Cultural identity

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I, too, am Harvard

harvard2An article over the week-end in the NY Times discussed racial “microaggressions”, an increasingly used term on U.S. college campuses to describe “the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture”.  The Times cites examples: “A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American’s ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino’s ability to speak English without an accent.” These are clearly not examples of full-blown racism, but are indicators of a lack of awareness and sensitivity.  At a number of universities currently there are discussions of microagressions, through Facebook pages, photo projects, or blogs. There is debate in these forums as to whether the examples given are legitimate reasons to feel slighted or whether, as the Times states, they represent “a new form of divisive hypersensitivity, in which casual remarks are blown out of proportion.” The term’s prominence comes in part from the popularity of a blog begun by two Columbia University studens, the Microagressions Project.

At Harvard, a photo project called, “I, too, am Harvard” explores microaggressions experienced by black students at the elite university.  Many cite references to the appearance, often centered around hair, or casual statements about it being nice to be black when applying to Harvard.  That latter comment reflects one likely origin of such comments, the perceived experience of minority students receiving preferential treatment through affirmative action programs.  The photo project at Harvard has since morphed into a play.

An interesting take on such slights comes from Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In a recent interview on NPR, Adichie recounts the bafflement she felt when a black fellow student at Princeton took offense at a classmate talking about watermelon.  As an African, she has had to learn the cultural dimensions of being black in the U.S.  Interestingly, she has a lot to say in the interview about hair and the importance of how Nigerian women chose their hair styles, a topic that also comes up in her wonderful novel, Americanah.

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Becoming “Clark Rockefeller”

Christian Gerhartsresiter, aka Clark Rockefeller

Christian Gerhartsresiter, aka Clark Rockefeller

An interview this week on NPR’s Fresh Air brought back to light the case of “Clark Rockefeller”, the con man who was in reality Christian Gerharstreiter from Germany, not, as he claimed, a member of the Rockefeller clan.  That claim came after previous identities adopted over the years including being a British baronet, a cardiologist in Las Vegas, a Hollywood producer, and a bond broker in New York. The interview was with author Walter Kirn, who was a friend of “Rockefeller” for years.  Listening to the interview, it seems hardly credible that Kirn would accept the wild stories he was being told: that his friend was a “freelance central banker”, that he had never eaten in a restaurant, that he had attended Yale when he was 14, that he had a master key to the Rockefeller Center, that on successive week-ends he had as house guests Brittany Spears and then Angelika Merkel. It turns out that Gerhartsreiter was not only a con man, but he had brutally murdered a man in California in the 1980’s, a crime for which he was convicted last year and resentenced to prison for 27 years to life.

How was the massive deception possible?  Gerhartsreiter was skilled in reading his conversation partner and accurately gauging what stories would be believable.  His verbal skills were impressive, given the fact that he was not a native speaker of English.  The family with whom he originally stayed on coming to the U.S. as an exchange student (which he fraudulently arranged himself) when he was 18 reported that he experimented with different accents.  Eventually, he settled, according to Kirn, on an accent that sounded like Katharine Hepburn’s cousin. But, probably even more important than his language ability, were Gerhartreiter’s non-verbal skills.  His bearing, dress, and general appearance seemed to confirm his identity.  He acted out his roles with confidence and great self-assurance.  His success calls to mind the TED talk by Amy Cuddy in which she discusses the importance of body language and the possibility of adjusting your posture and appearance to convince yourself and others of the identity you want to convey.

Gerhartsreiter’s case also for me brings to mind a concept in modern linguistics:  performativity, originally conceived by J.L Austin. The idea of “performance” is that communicative competence is not, as often conceived, a matter of mastering the whole grammar system of a language, but rather of being able to strategically choose what is needed in particular contexts.  In this way, according to Suresh Canagarajah, performance “gives primacy to acts of creative and strategic communication motivated by the enigmatic purposes of complex individuals.  It draws attention to playfulness, fabrication, strategic negotiations, situationally motivated shifts, multiple identities” (from the forward to Clemente/Higgins, Performing English with a post-colonial accent:  Ethnographic narratives from Mexico). Christian Gerhartsreiter was clearly a master of performance in a number of senses.

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Philly sound: Dying out?

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Philly cheesesteak: More popular than the accent?

Interesting article in the NY Times about what the author describes as “the most distinctive, and least imitable, accent in North America,” namely the “Philadelphia, or Filelfia, accent [which] may sound like mumbled Mandarin without the tonal shifts”.  What has been unique about the Philly sound was that it represented a mash-up of Northern and Southern accents: “Nowhere but in the Delaware Valley can you hear those rounded vowels — soda is sewda, house is hay-ouse — a clear influence from Baltimore and points south.”

Some examples of Philly talk from the article:

Jeet? D’jou wanna get a sawff pressle?  [Did you eat? Do you want to get a soft pretzel?]
Dry da wooder awf wit a tail.   [Dry the water off with a towel.]
’Lannic City’s too torsty anymore.  [Atlantic City is too touristy these days.]

To hear the accent, check out the series of YouTube videos by Sean Monahan. Unfortunately, according to a recent study by linguists at the University of Pennsylvania, the accent is changing and moving towards greater similarity to other Northern accents.

Speaking of regional accents, a survey was conducted by cupid.com to determine the “sexist” North American accent.  The winner?  Southern.  The least sexy? “Mid-Atlantic” – does that mean Philly? On the other hand, the Philly Cheesesteak continues to find lots of admirers.

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Not in Putin’s plans: Crimean Tatars

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Crimean Tatars in traditional dress

Part of the tense, complicated crisis currently in Crimea is the role of an ethnic group indigenous to the Black Sea peninsula, the Crimean Tatars.  Their history has made them side much more with Ukraine than with Russia in the current stand-off.  They were forcibly removed by Stalin from Crimea, which they consider their ancestral homeland, and in the waning days of the Soviet Union, under Gorbachev, gradually began returning to Crimea.  Today they represent some 12% of the population of Crimea. Having suffered persecution under both Czarist and communist Russia, the Crimean Tatars are understandably nervous about Crimea coming back under Russian control. In fact, until the recent arrival of Russian military units in Crimea, the Tatars were among the few groups outside Western Ukraine actively proclaiming their allegiance to the new Ukrainian government. According to a recent article in the New Republic, the Crimean Tatars are not likely to go along with an increasing Russification of the peninsula and may  cause trouble for Putin’s possible plans to annex Crimea.

The Crimean Tatars differ from both Russians and Ukrainians in religion (Muslim) and language (Crimean Tatar).  Their language belongs to the Turkic language family and is one of the treasured cultural traditions the Tatars maintained in exile.  Today, however, living alongside other Crimeans speaking Russian and Ukrainian, there are fears that the language is endangered.  Should the language die out, so would a crucial element of the group’s cultural identity and cohesion.  In an interesting reflection of socio-political realities, the written language has gone through myriad transformations, from using Arabic script, to Turkic, to Cyrillian, to a Latin-based alphabet. 

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Fortune Cookies in Shanghai

Co-owners David Rossi and Fung Lam of the Fortune Cookie

Co-owners David Rossi and Fung Lam of the Fortune Cookie

A few years ago I went with two visiting colleagues from our Chinese partner university, Fudan University in Shanghai, to eat at what was considered the best Chinese restaurant in Richmond. They had a hard time with the menu, despite the fact that dish names were given in both English and Chinese.  What really baffled them, however, were the fortunes cookies, which they not only had never eaten, but had never heard of. Anyone who has visited China has experienced how different authentic Chinese restaurant food is from what is sold as “Chinese” in the U.S. This is not unique to the U.S. or to Chinese food.  Consider “Indian” or “Mexican” food in the U.S., but the same applies to Chinese food in India or Russia. In India, for example, adding cheese to a “Chinese” dish is common. Jennifer 8. Lee in her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles discusses the various origins of American Chinese food.  She also has done a nice TED talk on the same topic, the hunt for General Tso.

These thoughts were brought on by a story on NPR on a recently opened restaurant in Shanghai, called Fortune Cookie.  It features, of all things, American Chinese food, including General Tso’s chicken, and has turned out to be popular, especially for ex-pats from the U.S. who are nostalgic for the particular variants of Chinese food they grew up on.  The comments from Chinese diners, however, were not universally positive, with the majority finding the dishes too sweet or too salty. Intriguing to the Chinese customers, however, are the white cardboard takeout boxes, something else unknown in China.

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Pete Seeger

peteAre there distinguishing characteristics of Americans?  To my mind, one of the qualities that fits many of our “American originals” is idiosyncratic creativity – making your own path to success and keeping to it despite obstacles and opposition.  Pete Seeger is a great example of holding to your convictions and following through.  His mission was to make the world better – end wars, encourage cooperation, promote democracy – through music.  Despite personal attacks on him and his beliefs, including being blacklisted, Pete Seeger kept to his mission. He didn’t have a beautiful voice – he would be the first to mention that fact.  But his voice had the ring of authenticity and originality, reminiscent in that respect of Jonny Cash, Bob Dylan, or Kris Kristofferson.  His songs draw from American history and American circumstances but have resonated well beyond the borders of the U.S. American music has been one of our best, most positive exports, and reminds us of how much music is one of the human achievements that helps draw us all together.

One of the central ways Pete wanted to bring people together was through having them sing together.  Any concert he gave inevitably included sing-alongs.  He was especially eager to have children sing.  Up until his death, he volunteered at a local school to come in and teach and sing with the children.  One of my fondest memories of his music are his wonderful animal songs.  I remember playing “The Foolish Frog” over and over again for my children.  Pete had a serious mission in life but he knew the value and power of humor  – something which is evident in a lot of his songs.

Of the many tributes coming in now upon news of his death yesterday, that by Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic seems to me to have struck the right note: “His critics often called Pete Seeger anti-American. I think the opposite was true. I think he loved America so much that he was particularly offended and disappointed when it strayed, as it so often has, from the noble ideals upon which it was founded. I don’t think that feeling, or the protests it engendered, were anti-American. I think they were wholly, unabashedly American.”

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Frau Merkel’s lover

16933418,14048206,highRes,1344610095Sorry, there isn’t one. François Hollande, her counterpart across the Rhein?  Sure, he’s French.  The stories in the news recently from France and Germany make it hard to imagine that the two cultures have Charlemagne (Karl der Große) as a common ancestor, or that they share much at all in terms of values and way of life. It’s nothing surprising or shocking in France that a politician would have a maîtresse, even a politician as uncharismatic and down-to-earth as François Hollande. Just because they are elected to public office, French politicians aren’t expected to stop being human or men or French.

In Germany one expects politicians to be serious, that is to say, to focus on their responsibilities and to do their duty.  Such extra-curricular activities are verboten as an unnecessary and unwanted distraction.  How do German leaders break the public trust?  If they plagiarize on their university theses, as has caused the downfall of several ministers in the last few years (dishonesty).  Or they fall behind schedule on a building project, such as the debacle over the years late new Berlin airport (incompetence).  Or they spend an inordinate amount of public money (in this case from Church tax paying German Catholics) on luxury for themselves (extravagance), as did the “bling bishop” (Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst of Limburg).

The big news in Germany in recent days has nothing to do with lovers or sex, but instead with something much closer to the hearts of many Germans: their automobiles.  The scandal in the news is the sudden loss of trust in an organization Germans depend on and see as the ideal complement to their cars, namely their automobile association, the ADAC (Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club). The ADAC has served as the trusted advisor to German car owners and prospective car buyers since 1903.  The most widely published periodical in Germany is not Der Spiegel or Die Zeit, it is the ADAC Motorwelt (motor world). Now it turns out that data supplied by the ADAC (for example on the number of votes for car of the year) has in some cases been either manipulated or invented, possibly in order to inflate the importance of the organization in order to gain more members.  This is not just dishonesty, incompetence and greed – it’s all three combined to swindle Germans in relation to their prize possession, the symbol of German economic power and engineering prowess. Mein Gott, o Gott! 

Unlike their preferences in cars, Germans don’t like flashy leaders.  What they do value in leaders and cars is dependability and familiarity – just the qualities the reliable and consistent Mutti Merkel provides.  Mutti take a lover?  No way.

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Homophobia & Colonialism

uganda-anti-gayAmong the legacies of colonialism are habits and attitudes brought by the colonizing powers and which persist beyond the colonial period. That may be in some cases a taste for particular foods or styles of preparation – for example, the Portuguese treats I remember enjoying in Macau (at a casino food court, no less). The French influence on Vietnamese cuisine is another example (although pho may or may not be related to pot-au-feu). Even more evident is of course language, with India, Pakistan, the Philippines or Hong Kong taking advantage of the historical role of English to foster wide use of that language in business and education. But the few instances of positive colonial legacies pale in comparison to the pernicious cultural, economic, and political legacies of the colonial powers.  That includes suppression of native languages along with countless other acts of cultural imperialism.

What we are witnessing now in Uganda is just such a sad legacy. As discussed in a piece in the Think Africa Press, one of the sources of homophobic attitudes in that and other African countries is a holdover from imported and imposed Victorian concepts of sexuality.  There are of course other factors involved as well, one being the anti-Western backlash against what can be seen as neo-colonial pressure for Ugandans not to pass anti-gay legislation.  Another being the possible influence of American evangelicals. Uganda is by no means alone, According to the International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), there are at least 76 countries where homosexuality is illegal. Many have colonial histories as well but by no means all, and not all former colonies have Victorian attitudes to blame.  Russia’s anti-gay legislation and its wide-spread popular support seem sadly to be home-grown.

Uganda’s President indicated recently that he will not sign the anti-gay bill passed by the legislature.  His explanation – homosexuals are “abnormal” and “sick” and need to be rehabilitated. His views join a long list of world leaders making unfortunate remarks about gays in their countries, from Putin to former Iranian President Ahmadinejad who famously stated that there were no gays in Iran.

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Abiding Traditions

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The winner of the All-Japan Phone-Answering Competition

The annual All-Japan Phone-Answering Competition for office workers was held recently, an event that has been going on for over 50 years but has recently surged in popularity, according to an article in the NY Times. The competition aims to find the best phone answerer in terms of politeness, voice (a high pitch is preferable), and efficiency in providing the information sought. Almost all the competitors are women.  According to the article:

Organizers of the event, which now draws over twice the number of contestants as it did a decade ago, attribute that popularity to the enduring importance of politeness here, as well as a growing concern among some employers that younger Japanese are forgetting their basic manners…Formal phone answering is serious business in Japan, with many rules intended to head off offensive or awkward moments. A search on Amazon’s Japanese website found more than 60 books specifically on phone manners, and dozens more on business etiquette in general. Most appeared to be aimed at women, like “How to Talk Like a Workplace Beauty.”

The competition highlights the role of politeness in Japanese society, but also the position of women in the workplace.  Despite a 1986 gender equality law, women hold just 11 percent of managerial jobs in Japan.

Meanwhile, in England, folks are glued to the radio to hear the shipping forecast from the BBC, even if they live nowhere near the coast, or have no relationship to ships. It’s a tradition that points to a core value of English culture derived from being an island nation, an abiding concern for maritime weather — or, for that matter, just the weather.

NPR had a series of broadcasts this week featuring the shipping forecast and highlighting coastal communities.  Also discussed was the cultural significance of the shipping forecast.

It is a bizarre nightly ritual that is deeply embedded in the British way of life. You switch off the TV, lock up the house, slip into bed, turn on your radio, and begin to listen to a mantra, delivered by a soothing, soporific voice. “Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger ….” says the voice. You are aware — vaguely — that these delicious words are names, and that those names refer to big blocks of sea around your island nation, stretching all the way up to Iceland and down to North Africa. Your mind begins to swoop across the landscape, sleepily checking the shorelines, from the gray waters of the English Channel to the steely turbulence of the Atlantic. Somewhere, deep in your memory, stir echoes of British history — of invasions from across the sea by Vikings, Romans and Normans; of battles with Napoleon’s galleons and Hitler’s U-boats.

Japan and Britain share not only a respect for traditions (many more than the ones listed here), but also the reputation for politeness, perhaps inherent in island nations with relatively dense populations. In a fast changing world, it’s comforting to know that some things stay the same. It’s great too to have cultures like these that have traditions that seem unaffected by the tides of globalization and successfully resist the tendency towards homogenization.

 

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Selfie Society?

Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt takes a selfie

Helle Thorning-Schmidt takes a selfie

The word of the year for 2013:  selfie, according to Oxford Dictionaries, as well as linguist Geoff Nunberg, speaking today on NPR. Selfie (i.e., self-portrait) describes a picture taken of oneself with a phone camera. The word has been in the news recently in connection with the picture Danish prime minister took of herself together with President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron.  The picture excited comment due to the fact that it was taken during the memorial ceremony for Nelson Mandela, maybe also for the disapproving expression from Michele Obama. The term — and the practice it describes — have been seen as symptomatic of what ails modern society, from the cutesification of English to an obsession with sharing everything one does. It does seem to point to something that a wildly popular mobile app such as Snapchat can exist principally to enable sharing of selfies. A columnist in the New York Post pointed to the narcissism inherent in the practice and commented that the picture taken by the Danish prime minister “symbolizes the global calamity of Western decline.”  It’s not just in the U.S. that such concerns have been raised, as evident in the Telegraph’s (U.K.) article, Family albums fade as the young put only themselves in picture.

On NPR today there was another story that struck me in terms of language use.  It was in a story describing the high cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay area.  The reporter struggled to find a way to describe the housing arrangement of a group of unrelated young people living together in a large house.  He suggested the term “commune” but it was rejected as too heavily burdened with free love associations from the 1960’s.  The inhabitants of the house use the term “co-living” to describe their arrangement.  I found the difficulty finding a term interesting because of how easily and conventionally such arrangements are described in German-speaking countries: Wohngemeinschaft (living community), often shortened to WG.  This is not only a word widely used, but so too is the practice of doing what NPR thought was newsworthy in the Bay area, unrelated young people living together. Americans tend to think of houses as single family dwellings, which is far from how they are viewed in most of the rest of the world.

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Pasta not rice

Melanie Vanderlipe Ramil & her parents

Melanie Vanderlipe Ramil & her parents

“I ate pasta, family ate rice,” says Melanie Vanderlipe Ramil, who comes from a Filipino-American family and wrote that phrase as a contribution to the Race Card Project and as a way of characterizing one aspect of her cultural identity. As a girl Melanie was embarrassed that she couldn’t offer visiting school friends main-stream American snacks like hot dogs or Tater Tots – such things weren’t to be found in her family kitchen.  Melanie’s friends were mystified (and she was mortified) by the huge rice dispenser which was the centerpiece of her family kitchen. Her family ate Filipino food, and rice was served with every meal.  In middle school Melanie told her family she wasn’t going to eat rice any more and her accommodating mother made her pasta instead.  Her story is not unusual for immigrant families.  Fortunately, Melanie’s subsequent story is common these days as well.  In her 20’s she came to discover that her Filipino heritage made her special, and she has since embraced Filipino cooking. Ironically, as she told NPR, she is now making sure Filipino traditions are kept alive in her extended family, making sure the young people in her family know how to make the traditional dish of lumpia, (similar to an eggroll):

“I would prepare my grandmother’s lumpia recipe and kind of set up a lumpia sweatshop, if you will,” Ramil says. “For each of my cousins’ children … there are about 25 or 30 of them — I would put a place mat in front of them, lumpia wrappers … a little bowl of raw meat.”

Melanie is making sure such traditions have some permanence and extend beyond her family, writing a blog, Lola’s Journal, based on her grandmother’s life (and cooking).

For many of us food is an important part of our cultural identity, which may or may not be tied to ethnic backgrounds. Melanie’s story shows us that sometimes that connection is complicated and changes over time.  I’m writing this on Thanksgiving and I’m looking forward to a new tradition my family started last year:  the 10-minute instant Thanksgiving dinner, consisting of a purchased roasted chicken (how great that our main grocery store is open on Thanksgiving), boxed stuffing, instant mashed potatoes, canned vegetables and gravy, heated-up rolls. No gourmet feast, but it does allow more time for socializing, games, and emptying my growler, not to mention eliminating the 5 a.m. turkey preparation – a tradition I’m willing to pass up.

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Sacred values

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said today that he had set a “red line” for the negotiations his country is restarting with Western countries over Iran’s nuclear program.  His remarks echo similar comments Iranian officials in recent weeks concerning Iran’s “right” to create nuclear fuel through uranium enrichment. The U.S. and its allies are hoping that offering Iran a strong incentive, namely the easing of crippling sanctions to its economy, would bring Iran around to the point that it would agree to forego uranium enrichment.  The strong language from the leaders in Iran indicates otherwise.  While many observers might point to national pride or fervent nationalism as the explanation, a recent piece in the NY Times explains the Iranian recalcitrance by citing it as an example of the power of “sacred values”, defined as “moral imperatives we’re unwilling to compromise on, be they political, religious or personal”.  Evidently for Iranians nuclear power has become such a sacred value and no amount of logical persuasion or financial incentives is likely to have any effect.

The U.S. is no stranger to the strength of sacred values, as the battles over gun rights and abortion have demonstrated.  We may be seeing the playing out of a sacred value among those who are now so vociferously attacking “Obamacare”, who are not just upset over the botched roll-out or the bad policy they believe it represents, but view it as an assault on the strong belief they hold relative to the kind, size and power of the federal government.  Clearly when sacred values come into play negotiation and compromise goes out the window.  Of course in negotiations the trick is to determine when intransigence is a negotiating posture and when it is due to running up against a sacred value. The article cites pioneering work in behavioral economics that challenges the traditional assumption of economists that people act in their own best interest when it comes to financial transactions. It’s not just that people don’t always recognize their own best interest, in some cases that interest may be clashing with values so deeply held that nothing else matters.  The presence of sacred values can be important to recognize not just in political or diplomatic negotiations, but in personal interactions as well. It’s good to know when you might be hitting your head against a brick wall.

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Uncover the face

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Graphic by the Quebec government showing one example of a banned public dress under a proposed Charter

In the news recently there have been reports on initiatives in various countries to restrict how Muslim women may dress, specifically to ban clothing in public that covers the face.  That means outlawing the burqa and the hijab.  Most recently, there is a proposed law for Quebec as well as for the Canton of Ticino in Switzerland. Most of the initiatives now and in the past (in France and Belgium, for example) have been made with justifications centered around security (not being able to recognize the identity of someone with her face covered), safety (lack of peripheral vision when driving), or the maintenance of laity (strict separation of church and state, particularly in schools). Xenophobia, particularly towards Muslims, is never mentioned.  In some case, parallel movements pretty clearly point in this direction. In Switzerland, for example, a law was passed in 2009 banning the building of minarets, despite the fact that there are very few mosques in the country. The Quebec government’s proposed “Charter of Values,” would prohibit public servants from wearing “overt and conspicuous” religious symbols, thus insuring a “religiously neutral state.”  Yet, the province’s minister for democratic institutions, Bernard Drainville, told TIME Magazine “Quebec is not a blank page…Building our future shouldn’t come at the expense of our past, our heritage.”  What he meant by that statement is clear:  Christianity as part of the Quebequois culture will continue to enjoy privileged status.

The promoter of the initiative in Ticino is quite explicit in his goals, according to the Wall Street Journal:

[The law] is being spearheaded by Giorgio Ghiringhelli, a 61-year-old political activist and former journalist. Although burqas are rarely seen in Ticino, where less than 2% of the roughly 340,000 inhabitants identify as Muslim, Mr. Ghiringhelli said his ban could help curb Islamic extremism before it takes root, and would be “a strong signal for Switzerland and maybe for other countries” to follow suit.

Identifying Muslim dress as an indicator of political fanaticism is an attack on Islam as well as a strike against religious freedom. It’s ironic that we in the West often rail against mistreatment of Christians in Muslim countries, yet don’t see that with such initiatives we are just as guilty of intolerance and blind prejudice.

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I’m allowed to wear a hoodie

istock_000008235676largeIn an interview yesterday, a member of the George Zimmerman trial jury stated that race did not enter into their deliberations and that she did not think the situation would have been different had it been a white young man walking down the street of Zimmerman’s neighborhood. Given that perspective, it’s not surprising that Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trevon Martin. We all tend to categorize unknown individuals based on appearance, including dress, skin color, gender, age, demeanor, walking style. This is normal human behavior in dealing with the unknown – we put things and people into groups based on previous encounters, learned values, and media messaging. This kind of processing does not normally have deadly consequences, but it becomes problematic and potentially dangerous if we assume our initial categorizing corresponds to reality in every case and in every context, without trying to ascertain the nature of an individual beyond outward appearances. This is profiling – associating the stereotyped individual with assumed negative behavior.

It’s clear that Zimmerman’s actions were based on profiling, following Treyvon Martin because he was black, male, young, and wearing a hoodie. On NPR this morning as part of the “race card project” (creating 6-word statements about race) there was discussion about what message is sent by someone wearing a hoodie:

A woman named Bethany Banner of Kalamazoo had this ah-ha moment when she was out shopping one day. It starts raining. She pulls her hoodie, and her six words were: ‘I’m allowed to wear a hoodie’. Because she realized in that moment that no one would ever look at her, as a petite white woman, and assume that she was someone dangerous because she had this hood up over her head.

Treyvon Martin made the mistake of thinking he too would not be looked at askance when wearing a hoodie.

Another jolting quote came yesterday from George Zimmerman’s brother, who was complaining that his brother was afraid of retribution : “There are people that would want to take the law into their own hands as they perceive it, or be vigilantes in some sense”. I think he missed the irony of George Zimmerman fearing someone acting outside official channels and taking matters into his own hands.

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Not the nanny!

lam-bright-family-photoThe latest installment of the NPR “Code-Switch” series had an interesting segment on multi-racial families in the U.S this week.  Such families have become much more common, with 15 % of marriages being interracial or inter-ethnic, but that doesn’t means they are universally accepted. The story highlights the experiences of a couple with an African-American father, a Vietnamese mother, and two children.  The mom recounts that when she her daughter to a local park, she was ignored by the other moms or was asked if she were the nanny and if it was ok with the family that she spoke Vietnamese to her charge.  The encounters inspired the mom, Thien Kim Lam, to create a blog called I’m not the nanny. The article points out that more and more interracial families are touting their mixed heritage as a positive thing. Surveys in the U.S. show that that over 2/3 of Americans would accept multiracial marriages in their families.

It’s not always easy for the children in biracial families.  Thien Kim Lam recalls that when her daughter was 2, she threw a tantrum because her skin wasn’t fair like her mom’s and her hair was curly. The take-away for the mom was that it’s a good idea to talk about race and to make them aware of their special status: “Teaching them their Vietnamese culture, but then I also reiterate that they’re American. That’s what makes them American; that they have this great mix of cultures.”