My Cultural Mosaic

In their article “The Cultural Mosaic: A Metatheory for Understanding the Complexity of Culture,” Chao and Moon suggest that it is helpful to look at culture as a mosaic or as a picture that is made up of distinct pictures or pieces.  To me this makes sense because while an individual’s skin color and gender both have an effect on who that person is and what kind of decisions they make, those two characteristics have no real effect on each other.  So the different tiles that I would use to describe my cultural mosaic include: female, white, middle-class and learner.

When I was younger, I really hated my name.  I knew more men who were named “Dana” than women, and I felt that I should have a more feminine name.  I have since come to like my name, but it was a sore spot for awhile there.  Anyway, my dad told me that he chose my name because it was ambiguous and so that when I filled out a job-application any future employers wouldn’t automatically be able to decide if I were male or female.  I think that this is when I first realized that gender inequality was and occasionally continues to be an issue.  While I don’t feel that my gender is something that I’ve been discriminated against a lot, I do have an interest in seeing more cracks and breakage in that glass ceiling that we have and I do tend to pay attention to how things have and will affect women. 

While I have fair skin, I don’t really think about it much other than to remember to have sun block in the summer because I burn very easily.  My white skin comes from my Euro-mutt background of Polish, French and German ancestry.  My maternal grandmother is full Polish and grew up in Polish community outside of Detroit and we still identify ourselves as of Polish descent.  My paternal grandfather’s sister researched and created our family tree and discovered that we had German and French in our ancestry, though I don’t think any of the cultural influences of either country have really continued in my family.  I mentioned already that I don’t think much of my own skin color, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t profoundly affected my life in ways that I’m not even aware of. 

I come from a very middle-class, pro-union background.  My dad started at General Motors right out of high school and worked for 27 years before he retired.  He was also a member of the UAW.  My uncle also was a UAW member and worked for General Motors before retiring, though he didn’t get the benefit of early retirement like my dad did.  My paternal grandfather moved his family from Kentucky to Detroit for the auto industry because that was where the jobs were.  In short, when “take your child to work day” came around, I went to the factory my dad worked at and he gave me a tour and told me that his job was to attach the door to the car or whatever it was he did at the time.  If it wasn’t for my dad’s job at GM and the UAW benefits he had, I wouldn’t have had the amazing health care that I grew up with and I wouldn’t have had many of the things that I had growing up.  So when the auto industry started failing, which was right at the end of my dad’s career, and people started to really bash the union and GM, I was really torn.  I could see that perhaps the union had gone too far, but I wasn’t willing to say that unions are horrible and should be dismantled completely.  Furthermore, I am a member of a union now, though it’s not as effective as the UAW.  I also could see that perhaps American auto companies had made some bad decisions, but I still won’t buy a foreign car.

Finally, I am a learner and I place a very high value on education.  I talked about how my dad worked on the line at GM for 27 years.  But in addition to building cars and helping raise my sister and me, he also went from having no degree to having a MBA.  When I was growing up, I knew that there were options other than college for other people, but I never felt that anything but college was an option for me.  I dual-enrolled during high school at LCC and went to CMU the fall after I graduated high school.  Even though I have a BS right now, I still find myself working at a retail store.  The thing that consoles me about that is that I am working towards another degree; one that I hope will be more useful than my BS in Political Science and Sociology.  One thing that I can’t understand, though, is how people can work in this retail store for ten, fifteen, twenty years.  I have a difficult time picturing myself being content there, but the people that I’m referring to seem to be.  It’s something that I have to be careful of, remember that not everybody has the same expectations for themselves that I do and not everybody has the same strengths that I do.

There are certainly many more tiles that I can fill in on my cultural mosaic, but that covers the basics.  I am also a liberal, which is partially influenced by my family’s history in the auto industry and as union members.  Interestingly, my family is mostly conservative.  I’m also non-religious.  When I was growing up, my maternal great-grandmother always said that even the worst Catholics didn’t eat meat on Good Friday, and that was about as much as my family did religiously.  I still don’t eat meat on Good Friday, but that’s more a tribute to my great-grandmother rather than any religious reasons.  I am also a member of generation y and I am very comfortable with technology and with instant communication.  As I grow older and learn more, my cultural mosaic will shift and change, but this is what it is right now.

Sources:

Chao, G. & Moon, H. (2005). The cultural mosaic: A metatheory for understanding the complexity of culture. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90 (6), 1128-1140.