User:Arkman87

Social Background

''It is important to know where I came from in order to understand who I am. Social forces have a strong impact in everyone’s life, and I am no exception. My name is Noah Mitchell, and this is who I am.''

I am a white, male, Anglo-Saxon protestant. My family is not entirely certain of exactly where we came from, but I have managed to piece together small chunks of information coming mostly from my father’s mother. As for my mother, she and my father divorced when I was a toddler, and I barely keep in contact with her; in addition, my stepmother has no idea of where her family comes from. My grandmother has been able to tell me that I descend mostly from British and Dutch ancestry.

Being as white as they come, I have enjoyed the many privileges that the United States of America has to offer its Caucasian citizens. To my knowledge, I have never been the target of racial nor sexual discrimination. It is sad to live in a society where I know that am treated differently than those with darker skin than mine. There have been a few times in just the last year that I have been buzzed into a secure, undisclosed bank lobby in a small central-Florida town, walking just seconds ahead of an African-American with a paycheck who is denied entry and made to walk through the bank’s drive-through.

In addition to my preferential race and sex status, I am also a card-carrying member of the United Methodist Church, a mainstream protestant religion, even though I have not attended a service there in months. There is an ever-increasing bias towards those with secular affiliations in America, but I still fit in with one of the largest denominations of the largest religion in America, Christianity. As you will see later on, my religion plays a huge role in who I am and who I want to be.

I owe much of the opportunity I enjoy in the U.S. to my ancestors that immigrated here more than 150 years ago. Again, relying only on the patrilineal records I have found, I know that my grandfather’s side of the family is from Great Britain, and my grandmother’s side of the family is mostly Dutch. Something that I did not expect to find is that is that both sides of my family seemed to have come into the country at almost the same time.

My grandfather’s grandfather was the first Mitchell to arrive in America in what must have been the mid-nineteenth century. I speculate that there was English and Scottish intermarriage before his arrival because Mitchell is a Scottish name, a sept of clan Ross, but I had much difficulty singling out a time period in which the Scottish name would find its way over to Great Britain. My grandmother vaguely remembers him as being a miner that relocated frequently, taking his family with him, before taking permanent residence in Kentucky.

No nation was more strongly associated with mining at the time than the British. During the 1850s alone, more than 37,000 British miners migrated to the United States. It is most likely that my great-great-grandfather was a coal miner. Upon arriving in America, many coal miners went to either Pennsylvania or Appalachian states like Kentucky. On the other hand, British hard-rock miners tended to bring along their families more than coal miners; they were much more often older men with families compared to the fit, young native men working with them. Records show that there was much incentive to mine in America. The work paid around two dollars a week, which helped miners pay their four dollar rent, but the nature of the back-breaking labor and the near-certainty of an early death did not attract everyone off of the boat. Miners and their families lived in houses often owned by the mining company in towns that the mining companies would run. Alcoholism was a major problem among miners, creating many drunken brawls and draining much of their pay. I am uncertain, but this tendency for miners to drink excessively may be involved in my family’s disposition toward alcoholism for several generations, leading up to my father’s divorce and the time he spent in Alcoholics Anonymous. Overall, life was not easy for nineteenth-century miners, and my great-great-grandfather’s presence and experience in this country influences me today.

My grandmother’s grandfather came to America from Holland. My grandmother has only faint recollections of him because he died early in her childhood. Between 1835 and 1880, 62,000 Dutch emigrated from Holland, 90% of whom came to the United States. The largest wave, over 20,000, came between 1846 and 1856, in conjunction with a major potato crop failure. 10 years prior to the failure was marked by the intensification of pressure placed on dissenters and seceders of the monarch’s reform church; the crop failure is viewed by many to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for the thousands with emigration already on their mind.

In the mid-nineteenth century, and for a long time prior, national identity and religious identity could be almost considered inextricably bound. Information coming from my father told me that his maternal grandfather was the first in his family to break away from the Calvinist church in favor of the Baptist denomination. This leads me to believe that my grandmother’s grandfather was a Dutch Calvinist. During the time of vast Dutch immigration, Protestants were much more likely than Catholics to emigrate. In addition, the Protestant Dutch tended to form ethnic enclaves, unlike Catholics who lived with their families in rural areas. Most of the immigrating Dutch ended up in northern states like New York, Michigan, or Wisconsin. With the golden age of Dutch immigration and conquest over a century and a half earlier, there was a stronger concentration of Dutch descendants in these areas, especially in New York.

I have now reached a point of vague uncertainty. My grandmother grew up in Kentucky, but she is not sure of when the family got there. It is unlikely that this occurred with the first generation to move to America, since the Dutch tended to stay clustered in the northern states. At the time of my great-great-grandfather’s arrival in Kentucky, over 52% of the white population was of English descent. Those families coming from Holland, however, only accounted for 1.3% of the population. A variety of things could have given the Dutch incentive to move. Perhaps they had to move because they became involved in the Civil War, or maybe there was a promise of cheap farmland in the Appalachian region, possibly appealing to a family that became involved with and disillusioned by the California gold rush. It is hard to say, but all I know is that my dad’s mother and my dad’s father were living in Kentucky at the same time, and that is why I am here, now presenting this information.

My grandparents were married in Cuvington, Kentucky and raised seven children in a state of poverty. My grandfather was a roofer, and my grandmother worked on and off in various government positions, most frequently a schoolteacher, depending on when she was having a baby. They lived on the border of Livingston and Cuvington, both towns so small that no one made a distinction between them. They rarely had a car, and my grandfather would often catch rides to work, carrying around his heavy, two-story, wooden extension-ladder. Early on in the marriage, they lived in a Livingston farmhouse without electricity, and as they older children moved out, they moved into a trailer in Cuvington in order to save money.

In Cuvington, my father met and married my biological mother when he was 16, and she was one year his senior. Within a year, my father had to drop out of high school and join the military in 1980 to support his new-born son. As he moved up in rank through the military, eventually becoming a prominent officer, he moved his family around the world. My sister was born in North Carolina in 1985, and I was born in Viccenza, Italy on May 8, 1987. For many years, my father’s new family was as poor as he had been growing up.

My mother and father divorced shortly after coming back to America about the time that I turned one. My mother moved back to Kentucky, and my father continued moving around the country, taking my older brother, my older sister and me with him. Three years later, he married my stepmother, a fellow officer in the army, and moved his newly maternally endowed family to Colorado. Upon leaving the army, he became a real estate agent for Remax, but the family moved shortly thereafter to Gainesville, Florida, where my stepmother grew up, taking their new baby boy with them.

In Gainesville, my father became a roofer, like his father before him, and his aspirations led him to start his own roofing company two years later, finally enabling him to bring home a middle class salary. Eventually, my father began to fulfill all of the aspirations that sociology says he should not have nor fulfill. He sold his roofing company and invested in real estate; at that point, I had spending money for the first time in my life. As he bought more and more real estate, he rented them out to tenants, who often damaged them severely. When I became homeschooled after flunking out of a gifted program in middle school, I helped repair his houses and gained a work ethic that I would not have otherwise cared to have.

My stepmother played the role of secretary, real estate agent, leasing agent, accountant and housewife. She came from a working class family, daughter to a communications tower repairman. Her original plan in life was to enroll in law school to become a lawyer after she left the military, but she opted instead to become a stepmother to a poor family with three children. She is the stepmother to my older siblings, but to my younger brother and me, she is “Mom”. If my father was there to teach me how to work hard to achieve goals, then she was there to show me that there are more important things in life than material possessions.

If there is anything that both of my parents wanted me to have, it is a firm rooting in Christianity. We moved into a historic neighborhood of reasonably wealthy people when we came to Gainesville (we were able to do this because we bought the house that my stepmother grew up in from her parents). Next door to our house was a large, Civil War era United Methodist church. The beginnings of my faith took place in a stuffy, pastel-colored classroom every Sunday morning. When I was old enough, my parents encouraged me to join the church’s youth group, much to the dismay of my older sister already in attendance. It was during a worship service in this group several years later that first felt a call in my life to become a youth pastor, working in fulltime ministry.

Shortly thereafter, I did something that not many American Christians have done; I left my denomination. The traditional church was fine for me when I was wandering through life in terms of high school, but after actually being given direction, United Methodism was far too complacent for me; I was tired of seeing dozens of old people coming to homogeneous services just to be seen by all the right people. I spent several months attending different services at different protestant churches in many different denominations before I found the charismatic, pentecostal Assemblies of God. I have been attending Sunday morning services, and I am now a volunteer for the youth group and technical director for its light and sound. As you might imagine, the transition mumbling through centuries old hymns played on a centuries old pipe organ to watching people faint and speak tongues was not an easy one. I still do not fit in with others in the church, myself being the least charismatic member, but I value their dedication to God and the social relationships I have managed to form.

Another important social factor in my life was the expectation on the part of my family and society at large for me to go to college. My father, the dropout, encouraged me to enter the dual enrollment program at a community college in my town, mostly due to his distaste for high school. The program allowed me to take college courses for both college and high school credit. I graduated with an Associate of Arts degree the week before I turned 18. Because of career goal, I enrolled in the University of Florida’s department of Agriculture and Life Sciences as a Family, Youth, and Community Sciences major. The program seemed to be the most reasonable choice for an aspiring youth pastor getting an education at a secular institution. I rather like the process of accelerated education, and this combined with my interest in higher learning means that I will begin an accelerated Masters degree program during my senior year at the University of Florida. This means that I will earn a Masters degree in Family, Youth and Community Sciences before I am legally allowed to drink.

In closing, social forces have had a profound effect on who I am. Being a white, educated, Christian American has an immeasurable impact on how I live my life, and I owe that to the social forces around me. These social forces govern society and how society interacts with me. The type of interaction I have with society is often based on my genealogy, a direct result from my great-great-grandfather breaking his back to make a living in a new country. Without considering race, social forces push me based on all of my grandparents creating the place in society for my parents to fit in or move on from, my parents influencing me and what I value and also my religion pushing me to pursue a career that will someday place me in society according to the income it gives me. Society has played a major role in who I am, and it will continue to play a role in who I will be.