David, Jordan and Chris, three middle class African American boys, with religious grandmothers, are also three different people; possibly with nothing in common, besides the color of their skin. One of them could come from a family where race is an important topic. One of them might be more affected by class, than race. Or by their family’s Southern roots. You really won’t know that unless you get to know them. I asked her for specifics because sorting people by their perceived culture can lead to putting them in a box.
Definitely. And you (generic you) need to guard against that, and to take into account all the factors when you’re working out who a kid is and how to deal with him. But it’s absurd to dismiss some factors outright as irrelevant to who a person is, when they clearly are relevant, whether to a minor degree or a major one.
Also, when you decide not to take another person’s culture into account, in practical terms that usually means simply pretending the person’s own culture is exactly like your own. In other words, it means discounting and dismissing the person’s own culture altogether. Which I think is a pretty dodgy way to operate.
No one is suggesting that we don’t take other cultures into account, or dismiss them outright. Simply that you make sure to allow the person to show or tell you which cultures have had an affect on them, instead of deciding you already know, while possibly alienating them in the process. Of course, it’s not actually a simple task.
Agreed. It’s a spectrum - with ‘defining someone based on his culture’ at one end, and ‘discounting his culture altogether’ at the other - and finding the right point on the spectrum for interacting with any given person at any given moment is going to be a complicated and constantly shifting process. But either extreme bothers me.
I think the latter would bother me more, if you were discounting what the person was actually telling you, but barring some sort of extreme cue, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with treating strangers the same and modifying your behavior as time goes on.
The problem with that, at least in my experience, is that it means that early on in your interactions with others, you’re creating a bias towards the people that are like you. In a lot of situations, that might not really matter, but when I’ve got a 150 kids that I don’t know well, if I basically interact with them using my “default”, I’m gonna treat them all like middle class white kids. And so I’ll get the most positive responses, I’ll feel most in sync with, middle class white kids. And that little head start in interacting with me means I learn their names first, I give them more individual attention (because I see a sea of generic faces and 2-3 that I already know), etc. So it can snowball. On the other extreme, the kids I’m mostly likely alienating a little by doing things that come across as obnoxious or uncouth or rude or aggressive will stay a little alienated, and that can snowball, too.
I guess I don’t believe a true neutral exists, here. But, again, it requires a lot of reflective practice.
I don’t think a true neutral exists either, but it will take time to realize that Edna is from Botswana and that Jose’s family has been in the U.S. for generations and none of them speak Spanish. I’m not sure it’s better to lump the black, white and Latino kids until three separate groups, and use that as until you learn more about them, than to try to approach all 150 of them as one large group, even if that does end in them all getting the standard middle class white kid treatment. I’m not a teacher, though, and this is all hypothetical to me, because I don’t have 150 new people to reach every year. I guess, if it’s working, then great, but I think that the majority of us, who aren’t starting over with a large group every year, would be better off sticking to our neutral, even if our neutral happens to be the most comforting to other people like us, and adjusting things as time goes on.
Well, it’s a pretty dynamic process from day one. There’s certainly way too much variation for white/black/Hispanic/Asian to mean much at all, ever. I don’t think I really disagree, I’m more disagreeing with the idea that people have that a person should just have a sort of Chinese wall between what they know about a person’s background and how they interpret that person’s actions/act towards them. Or that talking about how different people do things differently is inherently a bad thing (which was the OP’s point).
I guess I’m picturing this method being carried out by the people who don’t see the variation and imagining the results*, which is why I asked for specific examples.
*Like - Sanjay’s people are intelligent, but he’s failing this class. Must be lazy. Or - we can’t expect Jane’s parents to encourage her to go to college. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t value education.
I was relieved that the examples weren’t things along those lines.
The examples I was thinking of were stuff like this:
Francesca and Naoko are both new to your class/workplace/local pub/whatever. Francesca just moved here from Italy, Naoko from Japan. Francesca talks loudly, is physically demonstrative and expressive, stands close to people when she talks to them. Naoko talks quietly, is much less physically animated and stands farther from people. If you discount their background cultures, you’ll decide that Francesca is outgoing and friendly, while Naoko is reserved and introverted. That might be true, but it might not - those cues might be cultural artifacts. Discounting the background cultures will actually lead you to assume that you’ve got information you don’t really have - it’ll lead you to put people in boxes that might not actually fit them.
Raj is Hindu, (or at least his parents are. I can’t remember if Raj ever identified himself as one.)
More than once, but one comes to mind first:
From the episode where they’re prepping to go to the Arctic:
Raj: Well, I’m a Hindu. My religion teaches that if we suffer in this life we are rewarded in the next. Three months at the North Pole with Sheldon and I’m reborn as a well-hung billionaire with wings.
There was also this exchange in the episode where Raj is threatened with deportation:
Leonard: I’ve always been a little confused about this. Why don’t Hindus eat beef?
Raj: We believe cows are gods.
Sheldon: Not technically. In Hinduism, cattle are thought to be like God.
Raj: Do not tell me about my own culture, Sheldon! In the mood I’m in, I’ll take you out, I swear to cow!
Oh god, nothing like that. More like “Sanjay is acutely aware that his peers and sometimes teachers often expect him to be “naturally” brilliant without effort and he’s really probably not any quicker than most of the other kids and so a lot of that “I could do it, I just don’t give a fuck” bullshit comes from a panicky need not to be seen as trying and failing, so the real key to this one is to make him comfortable with the idea of trying”. Obviously, that involves a lot of paying attention to the individual, but it’s paying attention to the individual* with an understanding of how the demographic factors of their identity shape their interactions.* And you don’t get to that understanding if you don’t spend a great deal of time having potentially uncomfortable conversations with people about their identities.