Intercultural Miscommunication: Perceptions and Misperceptions
between Africans and African Americans*
Funwi F. Ayuninjam, KentuckyStateUniversity
Intercultural Miscommunication: Perceptions and Misperceptions
between Africans and African Americans*
Funwi F. Ayuninjam, KentuckyStateUniversity
INTRODUCTION
The popular melting pot metaphor associated with the United States of America—whether or not well earned—may be a mixed blessing. For one thing, a society that harbors a multiplicity of cultures—all of which recognize and pool from one another’s strengths—stands a greater chance of moving forward and faster than a monolithic society. Biologically, and based on Darwin’s theories of the evolution of pigeons and of human sexual selection, this argument explains the differences in quality between inbred species and their crossbred counterparts.1 But far too often melting pots tend to take for granted the intrinsic value and strength of their diversity until that very strength begins to turn against them. The melting pot metaphor reflects a nation whose social institutions are increasingly responding to various pressures to live up to their names. Thus schools, colleges and universities, clubs, places of religious worship, financial institutions, and other social groups are being motivated to join the hearty march toward diversity and multiculturalism through batteries of diversity workshops and by taking a harder look at their recruitment or membership policies and practices—all in a bid to ensure inclusiveness. It is evident—at least on the surface—that some of these efforts are opening up some eyes to the wider world; it is equally true that there is a deepening and widening cultural gulf between various segments of American society resulting from, but in some cases also confirming, age-old mutual mistrust and suspicions, some of which have been facilitated by the new drive toward political correctness, which enables us to conveniently postpone indefinitely any attempt to resolve or bring to closure daily interpersonal differences.
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Intercultural Miscommunication
Funwi F. Ayuninjam
The need to seek better ways of talking across cultures is urgent, particularly because cultural ignorance afflicts not only children and the less literate populations, but also virtually every facet of the putatively “cultured” community—the intellectual elite, teachers, college students, politicians, and even some of the best in the broadcast industry. Commenting on the never-ending argument that foreigners are coming into the U.S. and taking jobs away from Americans, a National Public Radio (NPR) “Marketplace” reporter on November 14, 1996 said of an “illegal” Mexican employee, “He was short and stolid, like a brick.” Another NPR reporter, commenting on Mad Cow Disease, suggested (I believe facetiously) that Britain release its mad cows into Salvador to detonate land mines. Would this reporter have considered recommending that the cows be sent rather to Bosnia, so 25,000 GIs and other European troops might not go into harm’s way? Releasing mad cows into a mine-ridden area might help solve the mine issue; however, this type of solution appears unwieldy, given the distance involved. Perhaps more important is the health risk to which the citizens of Salvador might be exposed. On November 13, 2000 another National Public Radio reporter, covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, referred to the Palestinians as “a savage, uncontrollable mob,” but described Israel as “an overbearing military” (“Morning Edition”). During the 1996 U.S. vice-presidential debate, candidate Jack Kemp described his opponent’s economic program as “a welfare system like that of a third-world socialist country.” In a jolt of eloquence, one of my colleagues at KentuckyStateUniversity described an African’s home as follows: “It was a shack. It was totally out of the third world corrugated metal sheetsnothing was straight,” while yet another, talking about African students, said, “My African students have beautiful names. They’re very musical!” While this remark about names might have been well-meaning, more often than not Americans have trouble pronouncing African names, and for such people, remarks of this kind would be disingenuous. But, as usual, there are redeeming moments, as when a Caucasian student in my Integrative Studies class at Kentucky State University called me on a February afternoon in 1997 and reported that she had just come to understand how brilliant Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was only after doing an assigned reading of his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”—a reading that drove her to tears as she contemplated the terrible loss that the United States suffered in the King assassination.
This paper focuses on stereotyping between Africans (both from the mainland and in the diaspora) and African Americans—both students, and faculty, and staff. It takes a look at various forms of stereotyping mirrored in issues of identity and language use. It seeks to determine their effects, and suggests coping mechanisms that might facilitate looking beyond stereotypes and discovering more positive symbols of the culture continuum.
Historical Perspective
An account of the relations between Africans and African Americans can hardly be fully comprehensible without bringing into focus the Pan-African Movement, alias Pan-Africanism. Conceived in the mid nineteenth century in the United States, the Pan-African Movement—“a movement of ideas and emotions”—sought to regain independence, freedom, and, most importantly, dignity for African people in the diaspora.2 These were those “who felt themselves either physically through dispossession or slavery, or socially, economically, politically and mentally [sic] through colonialism to have lost their homeland.”3 Legum also identifies in Pan-Africanism another burning desire: black solidarity—to establish a unifying identity and to achieve a sense of oneness.4
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Intercultural Miscommunication
Funwi F. Ayuninjam
The feeling of alienation (expressed by poets like Claude McKay) prompted Jamaican Marcus Aurelius Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, which was premised on Negroes’ disengaging themselves from the West.5 Albeit a potent emotional appeal, Garvey’s movement was politically impotent and physically unrealistic. The subsequent call for solidarity (evoked by writers like Langston Hughes) gradually ceded to an expression of inferiority and insecurity by David Diop, Harold Isaacs, and the like. This disposition was soon succeeded by negritude—outright rejection of inferiority, defiant self-acceptance, and pride of race and color, as reflected in the writings of R.E.G. Armattoe, Leopold Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. As the Civil Rights struggle raged in the United States in the 1960s, pop star James Brown also echoed the same theme in his song “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” as a way of extolling blackness; being black could not explain low self-esteem. Having dismissed blackness as an illegitimate excuse for abashment, Léon Gontrand Damas and others lucidly advocated a rediscovery of Negroes’ forgotten roots through the African Personality Movement—a process born in the 1880s in Dr. Edward W. Blyden of the West Indies; it called for authentic African endeavors, not African reproductions of Western traditions or institutions.6
The current conflict between African Americans and Africans (including those in the diaspora) may have been epitomized by the nascent rift between Du Bois and Garvey at the turn of the century. Ironically, these two personalities initially met under the aegis of the first Pan-African Congress, held in London in 1900. Even though Du Bois, in his Souls of Black Folk, prophetically asserted, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line–the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the seas” (54), he did not forestall racial dissonance among Blacks by stereotypically viewing Garvey as a “little, fat, black man; ugly but with intelligent eyes and a big head” (Legum 25). This characterization was intentionally insulting given that Du Bois was of Dutch and French origin, of which he was overtly very proud. Garvey in turn derided Du Bois, a light-skinned man, as a “hybrid”; Garvey would therefore not collaborate with him. Ironically, Garvey died in London in 1940 without ever having visited Africa, while Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963 after becoming a naturalized Ghanaian citizen.
STEREOTYPING
Faculty Perceptions of Students
The New Webster’s Dictionary defines stereotype as “a standardized or typical image or conception held by or applied to members of a certain group” (1981). Stereotypes are among the most commonly used logical fallacies, and by the above definition, they presuppose a certain deficiency in reasoning. As a consequence, the stereotypes under consideration here, irrespective of their justification, may largely be dismissed as expressions of ignorance on the part of the users. There is no known single issue on which all Africans concur; neither can any one African American speak for all and to all’s satisfaction. Among the terms that some African American faculty have used to describe African students in the United States are these:7 “malleable,” “of above-average intelligence,” “hardworking,” “serious,” “eager,” and “appreciative”; African American students were mostly described as “lazy.” While it would be desirable to have college classrooms full of students with the positive attributes, the possibility of having twenty of such students in a single classroom is very doubtful, and the likelihood virtually zero—at least as it pertains to institutions with open-door admission policies. There are 104 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the nation, most of which admit high school graduates who have not successfully completed the Pre-College Curriculum (PCC); most HBCUs have remedial programs in reading, writing, and mathematics. Of the 73 HBCUs that were contacted during this study, 55 of them (75%) said they offered remedial courses, while 18 (25%) said they did not.8
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Institutions of higher learning like HBCUs–whose enrollments claim at least 50 percent African Americans—are more likely than not to have problems of student retention if high academic standards are set and maintained. Retention would be an even more acute malady if such institutions did not have well-organized remedial or college preparatory programs that inculcated in students study habits for success in the academy. Unfortunately, a disproportionate percentage of African Americans are ill-prepared for, and drop out of, high school: 13% (as against 7.3% for Whites).9
In his study of pre-college African Americans, White finds that empathy, positive regard, and genuineness led to “significant growth in learning rates, achievement test scores, self-concept, cognitive problem-solving skills, improved attendance records, and fewer discipline problems” (116). Many Africans tend to quickly dismiss less achieving African Americans as being lazy and laid back, as confirmed by the Achievement Motivation Hypothesis (McClelland et al. 1953, Atkinson 1966),10 that claims that African Americans “lack the commitment to the values of persistence, the pursuit of excellence, future planning, and hard work. They are simply lazy, shiftless, or incapable of responding to the rigors, challenges, and joys of mental discipline” (qtd. in White 120). Embedded in this hypothesis is an outrageous and malevolent stereotype, for the statement negates African American scholarship in toto. White rejects this hypothesis claiming it “fails to take into consideration major differences in the psychosocial realities that Black and white [sic] children encounter in the process of growing up within American society” (120). White goes to great lengths to lambast America’s public school system and its educators as fake and misguided and for being focused exclusively on America’s disingenuous, competitive corporate structure. Worse still, and rather ironically, he tries to defend African American students against what he labels “the sterile, dull, meaningless content of what passes for education in the typical American classroom when there is little assurance of a payoff at the end” (122). This critique is wholly spurious, for White cannot at once be opposed to a materialistic, corporate culture and have an eye on a payoff—the end game; if future payoffs are evil for Whites, what makes them good for Blacks? Yet the very “fake” and “misguided” public school system and educators are the ones largely responsible for preparing Blacks for college.
Unfortunately, White is not alone; many African American scholars share his take on the education polemic. For how long will African American leaders (policy makers, academics, and community activists alike) keep expecting that the rest of society “take into consideration major differences in the psychosocial realities”? Unlimited consideration will only hurt, not help, the intended beneficiaries; that is what the Clarence Thomases, the Ward Connerlys, and the Shelby Steeles11 are preaching, but the faithful are either deaf or think they are hearing Greek.
High Expectations: A “Problem”?
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Funwi F. Ayuninjam
Franklin Delano Raines, Fannie Mae CEO and former Director of the Office of Budget and Management in the Clinton administrations, imputed the steady weeding out of his fellow black classmates in his fast track junior high school class to a “problem of high expectations” (30), suggesting that Blacks may not have been used to such expectations. This problem is still a reality in HBCUs like KSU, as can be observed at end-of-year honor convocations and commencement ceremonies, where a disproportionate number of honors and citations go to Caucasian and international students. Also, international education and study abroad are still largely a “white” thing, as black student participation has remained numerically insignificant compared to white student participation.
It is widely agreed in American higher education that international experiences are pivotal to successful liberal arts education. The import of this understanding is readily apparent when one looks at the educational backgrounds of American foreign service personnel. A recent study shows that private liberal arts colleges such as KalamazooCollege, OberlinCollege, St.OlafCollege, ColgateCollege, and CentreCollege produce a significant number of American foreign service personnel and others who pursue careers in international civil service organizations like the United Nations. The success of these colleges in producing graduates who pursue international careers is deeply tied to the international experiences their students receive during their matriculation at these colleges. These institutions expect their students to have gained an international experience before graduation, and provide them with a wide range of study-abroad opportunities. The result for institutions like St.OlafCollege is that 100% of their graduates gain an international experience during their study at the institution.12
While the private liberal arts colleges, most of which enroll only a handful of African American students, are succeeding in training students for international careers, the need for more African Americans, Latinos, and minority internationals in the United States foreign service is growing. Currently, African Americans comprise only a small fraction of the total universe of U.S. foreign service personnel. Even though HBCUs have produced a few prominent foreign service and international civil servants, the need for more African Americans in the U.S. foreign service has never been greater.
A juxtaposition of the success of liberal arts institutions like St. Olaf on this issue with the small number of KSU students who participate in study abroad obviates any doubt that this proposal should be funded. As evidence, of the 2300 students enrolled at KSU during the 1999-2000 academic year, only 5 students studied abroad; in 2000-2001, three did; in 2001-2002, four students could afford the trip; and last year only three could. These numbers represent less than 1% of KSU’s student body for each of these three years. The numbers have remained dismally low in spite of the fact that the University is a member of CooperativeCenter for Study Abroad (CCSA) and the Kentucky Institute for International Studies (KIIS), consortia of colleges that aim to increase student opportunities for study abroad.
Generally speaking, there are usually several barriers to minority students studying abroad. These barriers in part explain why African American students make up less than 4% of U.S. study abroad students (Black Issues 23). For a preponderant majority of the students enrolled at KSU, for example, the main barrier to gaining an international experience is financial. For many, the lack of financial resources is compounded by lack of awareness and classroom experiences that have not encouraged students to gain international experiences. Besides the low representation among Blacks in US foreign service appointment as a result of the lack of international experiences is a relatively narrower view of the world for Blacks than for whites.
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Students who understand that education is remunerative appreciate the trouble they must endure to obtain it; they cannot have their eyes on the end game for a victory celebration and also have their eyes off the ball before the game is over. A person cannot successfully pursue happiness without being able to differentiate between what is within his or her power and what is not. Thus, Epictetus writes that “the things in our power are by nature free, not subject to restraint nor hindrance: but the things not in our power are weak, slavish, subject to restraint, in the power of others.”13 Graduating students simply in order to give them a chance to partake of the American dream—at the cost of educating them—seems to premise the indiscriminate, loose admission syndrome that might be plaguing HBCUs like Kentucky State University, which Bireda qualifies as “a saving grace for many students who otherwise may not have been able to attend college at all due to insufficient preparation or low test scores.”14 The average African student, by contrast, is more likely to understand the relationship between work and achievement; one is a precursor to the other, and they generally attach a high premium to the precursor. Epictetus’ enslavement metaphor applies here in the sense that the students who are pushed through have not earned their diplomas, and they therefore will be unable to “defend” the diplomas upon graduation—at the workplace.