Defining culture by what it is not
A white guy’s growing understanding of diversity
How can we define culture by what it is not? After all, don’t we define culture based on what it is such as our values, languages, religions, etc? Anthropologists talk of worldview, which also includes basic assumptions about how things work. Values are derivative of worldview.
I’m going to share with you how I learned a little about my European American culture through a story a friend told me recently and how I came to see my own culture a little clearer because of what it isn’t.
But before I do, let me give you some things to snack on.
A little about me
I am a European American male. 51 years old. My parents are from Irish and Scottish stock. I was raised and spent most of my life in the Northeast. Now living in the Pacific Northwest.
Verbalizing European American culture
I know when I’m asked to talk about my culture, I sometimes have difficulty doing so. I have to think about it and usually come up with some kind of generic answer. I have heard the same sorts of responses from other European Americans (EA).
For example these are some of the responses I have given and have also heard other EA’s say.
- I’m American
- We’re all Americans (When we start to drill down into this response, we don’t have to go very far to discover that there are big differences in what this means depending on who is speaking
I celebrate
- The 4th of July
- Thanksgiving
- Christmas
In my family we acknowledged our Irish background by celebrating St Patrick’s Day. My stomach still turns over when I think of all that over-boiled corned beef and cabbage I was made to eat.
Somehow all of these things leave me with a feeling that something is missing. There’s more to the story, but I can’t put my finger on it.
Lost in St Louis
As I mentioned, a friend told me a story recently that gave me greater insight into my own culture. Let’s call him Michael.
Michael is from the Northwest and holds numerous high level degrees. The word brilliant comes to mind when I think about him. A thirst for knowledge, curiosity, and making relevance of the world has been his path through life.
A number of years ago, Michael attended a professional conference in St Louis, Missouri. He decides to save money by taking a bus instead of a taxi to his hotel. Unfortunately, he finds out that the bus line ends far away from his hotel. Now he is lost and is walking around trying to find another connection to his hotel. After an hour of walking in business attire, he finds himself on the edge of Washington University. Michael has never been to this city, so everything is new.
At some point in his wanderings, he notices a sheriff is following him. What makes the act so apparent is that the sheriff is in an official car and driving at the speed Michael is walking. There is no attempt to conceal the surveillance. Michael makes nothing of this at first chalking it up to a bored cop with nothing better to do.
After two, or has it been three, hours of this, Michael is feeling panicked. He cannot understand why he has drawn the attention of this sheriff. He has no history in St. Louis, so no reason to be harassed. He is well dressed and has broken no laws. He is a professional not some street thug in need of chaperoning.
He is lost and feeling desperate. He tries to call a cab from a phone booth, but the cab company wants to know ‘where’r you at’. He doesn’t understand the question. He’s telling them the location. He goes into an Asian restaurant to get change to call another cab. The workers look at him with fear and suspicion. They nervously inspect his money and give him change. Finally someone tells him that in St. Louis, cabs will only pick up people at a specific location such as at a restaurant. Unwritten rules.
What Michael didn’t know at the time was that the county had a sort of curfew in effect. The curfew was not geared towards protecting children by ensuring they were home at a safe hour. It was a local rule aimed at keeping specific groups of people off the streets. There were no signs spelling out the curfew guidelines, so only the locals would know of its existence.
The one qualification a person had to have for the curfew to apply to them was being non-white. You see, Michael is African American. He didn’t know the rules that governed African Americans in that part of the country, because they were enforced but not advertised like so many of these types of rules..
Defining culture by what it’s not
Hearing this story helped me to understand my European American culture better not because I had never heard of this sort of experience before. It helped me, because I realized that I would never expect this to happen to me. It is not in my consciousness or part of my life experience.
What isn’t defines what is
In the art world, there is a term called negative space. It is used to describe the space around an object or form. Negative space is as important to the overall purpose of the work as is the primary focal point, because it gives the work context.
This term is not used as a value judgment. There is no good or bad, right or wrong. It is just context.
Michael’s story is, in a sense, the negative space that gives more context to my experience as a European American. It is about what my experience has not been.
A reverse view of injustice
Part of what all of this is about is coming to understand white privilege. For me, the concept of white privilege has been more about the conscious attitudes of European Americans.
What I’m realizing is that there is an unconscious aspect that has to do with what I don’t ever expect to happen to me. When I was young and had long hair, I did expect the possibility of being harassed by a redneck cop. If my hair had been short I wouldn’t have expected it. But what I never would have expected then or now is to be followed around for hours because of my skin color. It’s not in my consciousness.
I have been aware for a long time that there is discrimination for many people in housing, job promotions, getting credit, etc. Yet, as a European American I have never had the conscious expectation that any of this would happen to me.
For example, I would never expect to be discriminated against for:
- Getting a job
- Being promoted
- Buying a car
- Purchasing a house
- Renting an apartment
I know this happens to others, but the possibility of it happening to me is not in my consciousness when I go about these activities. I never think to myself ‘I wonder if this person is going to treat me fairly because of my skin color’.
No scientific poll needed
I think it’s pretty safe to say that we don’t need a scientific poll to say that many non-dominant groups have the expectation that they may face discrimination in everyday encounters.
This expectation is something that a big percentage of US citizens live with every day of their lives.
And even though we may not be consciously aware of it, not having an expectation that it could happen to us, partly defines European American culture. It’s the negative space of our culture or worldview. The part defined by what it is not.
Incremental learning and diversity
I have found that becoming culturally aware and learning about diversity is about gaining insight through many small, incremental steps. Generally speaking there aren’t a lot of big ah-ha moments, although Michael’s story might be one, because it has caused me to reflect deeply. The reverberations have been many.
For me, understanding diversity and culture is a life-long process. I don’t think I’ll ever arrive at a point where I can say I know what it’s all about. There are layers and layers to uncover. And the layers shift as societies shift. Everything is in movement. Consciousness evolves. Understanding evolves.
What’s your perspective?
- How do you define your culture?
- What is the ‘negative space’ or unconscious parts of understanding cultural?
- What insights can you share to help others understand culture?
12 Responses to “Defining culture by what it is not”
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Thoughtful post. I am a 49 year old Australian. White. Irish heritage.
Not too sure if Australia has culture, per se. The country is too young. Too diverse, yet too narrow. If that makes sense. Still predominantly white, western culture with anglo-saxon underpinnings. About the only culture the dominant group has here is reality TV, beer and sport. Sound familiar?
Spent five years living in Southeast Asia recently and that gave me more insights into my country, Australia. While John Howard and his “Liberal” (a misnomer ~ should read conservative) Party governed the country I was embarrassed at times to be considered Australian. I felt ashamed to be Australian at times. The Australian government’s treatment of refugees, indigenous Australians, asylum seekers and Australian citizens that they thought were illegal aliens still appals me. Australia had seemingly stepped back fifty years in time.
We have had some terrible outbursts of racial and religious intolerance in this country in recent years. The Cronulla riots, anti Islamic protests, and reciprocal actions. It is shameful. It is sad. During the Howard years that ‘negative space’ was given credibility.
Minorities find it difficult here too. People with non Anglo-Saxon names also find it difficult. A former colleague at a university recounted how they applied for dozens and dozens of teaching positions at a variety of tertiary institutions across the country after migrating to Australia from Czechoslovakia. He was highly educated. Anyway, he changed his first name and surname to rather conservative English names. His first job application using the new names was successful.
When I was courting my future wife at university she and her friends were looking for a new flat. My wife is Taiwanese. We checked out some flats together and as we were being shown around one particular flat the landlord remarked that we need not bother looking around anymore. I asked why and they responded that they only wished to rent out the flat to a white Australian person. I responded that their comment was rude and inappropriate. We left. I wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper about the incident and it was published. The vast majority of the replies supported the landlord. The ‘negative space’ was in my face.
How to help others understand culture? Live with other cultures. Study other cultures. Read about other cultures. Move outside that comfort zone that rigidly defines so many of us.
Regards, John.
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You are most welcome Tom. I thoroughly enjoy reading your blog. Visuals are important to me…. The human computer interface. The design of shower faucets in hotel rooms. Push and pull signs on hotel doors. All that stuff.
best wishes
John
John
One aspect of visuals being the “human computer interface” is that they evoke stories. That is at the heart of what VisualsSpeak does. Our tools and techniques elicit stories of either what has been, what is, or where a person or organization wants to be.
Stories are a natural part of the human experience. In fact, we see and hear stories all of the time. A resume is the story of someone’s education and job history. A company’s quarterly financial report is the story of three month’s of that company’s history told in numbers.
The advertising industry has known this for a long time and has been particularly effective at creating product and service stories. Buying a BMW (in the US) is not about buying a car. It is the story of being successful, of grabbing the bull by the horns (do you have this expression in Aussie Land?), and of telling the world you are someone to reckon with.
Stories contain the shared values of cultures and have been the primary way humans have passed them down to he next generations since the beginning.
Next time you look at a hotel shower faucet think about the story that lies behind it. The real interesting thing about visuals is if we took a photo of that shower faucet and gave it to ten different people, we would come up with ten different stories about how it came to be.
Don’t get me going about visuals!
Thanks for your perspective.
Tom, I have been photographing shower faucets and/or taps as bizarre as that may seem. Some defy description. One resembled the handlebars and controls for a small motorbike. You grabbed each handle and adjusted the relative temperature and pressure by acceleraing and deaccelerating to taste.
And I just love those glass doors at the entrance to a building that are emblazoned with a ‘Push’ sign yet present you with a handle designed to be pulled. Isn’t the human race wonderfully imperfect?
Yes, we do grab the bull by the horns here. ^_^
Cheers, John.
I have a very different view of culture having lived in various parts of the US and the world, studying in multidisciplinary programs, and having studied and taught cross cultural communication.
One of my favorite activities is to have students listen to pop music that is popular in various cultures. I then have students talk about their assumptions based on what they hear. I could see the same thing with visuals (in fact, I have done this when teaching ESL).
I believe it is human nature to make initial judgments based on their assumptions and experience. This is the fight or flight reaction. What is important as a human being is to understand why we have a reaction, learn to analyze it, and decide in a thoughtful way if we are misinterpreting cues. The fact is, your colleague may also have been getting strange looks from the African American community (if he was in a poor neighborhood where those who wore suits were considered a threat from authority), but since the neighborhood may have “looked” familiar, he was not threatened by the looks (when in fact he may have actually been in a threatening situation).
When I teach cross cultural communication, I begin by giving students words and doing stream of consciousness responses (what comes to mind). Often there are trigger words for some groups (for example, upstaters or downstaters, as I teach in New York state, cracker, easterner) with a real depth of feeling. Those within the same “groups” (New Yorkers for example), have a real emotional response that others outside of the group don’t get. We then discuss how these words trigger those responses. I can see doing the same thing with visuals (i.e. logos, the American flag, the winning shot of Italy winning the World Cup) which would also get to those “blank spaces” of culture and help to develop empathy for the reactions of others outside of your group.
Hi Virginia
You’ll get no argument from me that visuals can help access all the many facets of culture that are not obvious through a cursory glance. We live and breathe this at VisualsSpeak.
I also absolutely agree with you that it is human nature to make assumptions about people based on life experience, cultural group, etc. What I am attempting to do with this post is to illustrate how I miss pieces of what defines my culture because Of what I don’t expect as I go through my daily life.
For example, I have been aware of discrimination for a long time. I was back east recently. I traveled by plane, rented a car, stayed at hotels. I noticed that I carried no expectations that I might be discriminated against. When I introduced the ‘what if’ factor, my thinking changed quite a bit.
What if I was not part of the dominant group? Would I have the expectation that I might not have been offered a newer car at the rental agency? Seems like a fairly simple thing, but if I had to go through my whole life with these expectations than I imagine that my life perspective would be quite different.
I also use visuals when I teach ESL. They help me to not only engage my students and help them practice their conversational skills, but help me to uncover my students’ passions. Knowing what a person is passionate about makes learning (and teaching) more meaningful.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments.
Tom
Tom, I understand what you are saying, but let me try to put this in another way. What you are describing is like getting a blank coloring book and as you learn you “color” in the pieces. After a while, when it is all together, you have a colorful picture, which in some cases, is the first time you see the image as a whole (thus you “learn” your culture).
However, suppose instead of staying within the lines you explore and begin to color outside of the lines. It can become such a better picture and more of your own that can be interpreted many different ways. The way in which you described culture seems to me more of the coloring book variety. The problem is that there is no sense of agency (culture is “there” that can’t be changed or varied as the lines are already drawn). I like to look at culture as something that is more dynamic, where the lines are constantly being redrawn as we bump up against other cultures and experiences and understand them. We then must begin to recognize what is the “core” picture (or culture) and what goes beyond the lines, to overlap with other pictures and create a collage that when put together, seems to mesh together nicely (although when looking at them, they initially seem to be so different).
Virginia
I think we are saying some of the same things but in different ways. Let me take a stab at how I am looking at culture using your analogies plus one of my own.
On one level, I believe you are correct in that I am coloring within the lines as a way to make sense of Michael’s story and how it relates to me. It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle where after years of searching I’ve finally found two pieces that go together. I want to view the two pieces from many different angles so that I can get a better idea of how they interact.
In this initial stage, I am observing the different pieces as being fairly static which is my way of learning or getting ‘it’. When I am familiar enough with this new concept or way of looking at the world, I can start to color outside the lines by making inferences on how these pieces fit together with culture as a whole.
Actually, I do see culture as being dynamic and ever changing. And my view of culture is constantly being altered by the people I meet and the places I visit. At least in most of the world that I am aware of, there is no such thing as a static culture. It is constantly being shaped and re-shaped, folded over and blended with other viewpoints, philosophies and ways of being.
For me, the only time culture is static is when I am wrestling to incorporate a new viewpoint into my world view. I need to cement the new learning before I can extrapolate.
Let’s face it, as has been pointed out to me, I’m a white guy starting to ‘get’ something which for a lot of people seems simplistic and every day. I’ll keep trying to expand my viewpoint and hopefully between my insights and the insights of people commenting, such as yourself, we’ll be able to affect new understandings for others.
Thanks so much for the dialogue.
Tom
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