A Space for a Disparate Many
Culture permeates the social space in which your mind is developed. Cognitive structures that represent your culture are built and later used to interpret the spaces you pass through. Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, I understood that every space had a culture and I often did not fit the theme. My urban modern façade was incompatible with another’s shabby chic décor. However, my hometown did not just teach me about cultural separation; it also taught me that dissimilar cultural spaces have connection points or entry ways to nooks of intercultural discourse.
After college, I was afforded an international example of this truism. I spent 11 months in Hong Kong, teaching English. I was awestruck, traveling so far from my space of origin, my culture. I had traveled before; a few weeks in Mozambique and London, but this was a rare expedition. I went to Mozambique with college peers and academic chaperones. Furthermore, we were ferried from one place to another by Mozambican hosts who pricked holes into the language barrier. In London, the language barrier was a porous and I had a good friend as a traveling companion. Hong Kong was different; I was a lava lamp on a dining room table. I was alone until I found companionship in American strangers on the same journey. Being in space in which your native tongue is sparingly spoken; and, there is no translator sewn into your daily routine, reminds you that there are other ways to communicate. I remember playing a pickup game of charades at a convenient store in Tai Po, Hong Kong. A young woman, who worked at that store, was my impromptu partner. She was good; we could have been champions. Her eyes lit up once she realized what I needed; just a few balloons to decorate a space at the college where I worked and lived. She smiled; stared into my victorious face — I had just broken through the language barrier — and said, “sorry, we don’t have those.” I never learned enough Cantonese to order a cup of coffee at Starbucks like a local. Therefore, the Canton language was merely an acoustic backdrop of the cultural space like Florida fowls and my neighbor’s donkey are typically the soundtrack of my morning. Every cultural space has a language and knowing it is like being offered a seat in someone’s living room. Otherwise, you are sipping sweet tea out on the front porch, wondering if their morning stagger from one room to the next is padded with carpet, tile, or linoleum.
In mid-June 2008, my time in Hong Kong was nearly spent. I took a bus from campus to the subway. I rode the subway to Kowloon Tong where I would sit down for my last haircut at a small Black barber shop. This part of the city space was dominated by dark complexions, Africans and Indians engaged in commerce. My barber was from Congo; “the little one” as he put it, meaning the Republic of Congo. During my time in Hong Kong, this small shop was a cultural oasis; a brief escape from my minority status. We had race, but not much culture in common. Nonetheless, our shared intimate understanding over the flavor of attention our skin could attract was enough to keep us meaningfully bonded for a few moments. That year was another reminder that every space has a culture and sometimes I don’t fit. Yet, other times, an accommodation is made in the cultural space by a store clerk who shows patience or a personable barber who changes the shop’s medium of discussion to English, because his American customer is monolingual.
While culture is a social space, it is also harbored by the mind. One way to think of culture is as a cognitive library of related practices, perspectives and ideations that are the accumulation of processed interactions between cultural members and the physical/social environment. That cultural knowledge is shared across generations and, in some cases, undergoes some level of reinterpretation or updating for the current ethos. This ideational collection of cultural artifacts is unevenly distributed among cultural members leading to intra-cultural similarity and variation. Moreover, that knowledge acts as a mental advisor for how we should proceed from moment to moment. In other words, the cultural space in which we cognitively develop builds a mental manual on how to interpret the social spaces we pass through.
During my early teen years, my family lived in an apartment complex a few minutes south of Birmingham in a commuter suburb called Homewood. One afternoon, for reasons now forgotten, I decided to walk to the nearby Piggly Wiggly grocery store. As I approached the side of the grocery store, a White woman was exiting her car. Upon noticing me, she suddenly re-entered her car, closed the door and just sat there. I immediately interpreted her behavior as a racist gesture. I went about my business and did not linger in the area. In April of 2008, I was making my way through a train station in Nanjing, China. I was with a few other Americans, but I was the only Black male, to the best of my memory, walking through the station. A female security agent was watching over all of us, but took a second glance at me. She waved me over to the side to take a look at my passport. Two British men behind me witnessed the extra attention I received and immediately commented to themselves, “well that’s racial profiling isn’t it.” Again, I immediately interpreted the event as racially tinged, especially in light of this encounter not being the first time that year I had gotten extra care at a Chinese airport or train station. My immediate reading of these events was rooted in my knowledge of plausible experiences in which those of my heritage may be thrown. Culture constitutes, in part, how reality is construed therein coloring how we remember our past experiences. However, what is interesting, at least to me as a cognitive psychologist, is that my interpretation of both events could be completely mistaken. The way I have described the encounters is dependent on me being accurate about the other person’s intentions. For instance, what if the woman that I thought was exiting her car was actually entering her car when we noticed one another? Or, what if she was reentering the car for a reason unrelated to my passing? As for my experience in the Nanjing station, maybe it was my dashing smile (doubtful) or my distinctiveness from other passengers that made the security guard curious about my country of origin. Perhaps, she thought I was Lebron James and found disappointment upon reading my passport. Sometimes, the reasons for an experience are clear. Other times, encounters are ambiguous and that is when cognitive structures that inform our expectations “help” to bring clarity. What is thought-provoking is that if these events happened to a White-American, they may not even consider a racial interpretation of the event as a plausible option; thus, it would not even come to mind as an explanation for the encounter. Culture, along with individual experiences, builds our expectations of events, influences what we extract and encode from the event, therein impacting how we remember the event.
It all comes from a cultural space in which we are thrown well before our first words are uttered. The adults feeding into a child’s development are products of a personal past, of a culture. Our ability to denote experiences as important to our self-concept and store them as mental movie reels for an episode of “This is Your Life” emerges from several developments, one of which is the ability to converse with adults in social interactions that are purposefully and inadvertently rooted in a cultural space. Thus, culture is baked into what moments you and I consider worthy of our personal narratives. Furthermore, culture impresses on us how the details of those moments should be framed on the walls of our consciousness and in the public galleries for sharing. Consequently, cognitive remnants of culture influence how we place ourselves in the present, remember the past and, to some degree, how we imagine our futures. What’s being inculcated in your cultural space?
A few months before I left for Hong Kong, I was working at Books-A-Million, a major bookstore headquartered in Birmingham. I was assisting a costumer who may have been in her mid-forties. We shared race; thus she wanted to provide some unsolicited wisdom to her young brother. Her sagacious message for me was to watch out for White people. Her words undoubtedly spoken from a place where cultural division in the city spaces had taught her a sad lesson that time would not dilute. But, what was I to do with that memo? Perhaps, I could use it as a tool for building intercultural alertness, but what if I wish to construct something more productive. There is a time for cultural hardness, but when division feels destructively imposing, you should look for flaws in the structure of disunity. You measure twice, then cut once. You re-route that entry way from a nook for quiet mornings and column reading to the main living space where voices are raised, games are played, and perspectives shared. In that space, we can build a mental manual for seeing each other.
