Читать книгу Multicultural Psychology - Jennifer T. Pedrotti - Страница 13

If you have already had one lecture from your instructor, you’ve probably started to realize that the study of multicultural psychology is not a simple one. Often people feel they should just understand the idea of diversity naturally: “It’s all about people, and we’re all people, right?” But this area of the field is much more complex than that, and studying multicultural psychology will allow you to better understand people in general, as well as the differences that exist between people from different groups. It will also help you to better understand yourself and to find new ways of explaining these ideas to others around you.

Multicultural psychology is the study of differences. The word different often has a negative connotation in our daily language use and therefore we sometimes form the idea that it is impolite to talk about differences, or even notice them. This often starts early in childhood. Consider stories you’ve heard, or maybe things you’ve experienced yourself that involve children noticing (and commenting on) differences. When a White child says loudly in a grocery store, “Why is that man’s skin dark?” within earshot of an African American man, a natural response of a White parent might be to say, “Shh! That’s impolite.” The parent in this case might simply mean that we don’t call out these sorts of differences while walking through the grocery store, and of course the parent is correct about this in terms of social manners.

But without a follow-up conversation on this interaction, it is possible that the child misunderstands the exact reason the parent called attention to the behavior. This may lead to a child accidentally getting the idea that we shouldn’t talk about differences, or that we should pretend not to notice them. Parents in this type of situation, particularly those who have not had much experience talking about race or other differences, may be uncomfortable starting a dialogue with the child about race at a young age, and unfortunately this allows children to instead fill in their own reasons regarding why they should not mention a different color of skin. Brown and colleagues conducted a study in 2007 in which parents of different ethnicities and races were asked if they talked to their children about race. Just 25% of White parents sampled talked to their children about race, while discussions of race in non-White homes occurred significantly more often (Brown, Tanner-Smith, Lesane-Brown, & Ezell, 2007). A parent in the scenario above might perhaps follow up later with the child, saying, “I know that you had some questions about the man’s skin inside the grocery store. It was different from ours, wasn’t it?” In this way a new conversation begins, and this may help a child to understand that while it is rude to yell things out about people’s skin (or other features) in public places, it is OK to talk about differences.

This avoidance of discussion of differences may almost become a sort of pretending that these differences don’t exist, and this can have an unintended self-perpetuating quality: If we aren’t supposed to notice differences, then we can’t talk about them, which leads to difficulty learning about differences in general. In the vacuum of our knowledge, stereotypes and others’ opinions often fill the void, and this often leads to misunderstandings of those differences that exist between us. In the field of multicultural psychology, and in this book, difference is a main topic of discussion. While we should of course work not to discriminate against people as a result of a difference, it is beneficial to understand differences between people. James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced” (1962, p. 38). The study of multicultural psychology involves digging into differences that have to do with cultural context, identity, and experiences and trying to better understand them. As Baldwin wisely notes in his quote, we cannot make change unless we face things head on. We are hoping you are here to do just that.