I think white people are just culturally retarded," I exclaimed to my boyfriend as I waited in a crowded Greyhound line in New York. An older Latina woman with a teenage boy by her side turned around as she nodded in agreement. "You're right!" she told me with a knowing smile. My boyfriend and I laughed at this strange connection in the New York bus terminal as we wondered when the damn line would start moving.
Why do people hesitate to learn about other cultures? Why does the thought of difference scare us? Is it possible to acknowledge difference without automatically creating a hierarchy with your values and practices at the top? To revisit an example on Duke's campus, why did Sigma Chi and so many other Duke students fail to see the vulgarity and disrespect inherent in the Viva Mexico party? I now think the main question should not have been about punishment or even the prevention of such parties, but instead how could Duke students be this stupid? Our Duke educations, our lives, lack cultural awareness and understanding. When a sports editor refers to the ape-like arms of a black basketball player, we have to look beyond just the guy who wrote it. Beyond sensitivity trainings that reduce fundamental beliefs and experiences to hour-long sessions with pee breaks. We have to look to how we live our lives, who we live with, who we love, what we read, what interests us... Aren't we all at Duke because we have an insatiable thirst for knowledge? Why does this curiousity so seldom extend to the lived realities of those around us?
As I write this column, I am sitting at a circa 1995 computer in Fortaleza, Brazil, a coastal city in the Northeast. I am living with an Afro-Brazilian family and attempting to discuss racism, the landless movement and women's rights in elementary Portuguese. I study all day and at night I go out with my sisters and dance to samba and forro as I drink beers that are cheaper than water. I am trying to understand the importance of touch here and the way my family shares everything and no one ever wants to be alone. My sisters are black but they mostly date white guys and here this is fairly accepted and normal. This weekend my mother wants to take me to the interior of Northeast Brazil, an impoverished area ravaged by droughts.
As I write this column, I know my friends in other parts of the world are having similar experiences as well. My best friend is in Senegal working with a women's development organization, my boyfriend is in China, and I also have friends in Mexico. We want to know the world. We want to try to understand other people and their lives, even though we know our ideas will always be shaped by our own limited backgrounds and experiences.
As I write this column, I also know there are millions of hungry Brazilian children desperately waiting for their next meal. I never got used to homeless women and their children begging in the U.S., and I won't get used to it here, either. I can't process the legless veteran in the New York subway station or the armless boy I pass on my way to school here in Brazil. I know I need to learn from these people about their lives if I am to help them and myself in the process.
Culture, of course, is not confined solely to other countries outside of the United States. When I worked at a homeless shelter in South Side Chicago last summer, I lived a culture very different from my own. When I talk with wealthy, conservative students at Duke I try to understand their beliefs and reasoning. More and more, I am becoming aware of my own family's culture and how it has shaped me.
Most importantly, I am trying to reconcile my own liberal beliefs with the more conservative beliefs that many people in my family hold. I know that for many working-class whites, especially men, individualistic values are very important and liberal ideals are often seen as negating the value of work and initiative.
I admire their hardwork and dedication to such principled beliefs. In between helpings of ham and mashed potatoes at family get togethers, I try to discuss values, politics and dreams with the conservatives in my family.
A thirst for knowledge must be a thirst to truly understand. A desire to be right necessitates a desire to listen. As Duke students, we should be seeking out new social situations (black frat parties for some, chatting with New Sense authors for others), reading everything we can (Mother Jones to The Economist) and stepping outside of our little boxes. We should do this, if for no other reason, because we want to know everything there is to know about the world. In this case, as in most others, being self-interested is fine and perhaps actually the only way to go.
There is nothing wrong with being self-interested, you just have to know enough about yourself and others to truly understand what your self-interest actually is.
To give this column a nice cheezy ending (which by the way seems to have no equivalent in Portuguese), only you can end cultural retardation. Walk around in Durham and actually talk to folks. Take a class outside of your comfort zone, be it economics or womens' studies, and challenge the professor on a regular basis. Take your classmates out to dinner and continue the debate over a few beers. Pick a spot on the globe and go there. Don't just stand in line waiting for the bus: walk. Hitch-hike.
It takes some effort but I think it beats the hell outta gettin' in the same damn bus as everyone else.
Bridget Newman is a Trinity junior. Her column appears every third Thursday.
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