A Reflection on Social and Cultural Foundations as Taught by Dr. Jackie Butler

 

Men don’t like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way.

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Step Twelve, The Twelve Step Program

In the second to last meeting of the course “Social and Cultural Foundations”, Dr. Butler told us, not once but twice, because some in the class didn’t understand what she said the first time, that “It is not necessary or possible to learn about other cultural groups in the abstract.” It was a concept worth repeating, I believe, because it was exactly this attempt to categorize and somehow “own” knowledge about other cultural groups that most of us in the class had hoped to gain from it. Instead of having a better handle on minority groups, for example, we have learned about the inadequacies of all stereotypical “handles.” People are not like luggage. They don’t necessarily have have handles which will allow others to manipulate them, carry them around or move them out of the way. It is precisely this assumption of cultural handles that has helped to place so much enmity between different cultural groups. For instance, majority cultures often believe it is their privilege to put handles on minority groups which allow the the majority culture to judge and the minority group according to self-serving standards. I believe this idea relates well to the minority group’s experience of living in a house of “alien philosophies”, as Dr. Butler phrases it. Minority cultures, on the other hand, will often respond to such treatment by in turn putting handles on the majority group which serves their, the minority culture’s, interests. The major difference is that the majority culture has the power to dish out the handles that really bind, that is, their prejudices have the capacity to affect consequences on the minority culture in a manner that is unavoidable for the minority culture. This is where oppression comes into the picture.

In class we learned that oppression has four main characteristics from the point of view of the oppressed: 1) Your destiny is at the hands of someone else, 2) You receive messages that reinforce the fact that you don’t make the rules, 3) The oppressor has to constantly inform you about how to get out of oppression, and 4) You are rewarded or punished according to the standards of the oppressive group. Ten weeks ago I was only dimly aware of the sociopolitical implications of oppression, and that mostly in terms of third world countries because of my previous courses in liberation theology. The legacy of Senator Moynihan's approach to poverty among African Americans, and of other culturally blind systems of thought, had never been explained to me before. It is only in our systems of thinking and policy-making that second-order change, “deciding – or being forced – to do something significantly or fundamentally different from what we have done before”¹, can take place in our approach to cultural diversity . Our reflections on the continuum from culturally destructive to culturally proficient systems of thought have caused me to pause and consider how the various institutions I associate with fall into line. The fact that there are some culturally proficient institutions in America today at least gives me hope that change and improvement is possible and that positive modeling can be done if we are willing. I believe that what Dr. Butler repeated several times in these nine weeks holds true: that there is no fortress which is impenetrable to change, no matter how fiercely resistant it may seem.

One enlightening aspect about oppression escaped my attention ten weeks ago. Oppression has its negative consequences for the majority group as well. I will take for example the hospital system I am working for now, which is also paying my tuition in order for me to attend to this class. Our hospital system was founded a long time ago primarily in order to serve the needs of poor people, the overwhelming majority of them white-skinned people. Years went by and this majority of white people became middle class whereas a sizable number of the poor began to be composed of people of color, primarily African Americans. In order to continue its mission to the poor, our health delivery system had to learn to serve African American people. For a long time, however, we failed to serve them in a culturally competent way. As the system hired more African Americans, it also had to deal with cross-cultural issues in the workplace. These two issues alone, dealing with a different cultural group as patients and then as co-workers, were enough to cause the system to examine it level of cultural competence. The major impetus for change, however, was financial. As the demographics of the region surrounding the hospital system was becoming more culturally diverse, competition was increasing for patients in a competitive hospital market. Suddenly, the hospital leadership realized that it needed African Americans more than ever ever before, especially as healthcare professionals in order to attract minority patients. One can look at this scenario as an example of an institution forced into cultural “enlightenment”. No matter how self-serving the cause, the leadership began to recognize the negative consequences of oppressive institutional racism and began to slowly evolve away from it. In this case, it is the struggle to survive in a shrinking healthcare market that serves the bridge that Saul Alinsky wrote about. Economic survival is the impetus helping the institution cross over from the security of its familiar, but unprofitable, ways to a new way of flourishing.

The last topic I want to touch upon in this reflection on our class is the phenomena of heterogeneity within cultural groups. We cannot always safely extrapolate general principles based solely of our personal experiences. To attempt to do so is nothing less than cultural hubris. This is what I was trying to point out to my in-laws (in an earlier reflection assignment)when I argued that they could not make generalized statements about all African Americans based on the small sample size of their personal encounters or the stories they heard about them. They, in turn, were right to point out the flaw in my argument, that I could always safely go in the opposite direction, from the general to the specific, in judging cross-cultural interactions. To do so is simply naïve because it causes one to look at the specifics only in a general way which fits the hopeful story I have been listening to. To approach cultural question in this way avoids actually entering into the encounter objectively. My younger self would stay above racial conflict by pretending to have it all figured out, politically correct, and neatly tucked away. Differences do exist within cultures just as they do between cultures. Since culture is such a fluid idea, we can never completely understand or categorize another person.
I cannot single handedly change anybody’s ideas about cultural groups. Through the support and cooperation of others and with the assurance of a transcendent spiritual presence, I can enter into the struggles and joys of fostering cultural appreciation in myself as well as in others. There are many ways to go about this task, which is beyond the scope of this paper to enumerate. In short, I can follow the advise of the final step of the twelve step programs: I can take what I have learned to others and practice the principles of cultural competence in all my affairs.

1https://certificationacademy.com/resources/leadership-and-change/

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