Love Me, Love My Culture

American discourse on "race," "ethnicity," and "culture" stinks to high heaven, because it's rooted in concepts that are antiquated to begin with, and flat wrong beyond that.  (Things are no better in other countries, but I'm talking about us.)  I sympathize, since I'm trying to make sense of these issues too, but I recognize that the categories are incoherent at best.  I'm not sure they can be fixed.

On Thursday morning NPR posted this story, about racial divisions among churches around Washington DC.  They interviewed the pastor of a church that's trying to work toward a more "multicultural" approach.  What seems to be the problem isn't so much overt racism as cultural differences between white and black churches, and the expectations of the worshipers from each.  As I listened to him, I began to suspect that the problem might not be a problem after all, and that racism is not going to be eliminated by erasing cultural differences.

The pastor makes some remarkable admissions here, perhaps unawares.  That worship is not a pure, timeless and ahistorical expression of service to deity but a human construction shaped by culture and habit.  That culture is not something "natural," fallen from heaven, but the product of human choices.  If white churches should modify their liturgy and other practices to make them more "multicultural," then why shouldn't black churches do so as well?  Of course, black churches are already heavily shaped by white culture: the services are performed in English using a religion that channeled Jewish and other west Asian sources through centuries of European culture, appropriate dress is European, church buildings are European, the musical instruments are European.  The Pentecostal elements, in those churches, aren't African either.  But I don't know, maybe African-American Christians have already compromised enough?  One could make the case, except that they seem not to be aware of it. African-American culture generally is also largely assimilated.  It's not very persuasive to invoke cultural survival of a culture that is already 'impure.'  But all cultures are.  Whether he knows it or not, this guy is moving toward atheism: I'm rooting for him.

The same applies to the white churches, of course: their Christianity is already a patchwork stitched together from many disparate sources.  You know, all those "pagan" elements that have found their way into Christian celebrations - "Christmas" trees, Yule logs, Easter eggs, and so on?  But also: Christianity originated in Palestinian Judaism, but the versions we know now came through Gentile ("Greek," as the New Testament writers call it) churches, with considerable conflict between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians (it all hangs out in Paul's letter to Galatians), and then through Rome (a catch-all for the multicultural Empire) and Western Europe.  The Eastern churches, lumped together as Orthodoxy, reflect other cultural differences.  More differences are emerging as Christianity spreads through Africa and Asia, and as Evangelical Protestantism competes successfully with Catholicism in Latin America.  Would people from these churches feel at home in a majority-white, middle- to upper-class D.C. service?

In all these cases, social construction relies on a heritage of forgetting that what feels comfortable, natural, neutral, is the current state of many centuries of change and learning.  Just within a given stream of tradition, whether the church be white or black, there are details that will trip up a visitor from one denomination to another.  A white Episcopalian who visits a white Presbyterian church will find many things about the service that feel 'wrong,' and indeed people have died over such things, though from a larger perspective they're of no more moment than how to hang a roll of toilet paper (over? under?).  Where does the burden of adaptation lie: on the visitor, or on the host?

I don't think white churches should have to assimilate any more than non-white churches should.  If a congregation wants to develop liturgies and worship practices that will work for an ethnic rainbow, that is their choice, but it's likely that they'll end up with everyone feeling dissatisfied, at least until they adjust to the changes.  What we need is not the erasure and elimination of differences, but respect for differences, and that inevitably means judgment about which differences matter and which don't.

Looking, Really Looking; Seeing, Really Seeing

I should have been paying more attention to the sites in my Korean news blogroll.  Some have disappeared, a couple are now Korean-language only, some are still there but stopped posting some time ago.

But I was interested by some of what I found when I looked them over last week.  This American blogger, though he stopped updating Korea Dispatch in 2009, has a good attitude.  I disagree with him on numerous points, of course, but he's less ethnocentric than some American writers in Korea that I've seen.  His suggested reading list is good.  He's married to a Korean woman.  I liked most of what he said in his final post, about the culture shock of returning to his home city of San Francisco after several years away, but this bugged me slightly:

And the faces. All kinds, all ethnicities. So unlike the never-ending sameness of Korea, that maddening, comforting sense of living in a village/nation where everyone is a variation of the same theme. SF felt fragmented, everyone a stranger who neither shared the same tongue, ate the same food… only occupying the same space. In Korea I am a minority; in SF, everyone is.

I realize that he's exaggerating slightly to make a point, and I know what he means, though when I first visited San Francisco in 1997 I was surprised how multiethnic it wasn't.  Yes, there was more variety of human appearance than in the small northern-Indiana towns I'd grown up in, but no more than I was used to after a quarter century in Bloomington, Indiana.  The university draws students from all over the world, and though its relative lack of racial diversity is still a sore point, I was surprised that San Francisco didn't feel so different to me.

But I disagree about the "never-ending sameness" of Koreans.  From my first visit in 2001, I was struck by how much variation there was in Koreans' appearance.  I'd already noticed it to some extent among the Koreans I'd met in Bloomington, but once I was in the actual place I could see how different Koreans looked from each other, and this was before younger Koreans really got into dyeing their hair in lighter colors.  (Older Koreans, by contrast, had been dyeing their hair black all along.  Every time I pass a Korean barber shop, I see half-a-dozen older men getting a dye job.  And not only older men: when I got my hair cut last week, a guy about 30 was getting his black hair refreshed.)  What I'm talking about is bone structure, face shape, eye shape (again, even leaving aside the depressingly popular eye-widening surgery so many Koreans get), lip/mouth shape, hair texture, even color.  (Also height and weight.)  Some of my Korean friends, when I've mentioned this, put it down to genetic influence from American soldiers, but I doubt it could have been as extensive as what I see.

But I've also noticed that there's a lot of sameness among Caucasians -- guys with goatees, for example, tend to look alike.  When I'm in all- or mostly-white small towns, I have the same feeling that the blogger had about Korea: never-ending sameness.  People's appearance can be categorized, though I don't have names for the categories, just the awareness that this person looks similar to others I've known or seen.  (That becomes more common as I get older: everyone looks like someone else.)  Some of the similarities cross "race" as well; I think of the laughing old Chinese man in Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet who's a dead ringer for Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot.

Maybe it's just that I look.  Many foreigners I see appear to be drawn into themselves, as if not to draw attention to themselves, maybe afraid that someone will ask to practice their English on them.  (Most of the white people I see are European, though; when I overhear them talking to each other, they aren't speaking English anyway.)  I'm glad to be here, I'm interested in the country and the people, and I interact when I can.  I know I'm not unique in this -- I see foreigners speaking good Korean on TV, and I know some who do in everyday life as well -- but I rarely see it on the street, in the stores, on the subway.  As Thomas Mann had one of his characters say, interest is greater than love.

Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others?

Voters in Houston have overwhelmingly rejected a city law that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity -- along with race, sex, color, religion, and other characteristics already protected by federal civil rights law but not by local ordinance. The law had been passed by the Houston City Council in 2014.  Today in the e-mail I got a press release from the National LBGTQ Task Force Action Fund, which referred to

the city’s ordinance that extends non-discrimination protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people--among 13 other protected classes including race, religion, sex, color, age, ethnicity, disability, national origin, marital status, military status, genetic information, pregnancy, and family status.

There's something off here.  I looked it up, and found that, sure enough, the ordinance prohibits discrimination based on "sexual orientation" and "gender identity," along with 13 other traits.  It doesn't specify lesbians, gay men, or the rest, which would have laid the law open to legal challenge.

I confess that some of the confusion was in my own mind.  I gather that "protected class" does not refer to a group of individuals -- it's legalese for the protected characteristic, but in neutral terms: "race," not "African-Americans"; "sex", not "women."  But the related "protected group" is confusing too.  Wikipedia, in a very brief article, says it "is a group of people qualified for special protection by a law, policy, or similar authority... U.S. federal law protects employees from discrimination or harassment based on sex, race, age, disability, color, creed, national origin or religion."  My point is that "sex, race, age, etc." don't refer to groups, but to all individuals.  A law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation protects heterosexuals as well as homosexuals and bisexuals; a law prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity will protect cisgender as well as transgender individuals; and so on.  I've said before that I don't know what sort of discrimination cisgender individuals might face, but someone's bound to figure out a way to do it before long.  That's one of the generally-ignored pitfalls (or is it a pitfall?) of civil rights antidiscrimination law: it protects majorities as well as well as minorities.  White men have sought and found relief under existing civil rights legislation, as have heterosexuals and bisexuals who were discriminated against by gay men.  And Christians, despite the whining of some of them, are already (in) a protected class. 

In this respect civil rights law is at odds with the dominant multiculti discourse on (for example) racism, which defines racism solely as structural racism and declares dogmatically that white people cannot suffer from racism.  Perhaps not -- it's evidently a matter of definition -- but they (we) can certainly experience discrimination based on our race.  It's written into the law, though as with many laws the consequences may not have been foreseen.  (Remember the article I discussed a couple of months ago, which treated racism as a consequence of innate human tendencies to stereotype people by their appearance, and declared that all white people are racist.  It also conflicted with the dominant multicultural model in treating racism as a matter of individual prejudice rather than structural factors, but neglected to notice that it also proved that all people of color are racist, since they have the same innate stereotyping tendencies.  When I pointed this out to the diversity manager who'd posted the article on Facebook, he floundered: he hadn't noticed the problem, and still didn't get it, caught as he is in the toils of diversity-management / culture of therapy discourse.  That couldn't be what the article meant, because it couldn't be.  That's the big trouble with diversity management in institutions, whether schools or corporations: people are given authority over others even though they don't really know what they're talking about.  But not to worry, they're just following the orders of their DNA.)

I understand why the Task Force phrased their press release as they did; it's a long-established convention to refer to civil rights laws in terms of the minorities they were enacted to protect, so that many people have come to believe that "Civil Rights" means specifically the rights of black people.  "Gay rights" is shorthand for prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, but many people, gay and straight, take it literally; and so on.  Since most people evidently have forgotten, if they ever knew, what the shorthand is short for, I think it's necessary to abandon the shorthand and spell out the actual meaning for a while.  Maybe it won't do much good.  Opposition to civil rights laws doesn't come from a misunderstanding of what the laws are supposed to do; bigots deliberately misunderstand the laws for their own reasons.  But it can't help that supporters of civil rights law don't undertand the laws either.