Understanding Cultural Identity

No writer has had a greater impact on my understanding of cultural identity than Dr. Beverly Tatum.

…When introducing cultural identity (or racial identity, a term she uses synonymously), Tatum tells a simple but poignant story of two eighth-grade girls, one black and the other white. The story serves as a parable of sorts for the cultural identity journey and reveals how even an everyday encounter can have dramatically different implications on people of different races. The story begins with a seemingly harmless interaction between a white schoolteacher, Mr. Smith, and the black eighth grader.

Mr. Smith is one of the chaperones for the school dance coming up, and he’s telling the class how excited he is. He asks the young black woman if she’s planning to attend, and she says no. She informs him that the black students are bussed into the mostly white neighborhood, and one of the unfortunate results of this social inequality is their lack of transportation to extracurricular activities. If the event doesn’t happen during school hours, there will be no black students in attendance.

Sharing information like this is no small task for the young black woman. The daily commute from her homogeneously black neighborhood into this homogeneously white neighborhood is a constant reminder that she is an “other.” She often feels that she is an outsider looking in, and the inability to find transportation to extracurricular events only exasperates this feeling. It was courageous and vulnerable for her to discuss this with the teacher.

Despite the gravity of her statement, Mr. Smith misses its significance. He is fixated on the school dance and is determined to convince this young woman to attend. Ignoring the information she just shared, he does his best to persuade her to reconsider. When he sees that his efforts are failing to yield any change, he mutters one final comment: “Oh come on, I know you people love to dance.”

This final line drops like a bomb. While it’s unclear to this young woman the full extent of what Mr. Smith meant by it, that doesn’t change the sting of the statement. When he included her in the “you people” group, it struck at the heart of one of her deepest suspicions. Though she couldn’t prove it, she sensed she was an outsider in Mr. Smith’s class.

It seemed he treated her differently than the other students, and she feared it could be due to her race. The careless use of “you people” has poured fresh gasoline all over the tinder of her fears. On the verge of tears, she bursts out of the classroom, and there she serendipitously bumps into her best friend. The friend, who is white, responds immediately with genuine concern.

She probes for what made her friend so upset, and the black student decides to recount the entire episode. She reveals that she has often felt like a cultural outsider in Mr. Smith’s classroom and shares how his “you people” comment shook her to the core. Since they have been friends for a while, the black girl assumes that this will be met with empathy and understanding. But to her surprise, the white eighth grader skips right over the feelings of sadness, shock, shame, and anger. Instead she comes to the defense of the teacher, responding, “Oh, Mr. Smith is such a nice guy. I’m sure he didn’t mean it like that. Don’t be so sensitive.”

The young black woman wants to give her friend the benefit of the doubt, but the lack of awareness around what happened is more than she can bear. She realizes that though she loves her friend—and trusts that her friend loves her—it was unwise to share something so delicate in a cross-cultural setting. Nursing her wounds from these back-to-back encounters, the young black woman goes to find someone that might understand her pain.