Color-Coded America: How the White “Dream” Employs Socio-Economic Limitations in African-American Culture and Beyond Anonymous College

In taking on the colossal notion of American culture, it would be ideal to begin with its inhabitants. The questions of what defines us and what we give value to are inherent challenges in themselves because the country is split by several subgroups: by race, by class, by creed, by ethnic group, and so on. Since this essay addresses minority culture in excess, another challenge for those groups surfaces in terms of “achieving an independent personal and group identity; gaining access to political power and economic opportunities; and finding ways to think, speak, and create that are not dominated by the ideology of the oppressor” (Tyson 423). When diving into the topic of multi-cultural literature and its voices, an even deeper challenge arises. By default, it seems that white culture has passed as universal culture due to its strong literary and political influences from the country’s very beginning. “…if colonizers acknowledged that a native culture existed, they claimed that such cultures were not worth sustaining in the face of the ‘superior’ civilization offered by the Europeans” (Tyson 424). White privilege has oppressed other identities, other values, and made our culture uniform. What’s more, stifling or covering up...