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| ISBN-13: | 9780226112251 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/1900 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Black and White Styles in Conflict
By Thomas Kochman
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1981 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-44954-8
CHAPTER 1
Black Culture
Black and white cultural differences are generally ignored when attempts are made to understand how and why black and white communication fails.
One reason for this is that cultural differences play a covert role in the communication process. When blacks and whites interact in public meetings, their agenda does not typically include a discussion of the way they are interpreting each other's behavior, the reasons they are interpreting it as they do, or the way they are expecting the meeting to evolve. Thus, unless there are reasons to think otherwise, blacks and whites at such gatherings will assume that the meanings they are assigning to all of these matters are the same and, therefore, that the motives they are ascribing to each other—based on this assumption—are also justified.
Also, given the nature of the issues about which whites and blacks typically interact in public, cultural differences will probably not be the only reason interracial communication has failed. Since these other reasons can also serve to account for why things went wrong and are also more readily identifiable, blacks and whites will not feel compelled to search beyond them for other possible causes.
Of course the chief reason cultural differences are ignored is that blacks and whites assume they are operating according to identical speech and cultural conventions and that these are the conventions the socially dominant white group has established as standard. This assumption—besides adding to the disruptive capacity of cultural differences—speaks to the general public failure to recognize that black norms and conventions in these areas differ from those of whites. It is also the chief obstacle to considering how they differ.
A major share of responsibility for the general view that blacks have no distinctive culture must be carried by social scientists who, barring a few exceptions, have promoted the view that African culture was all but destroyed by slavery. Herskovits ([1941] 1958, p. 1), one of the notable exceptions here, called such a view a myth. Yet as recently as 1963, Glazer would write, "The Negro is only an American and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect" (Glazer and Moynihan 1963, p. 53). Indeed in 1967, in putting together material for a course on black language, I found little published on the subject and only a handful of language scholars willing to concede that such a distinct phenomenon as black language existed. The consequence of viewing blacks without their own language or culture was to see their different behavior as distortions of white behavior, due to their social distance from the white mainstream where such behavior was regularly in use, or as pathological responses to the oppressive forces of caste and class (Stewart 1974, pp. 1–2). The distinctive grammatical patterns of blacks were seen not as governed by their own set of rules but as a random collection of mistakes. No search for an underlying structure to black behavior was undertaken, because none was presumed to exist.
Even when black behavior was not categorized as pathological or as a distortion of white behavior, the absence of a black cultural frame of reference still resulted only in social explanations of black behavior, which, because they were exclusively social, were often also incomplete. Thus David Wolf (1972, p. 41) explained the spectacular exhibitionism that marks black playing style in basketball as a means by which impoverished black youths could rise above the "drabness and anonymity of their lives." This social view is not necessarily false, taking into account as it does the psychological need of individuals for status among their peers. But it is not the whole truth, for it does not account for the style of the black response, the flair or, as Jeff Greenfield (1975, p. 170) called it, the "liquid grace" that characterizes black basketball. Oppressive social conditions may account more or less satisfactorily for playing with a punishing drive and intensity. But as Paul Carter Harrison (1972, pp. 25–26) and Roger Abrahams (1976, pp. 82–92) have each pointed out, the stylistic aspects of black performances need to be viewed against more broadly conceived aesthetic notions within the culture. There is a difference between simply playing aggressively and demonstrating personal power through the activation of vital and expressive images (Harrison 1972, pp. 32–34).
Likewise, a failure to recognize the substance or scope of expressiveness in black culture led one writer to attribute the "new expressiveness" in sports like football to the influence of Martha Graham and to see it simply as a fad, likely to disappear in the near future, "retained only in film clips or enshrined in some 1980's version of 'That's Entertainment'" (McDowell 1976, p. 16). Those who know the cultural function and value of expressive behavior for blacks also know that, if blacks have anything to say about it, this forecast simply will not materialize.
Blacks have been hurt by the general failure to recognize the distinctiveness of black culture in other ways: for example, on standardized psychological tests. Thus Thomas Pettigrew (1964, p. 19) reported that, when the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory (MMPI) was administered to black and white Alabama jail prisoners and Wisconsin working-class veterans with tuberculosis, black males scored higher than whites on the test's "measure of femininity" because they agreed more often with such "feminine" choices as "I would like to be a singer" and "I think that I feel more intensely than most people do." But as Erik Erikson noted (1968, p. 306), "to be a singer and to feel intensely may be facets of a masculine ideal gladly admitted if you grew up in a southern Negro community (or for that matter, in Naples)."
The test designers interpreted these choices as "feminine" because they used only dominant white cultural norms as reference. Thus, singing, like ballet dancing, was an appropriate desire for females in white culture, but not for males. Likewise, only females were permitted to give full expression to their feelings. As Philip Slater put it (1976, p. 3), about the only emotion males were permitted to show was anger, which was about the only emotion females were not permitted to show. But intense feeling and emotional expressiveness are not the only characteristics over whose sexual classification blacks and whites would disagree. Diane Lewis, for example, has posited a range of behavioral traits that whites would consider "masculine" or "feminine" but blacks would consider common to both sexes. These are aggressiveness, independence, self-confidence, nonconformity, sexual assertiveness, nurturance, emotional expressiveness, and focus on personal relationships. Whites would consider the first five traits "masculine" and the last three as "feminine" (Lewis 1975, p. 230).
Blacks have also been hurt by the failure to recognize distinctively black racial attributes. Thus Stanley Garn and Diane Clark point out that, if dimensional differences between blacks and whites are not taken into account and only white standards for normal growth and development are used as reference, problems will arise when nutritional assessments of black individuals are made. For example, based on surveys of large numbers of blacks and whites, Garn and Clark indicate that blacks at birth are smaller than whites in weight and length and that these birth differences hold even after income-matching. On the other hand, from the age of two through fourteen, black males and females are taller than their white cohorts. They conclude that if only white standards are used, those blacks at birth who are normal by black standards may be incorrectly assessed as nutritionally deficient. More serious, if only white standards are used for blacks during the age period two to fourteen, "some proportion of black children actually at nutritional risk will then be improperly judged satisfactory or normal, to their long-term disadvantage" (Garn and Clark 1976, pp. 262–64).
It is perhaps ironic that the kind of public discussion and scholarly inquiries needed to challenge the incorrect and often pejorative characterization of black behavior should be hampered by efforts originally aimed at relieving blacks and other minority groups of the stigma the public has attached to their different cultural behavior. For example, there still exists a social etiquette that considers it impolite to discuss minority-group differences in public. This rule emerged over a period when such differences were regularly used as evidence of minority-group inferiority. To resist this implication, minority-group members felt it necessary to divert attention away from ways in which they were distinctive. This included generally working to prevent discussion of differences. Some even went so far as to deny that they existed. Liberal-minded whites cooperated with minorities in these efforts, since they shared the general view that these differences were signs of minority-group inferiority. Consequently, they felt that their public discussion would be, as Joan and Stephen Baratz put it, tantamount to discussing a hunchback's hump with him (1972, p. 13).
The problem with this strategy is that it left the public view of minority-group differences intact, working equally against those who would talk about them to challenge incorrect and often negative interpretations and those who would use them to document minority-group inferiority. By and large, members of minority groups today must still confront a public view that sees their distinctive racial, cultural, and linguistic features as a source of public embarrassment.
Since the late 1960s many blacks and other minority-group members—especially younger people—have challenged this negative view of minority-group behavior, thereby forcing some segments of the public, like the scholastic establishment, to modify some of its earlier attitudes and policies. Where schools throughout the mid-1960s were uniformly committed to the eradication of black language patterns, they are now willing to acknowledge that these have some functional value for blacks when used within the context of their own community. This acknowledgment became formally recognized by the National Council of Teachers of English when they endorsed the language statement of their Committee on College Composition and Communication on "Students' Right to Their Own Language." Consequently schools, by and large, have been given the charge to move toward a more "bidialectal" approach to language teaching, one in which standard (white) English would become an addition, not a replacement.
The Bilingual Education Act expanded the idea of students' right to their own language to their right to be educated in their own language, if their command of English was insufficient for them to learn on a par with native English-speaking students in classrooms where only English was spoken. While obviously conceived as a transition to an English program, in effect, bilingual education also strengthens students' abilities to communicate in their own language, if that is the language in which it has been determined that they can learn more effectively. The social significance of this development, however unintentional, is that public schools—perhaps for the first time on a national scale—have become actively engaged in maintaining the native language of ethnic minority groups.
From the standpoint of social parity, these gains of minorities in the area of language do not amount to that much of a concession by the dominant social group, in that they do not change existing patterns of social accommodation. Bidialectalism and bilingualism, as presently defined, still expect minority students to learn and use the speech patterns of the dominant group in the wider society in the same way as before. Moreover, the concession of bidialectalism to native dialect maintenance is a negative one: it agrees not to attempt to eradicate it, but it does nothing to support or encourage its use or development.
Nonetheless, the recognition that students have language rights has led schools to assume responsibility for providing transitions between the native language of the student and that of the school. This has led to increased interest in educational research on language differences, functional as well as structural (see, e.g., Aarons, Gordon, and Stewart 1969; and Cazden, John, and Hymes 1972). It has also prompted scholastics to work to develop pedagogical strategies that will take these differences into account.
The issues involving cultural differences are much the same as those involving language differences. But they have not as yet had the same kind of impact, because contrasting cultural studies involving minorities have lagged behind similar language studies. Consequently it is relatively easy now to understand what bilingualism and bidialectalism are because the structures of the two languages or dialects have been identified, as have been, in some measure, their patterns of convergence and use. It is also possible to determine how speakers are being influenced as they move within and between the two systems in various social contexts. But how is the biculturalism or multiculturalism of individuals to be assessed? Without the contrasting cultural studies that would identify the cultural norms and patterns of the various contact groups, we are unable to tell.
The contrasting data provided in this book can be used to address the question of individual acculturation. This is because the different meanings that blacks and whites assign to their own and each other's behavior in effect reflect black and white cultural perspectives, at least with respect to those patterns of behavior that cause communicative conflict. Since these perspectives identify ways in which the two cultures are different, they can be used to indicate the extent to which blacks and whites have become bicultural. When correlated with social data, they can be used to indicate which blacks and whites are more likely to become bicultural and even which aspects of black culture tend to become lost—or saved—as blacks move further into social contexts or areas governed by white cultural norms. For example, a long-standing question has been how "black" or "white" are the black middle class or, taking into account their respective ethnic backgrounds, how "ethnic" and "white" are the middle classes of other ethnic groups? Allen Harris, one of my black students, has noted that the problem with most media portrayals of black middle-class people is that their behavior is typically represented as either exactly like "community" inner-city blacks or exactly like white middle-class people. For most middle-class blacks, who have typically incorporated aspects of both cultures, both portrayals are inaccurate.
As used in this book, the terms black and white reflect cultural patterns and perspectives almost entirely. Specifically, white is intended to represent the cultural patterns and perspectives of the dominant social group, also called in other studies white mainstream, white middle-class, Anglo, Anglo-American. Black represents the ethnic patterns and perspectives of black "community" people, called elsewhere ghetto blacks, inner-city blacks, or Afro-Americans.
My confidence in the "whiteness" and "blackness" of those cultural patterns and perspectives is based upon the authority of those from whom the information was directly obtained and the representativeness of those who displayed such patterns in the contexts in which I was a participant and observer. It also comes from cultural descriptions by other field investigators both within and outside the United States. Some of the black patterns and perspectives described here have also been found among blacks in the Caribbean. These parallel observations reinforce the view that they are indeed black ethnic patterns and, with regard to their source, African influenced or derived.
Because the term black describes the patterns and perspectives of black "community" people, there are those who will argue that these are class as opposed to cultural patterns and perspectives. I would reject that view, even though I acknowledge, following Herskovits ([1941] 1958, p. xxvi), that the black cultural perspective will be more prevalent among blacks at a lower socioeconomic level than among middle- or upper-income blacks. But that is only to recognize, along with Charles Valentine (1968, p. 25), that "ethnic identity and subcultural distinctness of all or many minorities are greatest for group members who are poor." Thus, just as poor first-generation Irish, Italian, Jewish, or Ukrainian groups are likely to be more "ethnic" than their third-generation middle-class counterparts, so would poor blacks be more "ethnic" than their black middle-class counterparts whose social networks, or level of education, has brought them more within the sphere of influence of dominant white cultural norms and values. That "community" blacks, even after several generations, should retain their original ethnic patterns and perspectives simply speaks to the extent to which racial segregation has kept the black rural and urban community culturally insular.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black and White Styles in Conflict by Thomas Kochman. Copyright © 1981 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. Black Culture
2. Classroom Modalities
3. Fighting Words
4. Boasting and Bragging
5. Male and Female Interaction: The First Phase
6. Truth and Consequences
7. Information as Property
8. The Force Field
9. Style
10. Epilogue
Appendix: Testing for Cultural Homogeneity
References
Index