American culture Quote by Robert Kegan

““American culture quite naturally provides these ideological supports to those it favors and elects as fellow participants in the social and psychological institutions which regulate its established arrangements. Essentially, these favored persons have been middle-class white men. A middle-class white man's evolution out of embeddedness in the interpersonal is not a moving spectacle in our culture precisely because there is no spectacle - you cannot watch it (unless you look closely at a given individual over time". It will stand out in the private relations of the person's immediate network but it does not stand out as figure on the cultural ground precisely because it is embedded in the tacit ideology of the culture. This is one reason the tacit ideology is so powerful and insidious for those it excludes: it cannot be seen; it is not held up for examination. What may be the most important consequence of the upheavals of the last fifteen years - largely through the attention these upheavals brought to the arrangements between blacks and whites (the 'civil rights' movement'), men and women (the 'women's movement'), and the government and the governed (the 'anti-war movement') is that the ideological nature of American life was made explicit. (Evolutionarily, if I were to apply my scheme to the culture at large, I should have to say the upheavals of the sixties and early seventies represented the transitional angst of the emergences out of 'institutional' embeddedness; of course, from the point of view of the old world not yet left behind, this same upheaval must look like a collapse of our basic institutions, which is just what popular analyses says.) For persons excluded from the tacit culture of ideology to make this move, it is necessary for them to construct their own ideological support which will necessarily stand out. Whether the ideology is feminism or black power or gay rights, it will have common features which serve the absolutely crucial function of supporting the evolution of meaning. It holds and recognizes the group-extensiveness of the new differentiation ('black pride,' 'I am woman') and protects against reabsorption into the old embeddedness (whether by moratoria from intimate relations with men, say, or turning to women - one's comrades - for intimate relations; or the adoption of a strident language which can be as much an effort to hold off an old self as it is an address to others).””

— Robert Kegan