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CULTURAL BACKGROUND
Abstract
This paper addresses the values, beliefs, religion history, and overall influences that stem from my
cultural identity. I come from an Anglo-American background, that values independence, achievement,
to some degree societal influence, and certainly respect. This paper addresses several aspects of that
cultural identity. First, the description of my cultural background is given, focusing much on the religious
aspect of my culture as a sort of case study. That is followed by a comparison of other cultures in the
region of the United States that I grew up in, Florida, where I was in contact with a large number of
minorities, particularly Hispanic-Americans. The paper finishes with an analysis of this project’s impact
on first my perspective on the importance of cultural identity, and finally, how I as an Anglo-American
relate to the topic of social justice. This paper is a thorough but not exhaustive analysis of my personal
relationship with my Anglo-American background.
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CULTURAL BACKGROUND
Cultural Identity
John Steinbeck, in his book Travels With Charley, made a remarkable observation about the
American restlessness he observed, saying this:
“The pioneers, the immigrants who peoples the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady
rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forced here as
slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home.
Wouldn’t it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency?” (Steinbeck, 1962)
This observation, upon first reading it, drew out an audible response from me. Of course! We did
not arrive here in a vacuum. There are characteristics that have been passed down generation by
generation. Even if someone doesn’t wear a kilt to commemorate their Scottish ancestry, it does not
mean that there are not significant Scottish cultural legacies that they still experience, even if it is not as
explicitly obvious as wearing a kilt and playing bagpipe music for your wedding, as a friend of mine did.
For example, while growing up I was told that I was a European “mutt”, there was always one
background that was closer to my family. My great-grandmother was born in England, and met her
husband, an American soldier, when he was stationed in England. My grandmother experienced the
English culture from a woman who was as English as it gets, and thus, I have experienced Anglo culture
more purely than others have, perhaps. While my grandmother speaks American English, there are a
handful of words that she says with a British pronunciation, and occasionally, she will speak, and
someone else will comment on the pronunciation, remarking that they too are the child of a English
parent. That being said, my family’s particular circumstance of being Floridians who transplanted from
the Northeast creates an even more unique blend of culture.
I was born in Central Florida, the son of a Floridian and a transplant from New England.
Particularly in my region of Florida, due to the nice weather there is a large number of people from the
Northeast, creating an odd mix of beach and Northeast culture. Spend any time around Florida and you
will run into the “Salt Life” brand, found on car window stickers, t-shirts, and hats in a way similar to the
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CULTURAL BACKGROUND
way people use the American flag. John Steinbeck once wrote “Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps
stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the
obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans (Steinbeck, 1962).” I find the
same to be true of Florida, though to a lesser degree. Nonetheless, when I think about what has shaped
me, I think about the unique cultural experiences found in Florida. I did not realize how a simple thing
like enjoying college sports as a hobby (there is the old advice to not have a wedding in the south on a
Saturday in the Fall, as people will choose college football over the wedding) is taken to level 10 in the
South. My father was the first one in my family in four hundred years (I know this because of baptism
records) to renounce his Catholicism (though my grandparents would later on). I speculate that a large
part of this was he was the first one to leave the deeply Catholic state of Connecticut. Catholicism is so
tightly woven into my family heritage, that my father’s middle name, Calvert, comes from our ancestor,
Cecil Calvert, who was the founder of Maryland, created as a refuge for English Roman Catholics. But yet,
my father left. I do not think it is a coincidence that he was the first one to grow up “away from the
flagpole”, so to speak. Unlike his parents and ancestors, though he was born in Connecticut, he was not
surrounded by Catholics growing up. He was surrounded by Southern Baptists, and when he came to
find his own faith as a young man, he found a Southern Baptist church.
Value wise, my family has many typical Anglo American values. My father and uncle were
expected to play sports (they chose what every boy in their neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut
wanted to do, to emulate New York Yankee Don Mattingly) because that is how you learn skills like
teamwork, hard work, and perseverance. If there was one word to describe my family, it’d be “order”.
“The Puritan New England idea of freedom was based on a belief in an ordered existence— order in
communities, families, and the lives of individuals.” (McGoldrick, 2005).
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CULTURAL BACKGROUND
I now see another example of the Anglo-American culture. Independence being something
Anglo-Americans value, I have struggled to get my grandparents to allow me to see the needs they have
in their old age. My grandfather was several months into chemotherapy before I ever found out he had
cancer, and when I suggest they live near me, I am quickly rebuffed. My grandparents do not want to be
a burden.
Similarities and Differences
In contrast, other cultures have deep family connections. My part of central Florida had a unique
mix of cultures. While I hailed from the northerner Floridian demographic, the other nearly equally
present demographic is the Hispanic-Floridian. The Hispanic-Floridian culture appeared to be quite
different than mine. While my culture consisted of small groups of families moving down from the north
(for example, my grandparents moved to Florida, so the only family was my grandparents, my father and
uncle, and their wives and kids), my Hispanic-Floridian friends would have massive family get togethers.
Upwards of twenty people is not out of the norm for a gathering, meanwhile I do not have twenty family
members in the entire state of Florida! In a more communal and less nuclear family structure, there
would be numerous people ready to help my grandmother, even if she is their third cousin twice
removed. I observed this in my Hispanic-American friends. It seemed that all the Cubans in my town
were related, and even if they weren’t, they related by friendship certainly. This is a clear divide in
thinking. “Anglo-American culture embraces autonomy, privacy and self- developing human agency.
Since the Enlightenment the central concern has been to protect individual liberty (Marginson & Yang,
2020).” Consequentially, it makes sense that my grandfather would resist dependency on me. Some man
many years ago told his son that he had to be independent, who taught that to his son, who taught that
to his son, all the way to my grandfather, who likely feels that being tied to his grandson means that he is
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CULTURAL BACKGROUND
no longer independent, that the enlightenment ideals our ancestors decided were important, are not
compatible with his life structure.
For me, I have never experienced racism to the degree that I was on the losing end of a power
imbalance. I have experienced discrimination based on my race, which is racism, but never racism of any
consequence. In Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge asks “what
history had I inherited that left me alien in my place of birth? (Englund, 2022). For me, I have never felt
alien.
Cultural Identity Development
When considering the ways that my family heritage informs the way I view cultural
identity development, I go back to the opening Steinbeck quote. I read that book just as I started this
assignment, and it shaped a lot of the way I approached my family culture. It is easy to say that Anglo-
Americans have no culture, but it is simply the dominant culture, which makes identifying cultural causes
for things that much harder to flesh out. I have realized that we all come from somewhere, and in order
to advocate for a client, it is integral that I figure out “where they come from”. Even if they were born in
the same town that we are performing counseling, they come from someone, who came from
somewhere. These factors inform the way that one must approach the therapeutic relationship. Helm’s
White Identity Model is one model for viewing ethnic/racial diversity, specifically from the perspective of
a white person, which I am (Hays & Redford, 2023). While Helm only posited two identity models, one
for white people and one for people of color, it seems that this isn’t so binary. What about the Asian-
American, who arguably might benefit from their color in certain settings? Neither model fits perfectly.
Developing cultural identity is integral because these models are just that—models. They are imperfect. I
do not fit perfectly in the White Identity Model.
Social Justice
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CULTURAL BACKGROUND
As mentioned previously, despite experiencing racism, my experiences with racism have always
come with relatively little to no consequence. The difficulty in advocating from a white, Anglo-American
perspective, is that many white people do not observe racism. Many white people are still early on in
Helm’s White Identity Model. Many are still in first stage of the model, which is contact. The average
white student attends a school that is 77% white, a number that is far too high to frequently observe
racism (Nurenberg, 2020). I attended a high school with, from what I can recall, one black student and a
handful of Hispanic students. If it wasn’t for my elementary and middle school experience where I
observed racial cliques form (and prejudice flow out of them), I could have graduated adamant that
racism does not exist in modern America, simply because I was not racist, and I did not observe racism in
my setting. For the Anglo-American, the dominant racial group in America, experiences to observe
racism must be searched for. Social Justice and client advocacy is not a passive thing, or innate. Racism is
not going to hit white people who are surrounded by white people in the face. Instead, the Anglo-
American counselor has to search for opportunities to advocate. “Counselors following traditional
counseling theories and interventions are at risk of not addressing underlying societal issues that are
likely the cause of the client’s issues” (Hays & Erford, 2023). Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) is a
anti-racist organization for white individuals, and one of their values states “As white people, we are
going to make mistakes when doing racial justice work. It’s inevitable. We don’t know anyone who has
been in the work and hasn’t made a mistake. Not a single person” (Standing Up for Racial Justice, 2022).
As an Anglo-American, I have to recognize that my perspectives on social justice are not going to be as
complete as someone who has spent their entire life finding their place in a socially conflicted world.
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CULTURAL BACKGROUND
References
Englund, L. (2022). Against Color-Blindness: Anglo-American Trajectories of Racism in Why I’m No Longer
Talking to White People About Race and White Rage. Journal of Black Studies, 53(8), 824-844.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00219347221128919
Hays, D. G., & Erford, B. T. (2023). Developing multicultural counseling competence: A systems
approach. Pearson Education Inc.
McGoldrick Et al. (2005). Ethnicity and Family Therapy. Guilford Publications. 2005.
Nurenberg, D. (2020). “what does injustice have to do with me?”: Engaging privileged white students
with social justice. Rowman & Littlefield.
Our values. SURJ. (2022, July 21). https://surj.org/about/our-values/
Steinbeck, J. (1962). Travels with Charley: In Search of America. Easton Press.
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