Anthropology Times

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I haven’t talked a lot with California locals about how they deal with cultural conflict. I hope to conduct interviews in this area that may help me gain a better understanding. In Mississippi and the South generally conversations about race and racism and cultural difference were common place. Either I don’t know how to start those conversations in California or they just aren’t happening as much or both. One of the first women I met in California was a traditionally-minded middle class white woman. And while on the surface we seemed very different, our willingness to talk about differences made friendship a real possibility. My conversations with her may have unfairly raised by expectations for the level of cross-cultural dialogue in the area as I did not have an appreciation for how exceptional she was on this front. I want to find that good cross-cultural dialogue again. If I don’t take classes over the summer, I will definitely make this a summer project.

Yours truly,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I’ve continued to ponder some of the cross-cultural difficulties that I’ve experienced in Southern California, but I’m afraid the work of the school semester has swallowed me up whole.

I have been pleased that my ability to do math has almost returned to “normal.” I never had any flashy math talents, but I was consistently good at it. When I was younger, I mistakenly gave too much credence to the importance of flashy math skills. I believe a number of young math and physical sciences students make this same mistake. While some amount of natural ability may be important to maintaining interest, doing the work is mostly just consistency and putting in the time.

I don’t enjoy chemistry in the same way that I enjoy math and physics, but I have been thinking of this semester of chemistry as good practice at putting in the time… reading and working problems. My study skills are slowly improving.

More culture talk next time.

Yours ever,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

There’s a picture of me with my grandmother from some time in the 1970s. We both have on three-piece polyester pant suits. We looked alike in someway beyond the physical. If the picture were set in motion it’s almost certain that we would move alike. In those moments when I’m jumped outside myself, when my analytical skills are at a peak and I observe myself fully, I see her ways.

I’ve been thinking lately that I should read some Mississippi fiction. I’ve been away for quite some time and I wonder what differences there may be in how I relate to the the fictional reality.

Until next time,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I will continue with that conversation concerning white people on TV by describing a  situation with which I had some difficulty. My interlocutor appeared to be a traditionally-minded middle class white woman. She was talking to me about her home life and detailing a list of things she does for her husband and children with undertones of passive-aggressive complaining set to a positive and bouncy beat. I recognized the form of her speech. I’ve heard it many times in movies and on TV. It’s a speech that I associate with a common way that middle class white women speak about being wives and mothers. And while I recognized that speech, I do not have the lived experience of hearing women talk this way around me my whole life growing up. I have had little access to the traditional grouping of responses to this speech.

The women with whom I would tend to be friends are the types to have responded that this woman’s husband and children could learn to be more appreciative of the things she does for them. The TV and movies that I watch that depict middle class white women giving this type of speech also tend to have this type of commentary. And this one type of response overwhelmingly makes up the mass of my experience with this stereotypical speech. Now, I knew enough to know that my interlocutor was not seeking this type of response, but it was the first one that came to mind for me and I did not immediately know what the alternatives were. And so, I smiled politely without giving any significant verbal response. There was tension.

Quite some time later, I believe I was able to figure out the response my interlocutor expected. I was to have complemented her on what a good mother she was and to have confirmed that there were all these things that we women know are important to do and that these things were part of our special intuition as women (an intuition that men and children didn’t share). Given the level of tension following my polite smile in response, I believe that my interlocutor felt that she had given me clear and obvious conversational cues to complement her mothering and I had purposely decided to not do so.

And even if that weren’t exactly the case in this situation, it’s representative of a general difficulty I’ve encountered more so in Southern California than anywhere else I’ve lived or visited – being in the midst of a conversation in which my interlocutor expects a very specific type of response and believes that this response is obvious and natural. Missing these types of conversational cues can significantly affect how others view how nice you are or how well you get along with the group. I’ve found that asking for clarification in these situations usually meets with a negative response particularly with women. Generally speaking, women are expected to know more of these learned cultural conversational interactions than men, and the expectation of this level of knowledge is part of why I believe the demands on a black woman assumed/expected to be middle class white are more than those on a black man assumed/expected to be middle class white.

In my personal experiences with cross-cultural communications, such as occurred during my time in law school in London, my women friends who spoke English as a second language expressed gratitude that I took care in my use of these types of learned cultural conversational cues. Many of these do not reach the level of idiomatic expression that would be found in a language text, but nevertheless are difficult to navigate without specific knowledge of the language culture.

Yours truly,
S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

So, it came to me that one of the main attributes that singled out some of the social scientists and aid workers who visited the Mississippi Delta as racists was that such people communicated that they didn’t just find Southern, black culture to be different than theirs; they thought it inferior. Though the condescending sentiment was invariably delivered with a smile and quite often with great subtlety and charitable zeal, the blow was not softened. Since being in California and being mistaken for someone who grew up in a housewife paradigm, this same attribute has been what I have found disturbing. A number of people appeared to be of the opinion that I should feel complimented to be considered such, that traditional housewife was a step up on the cultural development scale for black women. And while in Mississippi the notion that a black person was exactly like a middle class white person complete with every item of learned cultural behavior was tied to skin color and hair texture, some of my more recent acquaintances seem to tie this notion to income level and level of education… and they appear to think that this is less racist than the skin color notion or not racist at all. I found the latter more dehumanizing in that it appears to more specifically deny the existence of black culture. While I have met black people who are more culturally similar to middle class white people than to me, it usually had to do with having grown up in that type of community and never with skin color, income level or education.

When a black woman is falsely assumed to be middle class white, the depth and breath of knowledge about middle class white culture she is deemed to have is considerably more than for a black man. And unsurprisingly, within the radius of those with whom I found it the most challenging to interact, the black people present, if any, tended to be male. The knowledge of learned cultural behaviors I was deemed to have was knowledge to which I did not have access. While I did have friends of various backgrounds growing up (and beyond), I did not spend a lot of time visiting middle class white households. In Mississippi in the eighties and nineties, neighborhoods were highly segregated and too many social household visits across color lines, even when just children, was something to be avoided for safety considerations. And though television shows often featured middle class white households there were limits to what one could learn from such episodes with no context. For instance, it may have been easy to discern that an interaction between a man and woman was funny because of an exaggeration, but how much of an exaggeration was it? Was the exaggeration limited to just the verbal language or was the body language part of that, too, and so on… (Will continue next week.)

With continued devotion,
S.