Where and how have you gotten to know and understand people of different
cultural groups?  By this I mean groups based on ancestry, such as nationality
or national origin, ethnicity, language, religion, eye shape or skin color.
Have you met them by travel, living abroad, as friends, neighbors, fellow
students, housemates, fellow workers, through church?  How has this affected
prior stereotypes you might have had about other cultures, and has it changed
your understanding of your own culture?  Do you think there are greater
differences between the average persons in different cultures, or between
individuals in a single culture?
        I am entering this item, as suggested, to test interest among grexers,
including those from other countries, in a conference on cultural difference
and how different groups can learn to live together and benefit.  Another
possibility is a conference on discrimination and stereotypes, and other
problems faced by cultural and all other minority groups, including the old,
the young, short, tall, thin, fat.  Since there are already five other
conferences under Life Roles on a few other groups (femme, glb, homme,
disabilities, inbetween) I suggest these groups not be included, but that the
new conference be grouped under Life Roles and called something like
Minorities, or Stereotypes, or Discrimination, all of which seem a bit too
narrow.  Any ideas?  I had started this in Coop 34 but two grexers suggested
Agora instead, as a way to test interest.  They both thought that most
grexers were members of the cultural majority here.  Is that true?

162 responses total.

We seem to argue a lot for being all members of a cultural majority....

I've learned a lot about other cultures here at work.  The School
of Public Health has a lot of students, faculty, and staff who
were born and raised outside of the US.  

It's funny..  whenever a news broadcast shows english subtitles
for people who speak english imperfectly, I find I don't need
the subtitles.  I've learned to 'hear' english in a new way,
and to me the speakers don't need subtitles except for place
names and proper names.

Well, looks like the folks in coop were right about not much interest in this
subject.  I will attempt to answer my own questions.

Through age 12, I was a member of a nearly absolute majority in my Boston
neighborhood.  I had one minority friend, the only Christian in my class. 
She was the oldest of six, her father had moved out, and they had a color TV.
My brother was friends with the only Christian in his class, who had a
Christmas tree (I had never seen one up close) and happened to be colored.
At age 12 I started going to a school drawing students from the whole city.
Ten of us would grab a lunch table together (there were far more kids than
seat, the first one there piled booked all over a table to reserve it).  As
far as I could tell from the experience, everyone was a minority:  two each
Greek, Chinese, colored, Jewish, and Irish.  I had never known a protestant,
I assumed they were sort of a myth, like farmland.  (As far as I knew the
world consisted of city with an occasional park that we could see on our way
to visit New York).  I never encountered any prejudice, but for some reason
my two colored friends took a day off to attend NAACP meetings, and then my
mother decided it was not safe to play in their neighborhood so they came to
play in mine.  At age 12 I learned that I had a Christian aunt and cousin,
that we had never been told about becausse my grandfather practically
disinferited my uncle (who was also a Republican, horrors) when he married.
High school was mostly Jewish again (we moved out of the old neighborhood).
College was much more interesting.  I seem to have been raised with few
prejudices, so was very surprised at my mother's objecting to my current
partner of 14 years (who is Catholic and divorced, but her main objection was,
surprisingly, that he never finished a college degree.  Class snobbery?).
Did other grexers grow up in a less homogeneous environment?

To comment on a possible new conference, see Coop item #34.  There seems to
be a bit more interest than I thought.

I'm lots of cultures on my own.  From different lineages, I have both Irish
and English blood, and Lebonese blood.  (Pity I don't also have Jewish
ancestry... then I'd be a walking terrorist battle)

Apart from your blood, do you act like an English, Irish, or Lebanese person,
or like an average (?) American?

I'm of mixed German/English/French ancestry. Since I'm a white American
middle-class professional, I probably act more like an average white
American middle-class professional than anything else. This is not the
same thing as "average American".

Excuse me, Keesan, but what is the difference between the blood of
English, Irish, etc? I thought the only thing different was in blood
groups (A, B, rh, etc), and otherwise all ethnic groups can be blood
donors for all other ethnic groups. [My argument is with the common
expression which is inaccurate and misleading - a careful distinction
should be made between ethnic differences that are totally cultural,
and ethnic differences that are genetic. The term "blood" is a poor one
for keeping this distinction in mind, as shown above in distinguishing
Jewish and Lebanese "blood", but not the "blood" of all the genetically
different stock that share being Jewish.]

I am interested in knowing about cultural distinctions, not genetic, but there
is a frequent overlap.  Senna used the word blood, so I also did.  Certain
blood types are much more common among specific ethnic groups,  For instance
the basques have the higheest frequency of rh negative, and it falls off as
you approach them geographically.  Asians have a higher frequency of B.  SO
you would have a better chance of finding a donor within an ethnic group. 
I repeat my original question as to when and how grexers have come into
contact with other cultural groups and what they have learned from this.  BUt
you may also talk about your own cultural group, or anything else vaguely
related.  (I am doing an interesting translation on rhesus incompatibility,
from Russia, where there is a problem in producing the immunglobuloin needed
to get rid of fetal blood cells in rh-negative mothers, because they have
cured the problem of sensitized mothers by administering immunoglobulin from
previous sensitized mothers, and there are no not enough new ones, and the
other method, of injecting rh-positive blood into rh-negative volunteers, no
longer is acceptable because of AIDS).  Has anyone lived abroad (Rane, that
is your cue to tell us about life in the Netherlands).

I did not give or receive blood in the Netherlands. 

I am not surprised,but did you learn anything about the people of the
Netherlands while living there, or about your own culture by contrast?

Vis a vis the "blood" issue, I found out during the search for the Ann Arbor
serial racist that even with blood and tissue samples, there is no way to tell
the ethnicity of the "donor".  DNA, blood typing, and any other testing cannot
indicate what ethinc or racial group you are in.  

DNA fingerprinting takes into account a person's ethnic group in calculating
the probability of matching, in other words, if a person is Indonesian they
calculate the probability based on the frequency of certain DNA types occuring
in all Indonesians (or possibly all Indonesians of Chinese, or of Indian,
ancestry).  But it certainly cannot prove your ethnic origins.  If there is
a very high probability of finding a certain DNA configuration that you have
in your ethnic group, you are much less likely to be a match.

I act like an outcast, but that's another story :)

[I assume you meant 'serial rapist', although I have met quite a few 'serial
racists']

Give it a rest, people - it's a figure of speech.  If you can have Lebanese
roots without being a plant and Lebanese ties without rope, why can't you have
Lebanese blood without resorting to blood types in the scientific sense?  It's
a more elegant term for 'Lebanese ancestry', and I don't see what the problem
is.

The problem is that I don't know what influences you are talking about.
Lebanese among themselves are of a large range of different religions,
colors, ethnic groups, national backgrounds, etc. So what does "Lebanese
blood" mean? Sounds like an attempt to imnproperly stereotype.

Heh.  I once told my son that he has "a drop of Indian blood" in him.
(The ones with bows and arrows, not the ones with towels on their
heads, to use his distinction.)  He was about five at the time and
loved (still loves, in fact) the idea that he's part Native Amrerican.
But for months afterward, whenever he cut his finger or skinned his
knee, he wanted us to reassure him that none of the lost blood was
"the Indian drop."

Fee Fie Foe Fum, I smell the blood . . . oh never mind. Anyway, I was
quite fortunate to have a de facto foster family that was black (I'm
white). I'd met these guy in my high school jazz band, and when they
decided to form their own band they asked me to join (I played bass).
During that time, things were very tense with my mother and I sought a
foster family (to no avail).  Instead, I ended up spending a lot of time
at the house where we practiced.  When not there, I hung out with
relatives of theirs. Even thought they never had a lot of money, I was
often invited to dinner, and one of my best memories was going to a family
reunion with them and being the only white person out of about 40-50
people. My friend told me that his older relatives didn't much care for
white people but the younger ones were cool. Eventually, even the older
relatives at least seemed OK with me. Later, after I graduated HS and my
mother kicked me out (after a really stupid argument) I moved into the
practice house full time. My friend's parents were planning on retiring,
so I stayed on the couch until that happened. Then I moved into one of the
rooms and paid rent (my old room is now a recording studio!). My friend is
now married (to a white woman, not that that matters) and he and other
family members continue to reach out to people of all races. The world
needs more people like them. I feel very fortunate to know his family. 
And while they certainly didn't fit the American stereotype of the
"typical" black family, I think that is one of the reasons I learned to
look beyond stereotypes and color.

Thanks for sharing your experience.  We are also being treated as sort of
family by the black neighbors next door.  We have Thanksgiving dinner with
them and discuss our problems.  It's good to hear that younger people of any
race are becoming more tolerant.

If race is genetic, it should show up in DNA if people know what gene to look
for, right?

I have never run across a good definition of race.  Have you?  
Webster offers:  a division of mankind possessing traits that are
transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize it as a distinct human
type.  Unfortunately most traits are based on a combination of several genes.
The human genome mapping project should yield exciting answers.  Does anyone
know about the results so far?  Since we are all descended from the same
stock, and there has been a great deal of interbreeding among groups that had
previously split up, I don't see how races can be classified except
statistically, i. e., Africans are much more likely to have dark skin (but
their are albino Africans) and frizzy hair (but my aunt had frizzy red hair).

I'm not culturally lebanese at all.  But I still have a lot of genetic
ancestry (to the best of my knowledge, at least half of my ancestry exists
because an ancestor was fleeing lebanese oppression of roman catholocism).
Culturally, I've been raises American.  Lingually, I'm a three-way cross
between American, Canadian, and British (which has nothing to do with ancestry
at all).  Mentally, I'm a cross between a schizophrenic and a large tree
(nothing ancestral there, either).  Physically, I'm lebanese.

An oak, a maple, a pine, an elm....?  I would like to know more about your
language background, senna.  Did you live in all three countries, or did your
parents come from different countries?

race is an arbitrary distinction, nothing more.  there is no specific,
universal definition by which any and all persons can be divided into one race
category or another.

there exist specific genes which determine specific physical traits, many of
which are *characteristic* of certain races, so there is some viable genetic
distinction between races, but it is limited, and certainly impractical.

I'm 300% in total:  100% American, 50% Polish, 25% Russian, 25% Hungarian,
and 100% Palestinian, but only if you back to before the hebrew diaspora.
And that's only the parts i *know* about.  Nobody, to my knowledge has traced
my family history back further than 1800, but being jewish, i can fairly
safely assume the palestinian "origin."  Of course if you back further than
that, i'm something else entirely.  the point is that there is no point.
these distinctions are all political at their base.  there is some genetic
reinforcement due to selective breeding, chosen by virtue of those political
distinctions, and by geography.

humans are driven (in part) by a need to establish an individual identity.
often part of this identity is an association with a group of other people
who share a similar identity.  in order to forge that identity, we have to
*make* distinctions between those who are "us" and those who are "them."

Certainly the traits that we currently choose to use to distinguish "races"
are genetic. I'd much prefer if humans would totally forget about those
traits except as accidental curiosities, and build our societies upon the
basis that we are just a single species.

I agree with Rane completely - I always thought the concept of "race" was
not only badly defined but also irrelevant.

I can't say the same about cultural differences, though; I think the fact
that we have a diverse set of cultures on the planet helps us to analyze
our behavior.  If there were only one culture, it would be difficult to
distinguish between what is important, what is arbitrary, and what is
destructive.  If we didn't have anyone to compare ourselves with, how
could we tell?

Race is not "genetic" in the sense that you take a piece of DNA and identify
what race the person belongs too.  Nor is the gene mapping program complete
enough that you can say this piece of DNA came from a person with frizzy hair,
or blue eyes, or freckled skin.  The only way you can tell what race a person
is, is by looking at them, and comparing them to your visual stereotype of
"asian" or "black" or "caucasian".  

re 24 (belonging to a group) I read about an experiment where a set of people
were randomly divided into two groups, and demonstrated group loyalty.  Is
this different from cheering for 'your' football team.  Historically, people
in the same cultural group also were in the same geographic group and shared
a lot of genes, but with all the moving about in this country the group
distinctions are getting pretty scrambled.  Social groups were also mostly
genetic in Europe but there is more mobility here.  (Remember all the royalty
intermmarrying and having hemophilia and the Hapsburg chin?)  The advantage
of belonging to the bigger and stronger group is that when things get too
crowded for the available resources, the bigger group can do some ethnic
cleansing.  Even chimps do it.  Are political groups here still at all based
on religious or ethnic or social class distinctions?

My family's american immigration history goes something like this. 
Dad--Canadian, which is a a mix of irish and british ancestry, immigrated in
1969 to attend school.  Mom--Grandparents came over in late 19th/early20th
centuries.  I've never lived outside the slauson middle school district
myself, though I've never actually been inside teh school.  Always spoken
english, with various influences coming from other sources, one of the chief
ones being frequent visits to Canada to visit family.  I wish I spoke arabic,
though.  I can see rec/ed class in my future

you know, i like to watch foriegn films now.
<preferrably subtitled, not dubbed>. i can glean bits
and pieces about their culture,. how certain peole are treated, how
they react, etc.

        I'm half French, half Irish, with about a fifth of Scotch in me.

<smirk>

 
Part Swedish, Italian, Welsh, German, and a *tiny* minute fraction of
Sicilian, although my grandfather never admits to it and the temper flares
if you tell him he is from "that hell-hole". ;)  Anyway, I found it rather
humorous that *most* (not all) of this conversation has been about debating
semantics and different perceptions of words..  
I suppose the majority of my exposure to other ethnicities has been through
real life experiences.  Might I add that if one does not focus on the
differences between groups, one begins to notice more similarities, thus
becoming more accepting of everything.  
I was also wondering if anyone would consider exposure to different
subcultures in the US relevant to this convo.. They have their own religions,
languages, etc....
 

The residence hall experience at Michigan State University packed me in with
students from Kenya, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Cuba, Korea and India.  However, we
already shared sense of common purpose in that we were all trying to study
and we were all horny.  So, the inter- part of intercultural  learning took
second place to just dealing with the rather unique culture at the university.

I have second hand knowledge of programs at Grand Valley State University that
stress intercultural experiences.  Perhaps someone at GVSU would know about
the current status of what I only vaguely have heard about.

I don't have any facts at hand to back me up, but #27 seems to be patently
untrue.  How else is a person's pigment or natural hair characteristics be
determined except from his/her DNA?  Just because humans haven't isolated the
"race" gene (if in fact they haven't) doesn't mean it's not there.  Or perhaps
more precisely, a set of genes commonly found together, such as "dark pigment"
and "hair with particular characterics" and ...

There is no "race gene" - there are a very large number of genes that
create features by which we distinguish "races". Some genes can be
identified and associated with characteristics, but the ones one hears
about are associated with genetic diseases. I can understand that it makes
little sense to go looking for a way to identify genes for common visible
characteristics, but there are real reasons for identifying genes coding
for multiple sclerosis or susceptibility to cancer or Alzheimers. 

#re 33.  Subcultures are certainly relevant, but what did you mean by
different languages?  Please tell us more.  
re #35, 36, etc.  I have just proposed, in coop item #34 on new conference,
that we start a conference on issues related to genetics.  It is a very hot
topic now.  Please comment in the coop item.  Rane would you be a FW if there
is interest in such a conference?  By the way, genes have been discovered
for emphysema, schizophrenia, dyslexia and sexual orientation, all of which
ultimately have chemical effects and are a lot simpler to study than 'race'.

No, actually "race" is easier to study - you just look. The diseases
you list can be cryptic or arise from other than genetic causes. (I
respond to the cf proposal in coop.)

It has all got to do with the imprinted impression/picture we all got for the
familiar.
When you take into account that chimpansees are for way more than 90%
genetically identical to humans, would say then that chimps are just another
race?
The genetical differences between ethnic groups must be there, but since we
all got an eye for that what differs from the standard around us, we can
distinguish. When these differences are notcied among certain groups it
becomes eventually a selffullfilling prophecy.
e.g.
Germans: fat, with sometimes blondish/gingerish hair that talk loud and think
they own the world. What is cultural, what is gentical? But, nevertheless,
to me the average german looks like german.
Brits: almost the same story but with more accents towards pale complexions.
UI could go on for hours.
Humans are very focussed on the visual surroundings because it is the only
sense organ that functions properly.
Therefore humans are verysoon to notice differences.
I could go even further than this:
White people smell sour because of their taste for dairy products. To Chinese,
white (read western) people smell.
Indian (asian Indian) people have a scent that makes you think of masala, of
curry powder and garelic.
Is that smell genitcally based? No, of course not, it is solely based on sense
organ in the olphactory region.
But, easily we could sense the cent as offensive and point these people as
smelly.

Finally: through most of the centuries people lived in very restricted areas.
Hence all sorts of inbreeding. On larger scale, people generally never bread
'over the borders'. Hence some exchange of genetic material in large harbour
cities. hence more dark haired people in Amstyerdam than in the backlands of
the netherlands, where most people are blond.
Hence, most people from a certain region tend to look the same.
You americans have got very many similarities to me, but I am from the
netherlands, so maybe you see more differences between all alyers and parts
of american society tghan I can, so I make a severe generalization.

Biologically:
Viable offspring (as darwin has put it generally) is only possible within a
species.
races are an artificial term.
There is only one race: the human race.
I think that there are geneticall differences, but mostly in secundary genes
that come out in some morphological aspects.
In percentages of our genome I'd expect it to be minute.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss