The unflattering light of Starbucks
I am a decidedly middle-class white lady. I am a monolingual American from the mid-west. I was raised with notions of self-righteous Western civics and imperialism, the glory of democracy and capitalism, the unquestioned necessity of a functionally-differentiated (āindividualistā) society, the power of the individual, and the myth of American meritocracy. I generally expect everyone to have straight, healthy teeth and no discernible body odor. I honestly do not care about taking my shoes off inside my home even though I have a young child and I know how unsanitary and unhealthy that habit is. My experience working domestically with and among immigrants and refugees, and abroad as a foreign white-minority teacher taught me a lot about my own strange American habits and cultural biases.
As it turns out, I talk about the weather too much. I eat breakfast in my car unusually often. I take showers that are far too long and far too hot. And in the mornings I habitually zigzag around my home multi-tasking with a mouth full of foaming toothpaste (How revolting!). These are things I learned because I am self-aware of how odd my habits seem to others. But this is only the beginning. This is a superficial level of intercultural interaction. Most recommendations for intercultural communication competency will discuss the importance of self-reflection and self-awareness. In my opinion, the next recommended step toward ICC competencyāconfronting your own biasāis often overlooked and under-emphasized.
Confronting your own biases is a step of the adjustment process that goes beyond just being able to see your own mistakes and being aware of how you contribute to situations or circumstances. Confronting your own biases means understanding how your personal lensāyour assumptions (The majority rules!), your habits (NO sugar in your coffee, Miss?!), and your worldview (Be the change you want to see!) are part of your own cultural inheritance. In most of the literature on the topic, it reads like the next logical step, looks pretty straight-forward, and sounds kind of obvious. However, in my experience working with Peace Corps Volunteers, Fulbright ETAs, and fellow English Language Fellows who are all otherwise talented and experienced intercultural communicators, it is not always a next logical step. It is not always a straight-forward step. And it is definitely not obvious in real-life critical situations. This self-check is the emotional heavy-lifting. It is the task that requires nitty-gritty vulnerability. And itās the step that demands dig-deep-for-it courage.
In her book, Other Peopleās Children, Lisa Delpit (1995) wrote about the difficulty of confronting your own biases in a way that captures how this step feels to me. I hear her words echo in my head like a line of poetry when I find myself in critical incidents. I share them with you in the hopes that they will remind you take this step, too.
We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment ā and that is not easy. It is painful as well, because it means turning yourself inside out, giving up your own sense of who you are, and being willing to see yourself in the unflattering light of another's angry gaze. It is not easy, but it is the only way to learn what it might feel like to be someone else and the only way to start the dialogue. (Delpit, 1995, p. 46ā47)
I remember the first time I honestly saw myself āin the unflattering light of anotherās angry gazeā and it was much, much worse than I thought it would be. Delpit is right that it was painful, it did turn me inside out, and it did make me lose a sense of myself. By the time I got to Indonesia I was familiar with this step. I knew it was coming. I knew it would be hard. I could hear it in the McCulture playlists on the radio. I could read it in fast-food slogans like, āBros love brownies.ā I could see it in the cable television line-up. But I didnāt expect it to be as hard as it was.
I didnāt expect it to be on an average Thursday in Jakarta.
I didnāt expect it to be terrorist bomb.
And I didnāt expect it to be at the Starbucks across the street from my husbandās office.
I knew in the aftermath I could #prayforjakarta or I could #kamitidaktakut or I could consider myself #blessed that my husband spontaneously decided to work from home that day.
But I know that Starbucks.
I know people who lost colleaguesāfrom the United Nations and from the Indonesian National Police.
And I know better, as an intercultural communicator.
In the back of a police vehicle with tinted windows, wrapped in a colleagueās jilbab and behind sunglasses, I checked my phone and shared my location with my husband. A kind soul caring for my child wrapped her completely in her favoriteĀ āOh, the Places Youāll Goā blanket and delivered her quietly into the car on a back residential street. I put on a brave face to send a photo to my mom. We are okay.Ā
Then, I took a deep breath and āceased to exist.ā I saw myself, my work, my husbandās work, and our presence here in the angry gaze of someone who walked into a capitalistic, imperialistic, and materialistic coffee shop and sat down at the table with one of my husbandās colleagues. He was a middle-class white man. That man could have been my husband. Or it could have been a middle-class white lady, like me.
When I sifted through the shattered pieces of the worldview I originally boarded my flight with, I went back to Delpitās wisdom. I pulled up the article and re-discovered the two sentences, which began the quote that still rings in my ears.
Delpit (1995) wrote, āBoth sides do need to be able to listen, and I contend that it is those with the most power, those in the majority, who must take the greater responsibility for initiating the process. To do so takes a very special kind of listening, listening that requires not only open eyes and ears, but open hearts and mindsā (p. 46). Although my American middle-class white lady status doesnāt make me particularly powerful in Indonesia and doesnāt place me in the majority in Indonesia, I recognize how my own intercultural interaction mistakes, my own biases, and my participation in the larger framework of structural oppression does still place me squarely in the people group Delpit is referring to. It is my responsibility to remember to confront these biases. And it is my obligation to continually get better at listening with open eyes and ears, as a self-aware intercultural communicator; and furthermore, to get better at listening with a truly open heart and mind.
I learned many lessons on January 14, 2016. The intercultural communication lesson I re-discovered that morning was simple: day-to-day interaction and day-to-day communication is nothing more than speaking and listening. And intercultural communicators would do well to listen more and speak less. As hard as it is to face the unflattering light of confronting personal bias, the good news is that with experience you get more and more comfortable stepping into that space where, as Delpit said, you can āgive up your own beliefs and cease to exist for a moment,ā while you take a minute to step back, and try to understand someone elseās truth.
