Dr. Forbush Thinks

Things get quite confusing when we talk about race and culture. Race is your genetics. Culture is your behaviour, ideals and things that your family and friends teach you from the time you were born. Both are inherited from your family. However only culture can be changed.

People are protective of their culture as well as their racial identity. That means that people can go out and recognize another member of their culture by the way that they behave. Similarly people can go out and recognize members of other cultures based on the way they behave as well.

We can think of non-racial cultures like: scientists, politicians, lawyers, doctors, working class folks, wealthy folk etc. We also often think about racially based cultures like Irish, French, Japanese, and Indian (both Native American and Asian). The difference here is that one can recognize some racially based cultures by the way they look.

Just like saying a person with a shamrock on the bumper of their car a visual cue tells you what cultural behaviour you may expect when you talk to the people who own the car.

Now, imagine a culture of poor people. There are certain ways that poor people behave because of the way they were brought up. Manners may not have been taught, because both parents may have been working two jobs each just trying to put food on the table. The idea of rudeness may not be the same as for a person who attended finishing school. Since the parents may not have been around then the kids may have been left to fend for themselves in whatever way they could. The kids may have been raised without adult supervision to a great degree and kids could have been mean to each other. In fact, parents may have even taught self-defense strategies that aren’t the same as the kids raised in the suburbs. The dads may have taught the sons to hit the other guy before he hits you. The moms might have taught the girls to be quick with their tongue before the enemy has time to attack. These are cultural values, not racial values.

Our society uses the same strategy to identify cultures by visual cues, like knowing a guy is Italian because of the Italian flag T-shirt he is wearing.  And, because of the cultural history of the African Americans many of them ended up living in poor neighborhoods and picking up rude and aggressive behaviour. Other poor kids growing up in poor neighborhoods also pick up these rude and aggressive behaviours as well. It is not a racial thing but a cultural thing.

The good news is that culture can change. The bad news is that culture needs to change from within the culture. People outside the culture can not force a culture to change. In other words, groups develop that cultures by accident and by tradition. Traditions become rooted in a culture and become passed down by generation to generation. Actively and consciously trying to change the problem aspects of a culture are the only way it can change. But there is hope. Look at the smoking habit that was part of American culture in the 1950s. Fifty years later many fewer people smoke, and those who do are now looked down on by society in general.