and lovers, to the past and future, to

nature, to power, and to nation. Becoming a critical thinker

means learning how to look beyond these cultural myths and

the assumptions embedded in them.

You may associate the word “myth” primarily with the myths

of the ancient Greeks. The legends of gods and heroes like

Athena, Zeus, and Oedipus embodied the central ideals and

values of Greek civilization — notions like civic responsibility,

the primacy of male authority, and humility before the gods.

The stories were “true” not in a literal sense but as reflections of

important cultural beliefs. These myths assured the Greeks of

the nobility of their origins; they provided models for the roles

that Greeks would play in their public and private lives; they

justified inequities in Greek society; they helped the Greeks

understand human life and destiny in terms that “made sense”

within the framework of that culture.

Our cultural myths do much the same. Take, for example, the

American dream of success. Since the first European colonists

came to the “New World” some four centuries ago, America has

been synonymous with the idea of individual opportunity. For

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generations, immigrants have been lured across the ocean to

make their fortunes in a land where the streets were said to be

paved with gold. Of course we don’t always agree on what

success means or how it should be measured. Some calculate

the meaning of success in terms of six-figure salaries or the

acreage of their country estates. Others discover success in the

attainment of a dream — whether it’s graduating from college,

achieving excellence on the playing field, or winning new rights

and opportunities for less fortunate fellow citizens. For some

Americans, the dream of success is the very foundation of

everything that’s right about life in the United States. For

others, the American dream is a cultural mirage that keeps

workers happy in low-paying jobs while their bosses pocket the

profits of an unfair system. But whether you embrace or reject

the dream of success, you can’t escape its influence. As

Americans, we are steeped in a culture that prizes individual

achievement; growing up in the United States, we are told again

and again by parents, teachers, advertisers, Hollywood writers,

politicians, and opinion makers that we, too, can achieve our

dream — that we, too, can “Just Do It” if we try. You might

aspire to become an Internet tycoon, or you might rebel and opt

for a simple life, but you can’t ignore the impact of the myth.

Cultural myths gain such enormous power over us by

insinuating themselves into our thinking before we’re aware of

them. Most are learned at a deep, even unconscious level.

Gender roles are a good example. As children we get gender

role models from our families, our schools, our churches, and

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other important institutions. We see them acted out in the

relationships between family members or portrayed on

television, in the movies, or in song lyrics. Before long, the

culturally dominant roles we see for women and men appear to

us as “self-evident”: for many Americans it still seems “natural”

for a man to be strong, competitive, and heterosexual, just as it

may seem “unnatural” for a man to shun competitive activity or

to be romantically attracted to other men. Our most dominant

cultural myths shape the way we perceive the world and blind

us to alternative ways of seeing and being. When something

violates the expectations that such myths create, it may even be

called unnatural, immoral, or perverse.

CULTURAL MYTHS AS OBSTACLES TO CRITICAL THINKING Cultural myths can have more subtle effects as well. In

academic work they can reduce the complexity of our reading

and thinking. A few years ago, for example, a professor at Los

Angeles City College noted that he and his students couldn’t

agree in their interpretations of the following poem by

Theodore Roethke:

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

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But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother’s countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

The instructor read this poem as a clear expression of a child’s

love for his blue-collar father, a rough-and-tumble man who

had worked hard all his life (“a palm caked hard by dirt”), who

was not above taking a drink of whiskey to ease his mind, but

who also found the time to “waltz” his son off to bed. The

students didn’t see this at all. They saw the poem as a story

about an abusive father and heavy drinker. They seemed

unwilling to look beyond the father’s roughness and the

whiskey on his breath, equating these with drunken violence.

Although the poem does suggest an element of fear mingled

with the boy’s excitement (“I hung on like death”), the class

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ignored its complexity — the mixture of fear, love, and

boisterous fun that colors the son’s memory of his father. It’s

possible that some students might overlook the positive traits in

the father in this poem because they have suffered child abuse

themselves. But this couldn’t be true for all the students in the

class. The difference between these interpretations lies,

instead, in the influence of cultural myths. After all, in a culture

now dominated by images of the family that emphasize

“positive” parenting, middle-class values, and sensitive fathers,

it’s no wonder that students refused to see this father

sympathetically. Our culture simply doesn’t associate good,

loving families with drinking or with even the suggestion of

physical roughness.

Years of acculturation — the process of internalizing cultural

values — leave us with a set of rigid categories for “good” and

“bad” parents, narrow conceptions of how parents should look,

talk, and behave toward their children. These cultural

categories work like mental pigeonholes: they help us sort out

and evaluate our experiences rapidly, almost before we’re

consciously aware of them. They give us a helpful shorthand for

interpreting the world; after all, we can’t stop to ponder every

new situation we meet as if it were a puzzle or a philosophical

problem. But while cultural categories help us make practical

decisions in everyday life, they also impose their inherent

rigidity on our thinking and thus limit our ability to understand

the complexity of our experience. They reduce the world to

dichotomies — simplified either/or choices: either women or

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men, either heterosexuals or homosexuals, either nature or

culture, either animal or human, either “alien” or American,

either them or us.

Rigid cultural beliefs can present serious obstacles to success

for first-year college students. In a psychology class, for

example, students’ cultural myths may so color their thinking

that they find it nearly impossible to comprehend Freud’s ideas

about infant sexuality. Ingrained assumptions about childhood

innocence and sexual guilt may make it impossible for them to

see children as sexual beings — a concept absolutely basic to an

understanding of the history of psychoanalytic theory. Yet

college-level critical inquiry thrives on exactly this kind of

revision of common sense: academics prize the unusual, the

subtle, the ambiguous, the complex — and expect students to

appreciate them as well. Good critical thinkers in all academic

disciplines welcome the opportunity to challenge conventional

ways of seeing the world; they seem to take delight in

questioning everything that appears clear and self-evident.

QUESTIONING: THE BASIS OF CRITICAL THINKING By questioning the myths that dominate our culture, we can

begin to resist the limits they impose on our vision. In fact, they

invite such questioning. Often our personal experience fails to

fit the images the myths project: a young woman’s ambition to

be a test pilot may clash with the ideal of femininity our culture

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promotes; a Cambodian immigrant who has suffered from

racism in the United States may question our professed

commitment to equality; a student in the vocational track may

not see education as the road to success that we assume it is;

and few of our families these days fit the mythic model of

husband, wife, two kids, a dog, and a house in the suburbs.

Moreover, because cultural myths serve such large and

varied needs, they’re not always coherent or consistent.

Powerful contradictory myths coexist in our society and our

own minds. For example, while the myth of “the melting pot”

celebrates equality, the myth of individual success pushes us to

strive for inequality — to “get ahead” of everyone else. Likewise,

our attitudes toward education are deeply paradoxical: on one

level, Americans tend to see schooling as a valuable experience

that unites us in a common culture and helps us bring out the

best in ourselves; yet at the same time, we suspect that formal

classroom instruction stifles creativity and chokes off natural

intelligence and enthusiasm. These contradictions infuse our

history, literature, and popular culture; they’re so much a part

of our thinking that we tend to take them for granted, unaware

of their inconsistencies.

Learning to recognize contradictions lies at the very heart of

critical thinking, for intellectual conflict inevitably generates

questions. Can both (or all) perspectives be true? What evidence

do I have for the validity of each? Is there some way to reconcile

them? Are there still other alternatives? Questions like these

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represent the beginning of serious academic analysis. They

stimulate the reflection, discussion, and research that are the

essence of good scholarship. Thus whether we find

contradictions between myth and lived experience, or between

opposing myths, the wealth of powerful, conflicting material

generated by our cultural mythology offers a particularly rich

context for critical inquiry.

THE STRUCTURE OF REREADING AMERICA We’ve designed this book to help you develop the habits of mind