beautytruthandstrangeness:
casual-isms:
http://www.samefacts.com/2014/05/culture-and-civil-society/unlearning-how-white-people-ask-personal-questions/
Holy shit. I have ALWAYS thought the people around me were being unconscionably intrusive and power-playing in their starter conversations and they told me I was antisocial and oblivious to culture norms. Turns out, maybe I’m just from a different culture.
****new link****
by Keith Humphreys - May 5, 2014
When I met my fiance’s African-American stepfather, things did not
start well. Stumbling for some way to start a conversation with a man
whose life was unlike mine in almost every respect, I asked “So, what do
you do for a living?”.
He looked down at his shoes and said quietly “Well, I’m unemployed”.
At the time I cringed inwardly and recognized that I had committed a
terrible social gaffe which seemed to scream “Hey prospective in-law,
since I am probably going to be a member of your family real soon, I
thought I would let you know up front that I am a completely insensitive
jackass”. But I felt even worse years later when I came to appreciate
the racial dimension of how I had humiliated my stepfather-in-law to be.
For that painful but necessary bit of knowledge I owe a white friend
who throughout her childhood attended Chicago schools in a majority
Black district. She passed along a marvelous book that helped her make
sense of her own inter-racial experiences. It was Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict,
and it had a lasting effect on me. One of the many things I learned
from this anthropological treasure trove of a book is how race affects
the personal questions we feel entitled to ask and the answers we
receive in response.
My question to my stepfather was at the level of content a simple
conversation starter (albeit a completely failed one). But at the level
of process, it was an expression of power. Kochman’s book sensitized me
to middle class whites’ tendency to ask personal questions without first
considering whether they have a right to know the personal details of
someone else’s life. When we ask someone what they do for a living for
example, we are also asking for at least partial information on their
income, their status in the class hierarchy and their perceived
importance in the world. Unbidden, that question can be quite an
invasion. The presumption that one is entitled to such information is
rarely made explicit, but that doesn’t prevent it from forcing other
people to make a painful choice: Disclose something they want to keep
secret or flatly refuse to answer (which oddly enough usually makes
them, rather than the questioner, look rude).
Kochman’s book taught me a new word, which describes an indirect
conversational technique he studied in urban Black communities:
“signifying”. He gives the example (as I recall it, 25 years on) of a
marriage-minded black woman who is dating a man who pays for everything
on their very nice dates. She wonders if he has a good job. But instead
of grilling him with “So what do you do for a living?”, she signifies
“Whatever oil well you own, I hope it keeps pumping!”.
Her signifying in this way is a sensitive, respectful method to raise
the issue she wants to know about because unlike my entitled direct
question it keeps the control under the person whose personal
information is of interest. Her comment could be reasonably responded to
by her date as a funny joke, a bit of flirtation, or a wish for good
luck. But of course it also shows that if the man freely chooses
to reveal something like “Things look good for me financially: I’m a
certified public accountant at a big, stable firm”, he can do so and
know she will be interested.
Since reading Kochman’s book, I have never again directly asked
anyone what they do for a living. Instead my line is “So how do you
spend your time?”. Some people (particularly middle class white people)
choose to answer that question in the bog standard way by describing
their job. But other people choose to tell me about the compelling novel
they are reading, what they enjoy about being a parent, the medical
treatment they are getting for their bad back, whatever. Any of those
answers flow just as smoothly from the signification in a way they
wouldn’t from a direct question about their vocation.
From the perspective of ameliorating all the racial pain in the
world, this change in my behavior is a grain of sand in the Sahara. But I
pass this experience along nonetheless, for two reasons. First, very
generally, if any of us human beings can easily engage in small
kindnesses, we should. Second, specific to race, if those of us who have
more power can learn to refrain from using it to harm people in any way
– major or minor — we should do that too.
This is really useful stuff – as someone who’s on disability and knows a ton of people in the same boat, “What do you do for a living?” can be such a loaded question. “How do you spend your time?” is a much more compassionate thing to ask, because you can just enthuse about what you’re writing or how great your cats are or whatever.
