Keynote Address at the National Conference of the
Society for Intercultural Education, Training, and Research
San Diego October 19, 2017
Let me begin by telling you a story. Well, I’m a historian, so I’ll be telling you lots of stories today.
The story begins in 1991 when Lee Knefelkamp invited me to be a panelist at the opening plenary session of the American Association for Higher Education national conference. I decided to attend some pre-conference workshops. One was particularly interesting, so afterwards I introduced myself to the two presenters, Janet and Milton Bennett. I had never heard of them. Turns out, they had never heard of me, either, but they politely reciprocated by attending my plenary.
I hate to be mushy, but it was sort of love at first sight. They invited me to teach at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication and suddenly, like Alice, I found myself in a brand new Wonderland — intercultural communication. Brand new, that is, to me.
You see, I had been a history professor since 1968, had been giving talks and workshops on diversity and multicultural education for two decades, and thought I had a pretty good fix on the diversity landscape. Yet, somehow, I had managed to avoid learning that a field named Intercultural Communication even existed. Now I had discovered Intercultural Communication . . . sort of like Columbus discovering America. Of course, from an interculturalist’s perspective it was like, “Hey, dude, we’ve been around for quite some time.”
I’ve been teaching at the Institute since 1995 and have developed an admiration for the field and a deep respect for its practitioners. And I’ve been applying intercultural thinking in multiple venues, like teaching cultural competence in medical schools and lecturing about interculturalism on cruise ships. I even applied intercultural principles during my years as creative/cultural advisor for two children’s television shows, “Dora the Explorer” and “Go, Diego, Go!”
Yet I remain an outsider. I’ve never even taken an Intercultural Communication course. So I guess you could classify me as an ex-officio interculturalist, which is fine. Those who have read my memoir, Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time, or seen my one-person autobiographical play, A Conversation with Alana: One Boy’s Multicultural Rite of Passage, know that I rather enjoy being marginal.
So today I speak to you from the intercultural margins, as I take you on a journey — both personal and professional — that I hope sheds light on what I see as the 21st-century challenges and opportunities for interculturalism.
I’ll begin the journey on the morning of April 6, 2009, the day I awoke to the fact that I had just completed 75 years on earth. I’ll save you the math. I’m now 83.
As I lay in bed, something hit me. 75 years was a fact -– not an alternative fact. But old was just a perspective. If I altered my perspective, which is what interculturalists do, I was just one day into the fourth quarter of my life. And with that revelation, my life changed. Since then I’ve enjoyed every day not in spite of being old, but because I’m old.
I could now play the age card. I can’t tell you how great it is to give a workshop or speak at a conference and proclaim, “I’m the oldest damn person in the room.” No need for trendy euphemisms like, “person of advanced years.” Old is just fine. It’s short, it’s precise, and you don’t have to worry about insulting me. Let others wallow in self pity about linguistic victimization. Being old has given me permanent residence in a microaggression-free zone.
And being old, I can also be cranky. In fact, cranky has become my personal trademark. It’s in the subtitle of today’s talk and of my book of poetry, Fourth Quarter: Reflections of a Cranky Old Man, in which I comment, crankily, on the world from the perspective of an octogenarian. I’ll share one example of my poetry, a four-line ditty called “Essays.”
“Today I received my social security check from the SSA.
Then I gave blood so the doctor could check my PSA.
After that I went to the airport where I was patted down
by the TSA
To make certain I wasn’t a threat to the USA.”
Now I realize that bragging is unseemly, but I’m going to play the age card and mention that, even though Fourth Quarter is my first book of poetry, it just received honorable mention for the best book of poetry at this year’s International Latino Book Awards.
One of my favorite authors, the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis wrote –- it’s on his gravestone –- “I fear nothing. I expect nothing. I am free.”
For me, freedom includes aspiring to be like Sophocles’ tragic hero, King Oedipus. No, I don’t want to be like Oedipus who killed his father and slept with his mother, two misadventures I’ve managed to avoid. Rather I aspire to be like Oedipus the truth seeker, the intrepid detective who solved The Riddle of the Sphinx. He then tirelessly searched for the identity of his father’s killer, doggedly pursuing the evidentiary path even as it became terrifyingly clear that he, in fact, was the culprit. When Oedipus finally confronted his own guilt, he punished himself by gouging out his own eyes.
Well, I’ve never gone quite that far, but I have tried to model my professional actions on that intrepid detective. That is, I pursue evidence with relentless determination even if it leads me to conclusions that conflict with some of my basic beliefs and even if it puts me in the position of disagreeing openly with my friends. And I find that I increasingly admire people who are willing to ask tough questions, search for honest answers, and challenge entrenched positions, regardless of the ramifications.
This past spring a shattering intercultural controversy exploded. A young philosopher named Rebecca Tuvel published a peer-reviewed article in Hipatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. It was entitled “In Defense of Transracialism.” Tuvel addressed the following question: what happens if you take the arguments that support the idea of transgenderism and apply them to the phenomenon of transracialism — the process of adopting a racial identity different from one’s own birth race? She methodically examined a series of identity-related comparative arguments and came to the following conclusion: “Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism.”
Well, you would have thought that Tuvel had just ignited World War III. Forty Hipatia associate editors, all self-declared feminists, as is Tuvel, signed a petition demanding that her article be stricken from the journal and that apologies be issued. Tuvel was accused of multiple crimes, including “epistemic violence.” Some critics went so far as to say it was offensive to even ask the transgender/transracial question.
Tuvel defended her article, while admitting there were a couple of things she could have done better. That’s also true of just about everything I’ve ever written. Other philosophers came to her defense, while journalistic commentators criticized the mob attacks on her as an assault on free inquiry. The carnage continues to the present, with journal editors resigning and threats to destroy Tuvel’s career.
Now regardless of how much I may agree or disagree with Tuvel’s arguments, I applaud her courage in asking the question and, like Oedipus, pursuing her analysis to a conclusion that was almost guaranteed to –- well, maybe not to gouging out her own eyes — but certainly guaranteed to antagonize the high priestesses of her field.
The Tuvel incident speaks to my vision for interculturalism — that our field should strive to become more publicly visible as a twenty-first century thought leader. Not just a leader within the limits of academia and the safe spaces of our training sites. No, publicly, out there in the heated, take-no-prisoners arena of Op-Eds and public debates characterized by the heated, often vitriolic, clash of ideas. That’s a place where I spend much of my time, doing joyous battle with ideological foes.
Now, interculturalists do some things very well. We’re good at espousing intercultural theories, at fostering intercultural competence, and at helping people avoid intercultural faux pas. We do a fine job of replicating ourselves –- no, I’m not saying that we’re replicants. Rather we train younger people to re-transmit our sacred ideas and to re-apply our training methods. We rightfully take pride in these accomplishments.
But what I haven’t observed among interculturalists –- and admittedly I’m speaking as an outsider, so I could be wrong –- I have not observed the passion for the clash of ideas, the passion exhibited by Rebecca Tuvel, her antagonists, and her supporters. I’ve encountered plenty of intercultural ideas, but little passion for the conflict of ideas.
Nor have I observed a willingness to openly challenge intercultural sacred cows. As a result, in many respects we have become an ideological echo chamber, which almost guarantees replication, but ill-prepares us for the increasing complexities of the intercultural world.
For interculturalism to become a public intellectual thought leader, we need to celebrate the asking of tough questions, the eagerness to reach unpopular conclusions, and the willingness to respectfully challenge positions of even our closest intercultural colleagues. That’s how we can become stronger as individual interculturalists. That’s also how we can become more vibrant, visible, and formidable as a 21st-century field.
I come from a field, history, where you expect your ideas to be critiqued and critiqued hard. That’s the essence of revisionism, and revisionism lies at the heart of all robust fields of thought. Unfortunately, as an interculturalist outsider, I don’t see much commitment to internal challenge, critique, and revisionism.
Let’s look at one of our leading scholarly journals, the International Journal of Intercultural Research. Now the IJIR serves a useful purpose. It provides exposure for scholars doing different types of intercultural research. But I have yet to encounter one single truly lively IJIR forum in which scholars do vigorous battle over ideas, the vibrant kind of discourse that is so fundamental to most other disciplines.
The closest I found was a 2009 forum of articles on acculturation, which focused mainly on John Berry’s theory of acculturation. But the forum was so disappointing, so tepid, and so unenlightening that Berry himself commented, “I have found little in these articles that advances our knowledge of acculturation . . . .”
To become a more vibrant field, we need –- we desperately need –a new publication of intercultural ideas. Not to replace or replicate the IJIR, which serves its purpose, but rather an interculturalist professional magazine, in print or online, in which interculturalist scholars and practitioners challenge each others’ ideas using the vigorous language of public discourse, not the restrained, stilted, jargonistic vernacular of scholarly articles.
And we also need regular spaces at association gatherings in which such lively public dialogues can take place. SIETAR may not be the appropriate setting, but maybe it could be. We need vibrant conference sessions with real clashes of ideas, sessions that at some academic conferences attract nationwide press attention. As interculturalists, we would benefit individually and collectively from such forums.
So back to my personal journey and the wisdom of Emily Brontë, who wrote in her poem, “Stanzas”:
“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading.
It vexes me to choose another guide.”
Like Brontë, I talk to myself, constantly, sometimes imagining intercultural conversations between others. That’s one way I grapple with the clash of ideas. I pit two or more people who have staked out conflicting positions, imagine them having an argument, and then try to tease out my own conclusions. Let me give you an intercultural example.
A few months ago I was invited to write an opinion piece for a national outlet. The editor asked a number of so-called experts to write essays that addressed the question, “Will Mexico Pay for the Wall?” So to prepare my piece, I imagined a conversation between American President Donald Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Mind you, this was several months before the release of their actual telephone conversation. Based on their imagined conversation, I wrote that there wasn’t one chance in hell that Mexico was going to pay for the wall, but that it was almost certain that Trump would figure out some way to spin the result to make it appear as if he had implemented his original promise.
Sure enough, that’s what’s happening. Trump is now saying we only need a partial wall because his team has “discovered” that there are parts of the border where forests, mountains, and raging rivers make a wall unnecessary. In other words, like Columbus, his team had discovered something that others, in this case geographers, have known for several . . . centuries. And he is now talking about putting solar panels on the wall to cover part of the cost.
But I didn’t have to invent another intercultural conversation, the one between Simon Tam and the U.S. Supreme Court. I’m not sure if you all know about Simon Tam, a young man from Portland, Oregon, who, in 2006, formed a band of Asian American musicians. He named the group The Slants. You use an ethnic slur for us; we’ll culturally re-appropriate it as an assertion of ethnic pride.
Then The Slants tried to trademark their name, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected them. Why? Because of the 1946 Lanham Act, which forbids the registering of a trademark that “may disparage persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs or national symbols, or bring them into contempt or disrepute.”
Government bureaucrats ruled that the name, The Slants, disparages Asian Americans. Baloney, they responded. Who are you to tell us that our name for ourselves is disparaging?
The legal journey culminated four months ago when the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Lee v. Tam, ruled that the federal government could not restrict The Slants’ freedom of speech by deeming their name as disparaging. Ergo, The Slants may now trademark their name.
But it gets more complicated. Three years ago, in 2014, the same Patent Office revoked the trademark of another entity, the Washington Redskins professional football team. When The Slants won, the media immediately proclaimed the Redskins to be the real winner, because that decision could buttress their trademark case.
Now I’m no attorney and I don’t want to hypothesize what the courts, the Patent Office, or the Redskins might do. But as interculturalists, we recognize the difference in these cases. I wrote a blog about it. You can find it in the American Diversity Report or on my website, crankyoldmancarlos.com.
In The Slants’ situation, some Asian Americans chose their own ethnic label, what we call an ethnonym. In the Redskins’ situation, an outside group selected an ethnic label that, throughout much of U.S. history, has been used as a derogatory term for Native Americans, what we call an ethnophaulism.
Anyone who has done intercultural work is likely to have encountered the question, “Since they use the word for themselves, why can’t I use it?” I usually respond by giving a patient interculturalist explanation of the difference between in-group and out-group labels.
But The Slants have expanded those boundaries by transforming a traditionally derogatory label into a public proclamation. By the way, a group of young men straight out of Compton, California, did the same thing three decades ago when they formed a hip hop group called N.W.A. And two young Asian American women have now launched a magazine called Slant’d, while there are currently seven trademark applications to register versions of the N-word.
The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus argued that it is relatively easy to develop a moral compass, but that things become more difficult when you try to apply that moral compass to the messy map of the real world. Think about our roles as 21st-century intercultural advocates, trainers, and consultants in a world where the Lee v. Tam case has severely altered the legal terrain of what’s offensive. What do you do now if you’re working with an organization, a company, or a school, and some club or employee resource group decides that it wants to follow the path of N.W.A and The Slants?
Obviously, one of the things we do as a profession is to try to help people avoid intercultural offenses. But “offensive” has increasingly become a moving target. How do you determine what is offensive? And what costs do you incur if you make the avoidance of offense a centerpiece of your efforts? Let me share two personal intercultural experiences.
In the 1970’s, the National Collegiate Athletic Association issued an edict banning all Native American team names. Some colleges protested, including Florida State University, which petitioned to keep its name, the Seminoles. The university was supported by the Seminole nation, which receives university benefits such as scholarships for Seminoles who want to attend Florida State. Florida State won and kept its team name, as did the Central Michigan Chippewas and the Utah Utes on similar grounds of tribal support.
A number of years later I was part of a panel discussion in front of nearly a thousand university students and faculty, when the topic of Native American team names arose. Suddenly I found myself catching it from two sides.
On one side was the tough, smart conservative columnist Linda Chávez, who excoriated me because I advocated dumping the name of her team, the Washington Redskins. On the other side was my good friend, the late, great Ron Takaki, who criticized me because I defended the practice of universities using Native American names for their sports teams. I did so, publicly, on the interculturalist grounds of respect for tribal self-determination. If that’s what the Seminoles, Chippewas, and Utes want, I support them, despite the arguments by many, including some interculturalists, that all Indian team names are inherently offensive.
By the way, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee recently conducted a nuanced intervention in the case of the Coachella Valley High School Arabs. The Committee did not take the knee-jerk position of insisting that the high school drop its team name. Rather it worked with the school district to transform the Arabs into the Mighty Arabs and to change the school logo from a lascivious-looking Arab into a strong-jawed man with a neatly trimmed beard. In doing so they carefully balanced the imperatives of intercultural respect and consideration for cultural tradition.
In Hamlet, Polonius pontificates, “I’m in favor of all of the good things and opposed to all of the bad ones.” A few centuries later a contemporary moral philosopher, minor league catcher Crash Davis in that wonderful baseball movie, Bull Durham, counseled a younger player, “You’re gonna have to learn your clichés. They’re your friends.”
Like all professional fields, interculturalism has its clichés. “That’s offensive.” “All cultures deserve respect.” “Cultural appropriation should be avoided.” But, increasingly, 21st-century interculturalists will face situations where our clichés, even our well-established principles, will not suffice until we test them carefully on the messy challenges of the real world.
Now many of you in this room may be disagreeing with some of my positions. Great. That’s the way it should be in a vibrant field. We may share intercultural principles, but we may also differ in the ways that we apply them. These are differences that we should debate honestly, joyously, and respectfully in open forums, not just over glasses of Chardonnay.
A few years ago I was asked to edit the four-volume Multicultural America encyclopedia. I sent drafts of my introduction to a couple dozen professional friends from a wide range of ideological and disciplinary perspectives. When the responses came back, some interculturalist friends -– only interculturalists — recommended that I eliminate my use of American and instead change it to USian.
Now I had heard interculturalists say the word USian and I’d asked why, getting varied responses. But I hadn’t paid much attention to it, figuring it was just some sort of insider joke. However, the responses to my introduction suggested that some interculturalists actually took this issue seriously, and since I had great respect for them as individuals, I pondered their suggestion.
It’s true that calling ourselves Americans has created some linguistic awkwardness, since there are also Latin America and South America and Central America. But over the years most people have learned to deal with that complication. People in Spanish-speaking countries call us norteamericanos; Brazilians call us norteamericanos. But when speaking English, many of them simply switch to the shorter, simpler American. I’ve lived in Latin America and seldom encountered anyone who got particularly upset about our use of American. Bemused, yes. Sardonic, sure. But exorcised, no. They’ve got too many other really important things on their minds.
So I switched into my Emily Brontë mode and imagined a conversation between a supporter and an opponent of American, using arguments I’d heard over the years from interculturalists.
“Using American for the United States is a form of cultural imperialism.”
“Not when I say it. That’s just your inference.”
“It also implies that we’re the only Americans.”
“Wrong again. Anybody can use the word. After all, we all appropriated the name from the same Italian cartographer, Amerigo Vespucci.”
And then came the inevitable interculturalist trope: “Using American for the United States is offensive to Latinos.” Hm.
Now, I’m Latino. I’ve lived in Latin America. I taught Latin American history. My father was a Mexican immigrant who proudly called himself an American. For eight decades I’ve used and heard the word American and I’ve never been offended by it. Had I been too stupid to recognize that American was actually offensive to me? This set me off on another of my Oedipal quests, to discover whether or not that use of American really was offensive to U.S. Latinos.
I attend lots of Latino events, and the word American is omnipresent. In fact, many Latino organizations include the word American in their organizational titles. The nation’s largest association of Latino military veterans calls itself the American G.I. Forum.
What about national surveys? Well, surveys conclude that, overwhelmingly, U.S. Latinos are proud to call themselves American. The most recent survey indicated that about one quarter of all U.S. Latinos even cite American as their primary cultural identity, surpassing Latino, Hispanic, or for that matter Mejicano, Cubano, Puertorriqueño, or Dominicano.
Now I’m not saying that no Latinos and Latin Americans are offended. Why not? Just about anything you say these days will be construed as offensive by somebody.
It reminds me of the vitriolic literary feud between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, when McCarthy said about her rival, “Every word Lillian Hellman writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Well, in this age of microaggression mania, almost anything you say will probably offend somebody, including “and” and “the.” That also goes for American. There is even a Facebook site rallying people to avoid saying American. And at least one U.S. university has put out a diversity language handbook that describes the word American as “problematic.”
But it’s not problematic to most Latinos. In fact, current evidence indicates that, by and large, they’re proud to call themselves American.
Then Mark Twain spoke to me. Twain once asked a colleague about his position on a controversial public issue and the colleague answered that he was neutral on it. So Twain responded, “Then whom are you neutral against?”
Bingo! I had been asking the wrong question. It was not a matter of finding a neutral inoffensive term. It was a matter of deciding whom to offend. Those who don’t like us calling ourselves American? Or those, including most U.S. Latinos, who take great pride in calling themselves American?
That made it easy. While I recognized a certain linguistic logic to USian, that position quickly deteriorated in the face of the imperative of historical pride in the word American, including by most U.S. Latinos. It was a no-brainer. I would go with American, with historical tradition, and with respect for linguistic self-determination . . . but.
Then another Brontean voice spoke up. “Are you saying that just because people have traditionally used a word, you should always bow to tradition? What about historically-grounded hate language like the N word and the K word and the C word and the W word?”
Legitimate question. Of course, as interculturalists we should vigorously condemn hate language. But short of very clear instances, we need to use restraint when it comes to declaring what is and what is not offensive. And we definitely should avoid the temptation of inventing new verbal offenses and then riding to the linguistic rescue. That’s the kind of nanny-state stuff that demeans our public image.
Most of all we should heed Mark Twain and avoid the desperate pursuit of a generally non-existent language neutrality. In fact, while editing my encyclopedia I encountered numerous situations in which I simply could not find a neutral term for an entry title and had to choose something, knowing that I was going to upset someone. So be it!
That editing experience also altered the way I give intercultural workshops. Now, when the topic of neutral or inoffensive language comes up –- and it often does — I usually reframe the discussion by recommending that they not bother to look for neutrality. Instead, recognize the near inevitability of offending someone, make your decision, prepare for the ramifications, and move on. The only alternative is to remain mute, for the rest of your life.
Imagine, for a moment, that you were the intercultural consultant for the Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles Board of Supervisors as they recently wrestled with the proposal to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day. Both entities voted to make the change, despite vigorous protests by Italian Americans. To help assuage that ethnic wound, the two government entities simultaneously voted to add a new October celebration, Italian Heritage Day, which just happens to fall about the same time that Columbus first landed in the Americas.
But let me add one more twist. When Columbus Day was originally established and Columbus monuments were being erected, the group that most vociferously attacked these actions was none other than the Ku Klux Klan, which labeled it a Roman Catholic plot. History certainly does create strange intercultural bedfellows.
Whatever your position on the Columbus issue, interculturalists should recognize the loss felt by Italian Americans. These Columbus monuments were not like Confederate monuments that were erected in the early 20th century to assert white supremacy. For Italian Americans the Columbus monuments were vivid public symbols of finally being recognized as true Americans.
Interculturalism is not always –- maybe seldom is –- a win-win situation. The University of Ghana recently removed a statue of Mahatma Gandhi because he once said that Indians were “infinitely superior” to native Africans. My guess is that 21st-century interculturalists will increasingly have to wrestle with these inconvenient dilemmas, both personally and professionally. That’s why we need more substantive dialogue about how to address this growing intercultural messiness.
Up until now I’ve reflected on our 21st-century intercultural journey by attending to the voices of outsiders –- Rebecca Tuvel and Simon Tam, Sophocles and Emily Brontë, Epictetus and Crash Davis. Now I want to add the voices of a pair of intercultural insiders: my wonderful Summer Institute teaching partner, Louise Wilkinson, who in our classes addresses the role of brain research; and my treasured friend, Shannon Murphy Robinson, who has co-authored a fascinating new book, Neuroscience of Inclusion. As a result of their efforts, with everything I now do interculturally, the Louise-and-Shannon duo whispers into my ear: does this hold up in the light of current neuroscience?
Albert Einstein warned that you should always try to make things as simple as possible but not simpler. Please forgive me, Shannon and Louise, if I err in making it too simpler. Let’s consider two basic neuroscientific points.
First, our subconscious brains operate continuously, no matter what we do consciously. Yours are operating right now, maybe even reacting defensively to things I’ve said. This subconscious operation occurs not only within ourselves, but within everybody else with whom we interact. As a result, all intercultural relations are, in some respects, interactions between reptilian subconscious brains.
Second, as a result, we need to reconsider, modify, and sometimes discard those intercultural practices that brain research suggests are ineffective and maybe even dysfunctional. This may include some of our hallowed approaches to training. Let me give you a current example.
One of today’s intercultural buzzwords is microaggressions. Now I like the concept of microaggressions and I teach about them, but I also recognize the concept’s limitations and, even more important, its dangers. And I have watched the term become increasingly perilous, mainly as a result of that holy trinity of language toxicity: misuse, abuse, and overuse.
Now we all say and do stuff that may have an adverse impact on others, often without knowing it. It’s certainly interculturally laudable to try to become more reflective about our actions and our words. But laudible can morph into ludicrous if people transform a principle into a fetish. The current fixation on avoiding microaggressions is becoming such a fetish, and neuroscience suggests why interculturalists need to avoid this fetishism.
In his book on microaggressions, Darrell Wing Sue included a well-known microaggressions list. He also argued that we should consider the context in which we use those expressions. One of those expressions is “Where are you from?,” a question I’ve asked several times right here at this conference over the past two days.
So why is it on Sue’s microaggression list? Because some people in some situations don’t accept the response and add “But where are you really from?,” suggesting that the respondent has been hiding her true identity. A common example is Asian Americans answering with their city or state, then being pressed about their “real” origins, insinuating that they are inherently foreign. So what’s the solution. Simple. Don’t ask people the “where are you really from” follow-up question. It’s wrong-minded and it’s insulting.
Another statement on Sue’s no-no list, “You speak English very well.” Sure, don’t say that when conversing with another American, such as one of a different skin color, because it implies surprise that this person speaks good English despite the color of her skin. But the statement is perfectly fine when complimenting someone from another country for whom English is not his native language.
When I lived in Brazil, I was absolutely delighted when someone complimented me on my Portuguese, which I didn’t begin learning until my mid-20’s. So I’m duly impressed when an outsider becomes highly proficient in English, a language with 18,000 rules of grammar and bafflingly non-phonetic spelling. That’s why English is one of the few languages of spelling bees. So I sometimes honor such achievers by complimenting their English, while also recognizing that this compliment should not be used in certain other contexts.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen some trainers go one step further –- one inane step further — telling participants that they ought to totally avoid using any of the expressions on Sue’s list. In other words, we should rigidly avoid perfectly good, basic, useful statements and questions out of the abject fear that someone, somewhere might take offense. This is how an obsession with the laudable principle of avoiding offenses can become transformed into dysfunctional and counter-productive fetishism.
As interculturalists, we have serious skin in this game, because bad training can bring disrepute to the entire interculturalist project. This is why we need the courage to criticize dysfunctional training methods and rethink our own methods in the face of new knowledge and critical insights.
Even when I’ve observed skilled trainers teach about microaggressions, I’ve often come away with a sense of lost opportunity. But I wasn’t sure why I felt that queasiness until I read Shannon’s book. Then, this fall, I read a quote from the welcoming remarks to new students by University of California, Berkeley, Chancellor Carol Christ. “Personal resilience,” Christ said, is “the surest form of safe space.” Personal resilience is “the surest form of safe space.” That was the missing link. Carol’s remarks intersected with Shannon’s book and Louise’s teaching to provide me with another “ah hah” intercultural moment.
Teaching about microaggressions advances interculturalism when it helps us become aware of more equitable ways to treat other people. But it fails -– and fails miserably –- when it doesn’t simultaneously build personal resilience. Instead it can infantilize people by contributing to their sense of “poor me, look at all of the microaggressions I have to face.” In teaching about microaggressions, we should develop participants’ intercultural sensitivity and emotional intelligence, but we must simultaneously strengthen their sense of personal resilience and agency, their sense of “screw you if you think I’m going to let your microaggressions ruin my life.” If we don’t develop people’s personal resilience while teaching about microaggressions, we contribute to disabling them.
In short, the changing world around us is complicating our lives as twenty-first-century interculturalists –- the world of unexpected events, new ideas, complex controversies, and revealing research. But those changes also offer us a great opportunity to extend beyond our usual teaching and training habitats into the hurly burly of the public square.
We teach courses and give workshops on holding courageous conversations and difficult dialogues. But what interculturalists also need are more courageous conversations and difficult dialogues among ourselves about our own field of endeavor.
So let me pull together the various strands of today’s journey into a vision of how 21st-century interculturalism can achieve a more powerful role in national and global public discourse.
First, we should gaze more intensely into the mirror, clarify our basic principles, and distance ourselves from those traps where principles have turned into fetishes.
Second, through conferences sessions and maybe through a new interculturalist magazine, we should commit ourselves to making interculturalism a galvanizer of vibrant internal discussion, including a respectful vetting of the differing, sometimes-clashing real-world applications of our principles. Like boxers training for a major fight, we can also use those interchanges with friends to hone our arguments, to toughen ourselves to criticism, and to prepare for the main event of public discourse.
Third, we should glory in such discussions — particularly concerning the complexities, contradictions, and inevitable dilemmas of applying basic interculturalist principles to the messy, ironic map of the real world. And we should make the examination of this messiness an essential part of our training of future generations of interculturalists. Let’s be more mindful about taking our training to places where truisms, even hallowed principles, do not suffice. To places where things aren’t win-win or clearly good vs. evil. To places of ethical messiness, of competing goods and competing bads, where neutrality doesn’t exist and you must dig way down to make difficult choices between inevitable offenses.
Finally, while continuing to do the things we do well, we should also stride more consciously out of our academic, training, and consulting safe spaces to take a more active role in the broader, more contentious public arena. And when doing so, we must remain hyper-aware that Polonius or Crash Davis interculturalist theories or clichés will be of little use, that they will be hurled back in our faces by smart, articulate, merciless opponents who have disdain for the very beliefs we cherish.
But if we avoid clichés, if we develop solid arguments based on compelling evidence, if we hone our combative skills among ourselves, and if we learn to apply interculturalist principles in imaginative ways that provide new and nuanced perspectives on old and emerging issues –- if we do these things, our field has the opportunity of becoming a more vital public voice on the major issues facing our nations and our world.
Will we succeed? Who knows? By what measure? I have my own personal assessment tool, provided by that great Irish existentialist playwright-novelist, Samuel Beckett. In his prose piece, Worstward Ho, Beckett gifted the world with twelve of the most penetrating words in the English language. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
The ultimate test of interculturalist moral courage is to try, to take the risk of becoming more active participants in the world’s great debates, and to not be afraid to “fail better.”
Carlos E. Cortés 