Author: Michael Karson, Ph.D.

We say that an immigrant can adopt a new culture, but actually it’s the other way around. An immigrant can accept or resist adoption by his new culture, just as a child can accept or resist adoption by a new family. Relevant factors include the age of the person being adopted (which is really a stand-in for the degree of identification with the prior culture), how welcome the person is in the new culture, and how ambivalent the culture is about adoption.

It bugs me when newborns are adopted and the parents are required to promise that they will teach the infant about her “cultural heritage.” A newborn has no cultural heritage—unless you believe that language, clothing, ritual, and values are genetic traits. What is really meant is that society is so literal about category membership that the parents should not try to raise the child as if she is theirs, thereby practically ensuring a sense of otherness at her core. For immigrant children, this means they are made to feel guilty if they allow themselves to be adopted by their new country, as if they are not preserving something that it is their duty to preserve. One of my more lasting pet peeves is my childhood irritation with the idea that Clark Kent is Superman’s secret identity. The guy is Clark Kent, adopted by the Kents, raised by the Kents, nurtured by the Kents, and guided by the Kents. Superman is his secret identity.

Older immigrants, of course, do have a heritage, and they may naturally prefer to preserve it. Venezuelan immigrants might enjoy getting together with compatriots, eating arepas, and speaking Spanish. I feel the same way when I take a break from academia once a week and connect with child welfare colleagues. An adoptive family can lovingly arrange for their child to spend time with members of his biological family, as long as the arrangement is not construed as a backup plan reflecting ambivalence by the adoptive family.

Except for the sexual component, falling in love is a pretty good analogy for adoption, and I have never met adoptive or foster parents who didn’t know exactly what I meant when I asked them if they had fallen in love with the child. Things go badly when the parents don’t fall in love with the child, and things go badly when the child doesn’t or can’t fall in love with the parents. Falling in love means that the parents are added to the short list of people the child can never fire, and vice versa. Yes, I realize that divorce and even parent-child discord leads to people firing people they should have had on their short list, but it sure is nice to believe fully that there are some people who just can’t fire you, even if you turn out to be wrong. It sure is nice to think you can’t be deported. Someone once told me that this is what she gets from worshipping Jesus.

I suppose I am suggesting the possibility of an emotional, rather than a legal, test for residence status. You can’t expect a child to commit to a family if the family won’t commit to him, and you can’t expect an immigrant to commit to a country if the country teases him with citizenship. The central issue for me in immigration policy is how to tell if it’s true love. It’s a lot easier to look at a family and assess true love than to look at an immigrant and a nation, but I suspect the relevant variables have to do with the immigrant’s feelings about the Bill of Rights, regulated capitalism, and the separation of church and state, and the country’s feelings about the immigrant’s past behavior and reasons for coming here. I wish all Americans knew as much about the Constitution as naturalized citizens are required to know; maybe then we’d have less conflict about which values define us.

Most multiculturalists, I think, are trying in their own way to make the world a better place. Those who are motivated by guilt, however, try to get others to do good by getting them to feel guilty. They tell you they are racists themselves and then try to get you to say bad things about yourself. (Guilt can be described as a relationship between the part of you that is telling you what to do and the part of you that is being told; it’s guilt when the message is filled with “shoulds” and condemnation.)

Those who are motivated by anger try to get you to do good by getting you angry. At worst, they put you in humiliating positions; at best, they confront you with terrible things that happened to innocent people. Those who are motivated by a feeling of superiority try to do good by getting you to feel superior to your old, benighted, unaware self and, eventually, superior to other, benighted, unaware folks.

My own motives have a mix of these elements, even if they are not the motivations I endorse. Sometimes I feel guilty about how well off I am, but I’m pretty good at converting those feelings into a sense of being a lucky so-and-so. Injustice, especially based on certain political categories, angers me. I hope I don’t inspire anger by humiliating people but by reminding them of injustices. I am susceptible to feeling superior to people who are unaware of their own privileges, but I’m pretty good at converting feelings of superiority to feelings of humility. A quote from George Eliot is never far from my mind: “A man likes to assume superiority over himself, by holding up his bad example and sermonizing on it.”

I try to concentrate on the way my interest in social justice makes me feel good about myself. I don’t mean that it makes me feel like I am a good person, like I am doing good in world, although I acknowledge that comes up in me more than occasionally, and it’s not a motivation that I think has much of a downside, except that it’s often difficult to determine how to do good, and it’s clear to me that it is often the case that the best good can be done by doing nothing.

I mean it makes me feel good about myself because it makes me feel whole. I think the politics of power and marginalization play out in each of us. Everyone is dominated by a hegemony of interests that ignore, exclude, or condemn other aspects of the self. If I can accept myself, I have found, then I can accept others. And if I can accept others, then I can accept myself. This is obvious when it comes to disability—the avoidance of the wheelchair is not the avoidance of the person in it, but the avoidance of the thought of me in it, the avoidance of my own physical incapacities and fear of helplessness. I don’t think all or even most homophobia is a reaction to the homophobe’s internal homosexual urges; but I do think it’s a reaction to the homophobe’s internal confusion about sex and rigidity about gender roles. So perhaps selfishly I want to be embraced, and I find that this is facilitated by the extent to which I can make embracing a way of life.

A nice moment with my dad: He was driving me somewhere when I was 13. At a stoplight, an elderly black man hobbled past the windshield, ragged clothes, ragged beard, beaten down, exuding ill health. I had just learned a cool quote, so I tried it out on my dad as we both followed the poor old man with our eyes. I said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Dad said, “Just say, ‘There go I.’”

Cultural relativism—the reluctance to champion one set of values as superior to others—is at the heart of most versions of multiculturalism, but it is itself a cultural value, and asserting cultural relativism is itself a form of cultural absolutism. I doubt that anyone who preaches cultural relativism seriously thinks it’s anything but backward to kill women for wearing makeup or men for not wearing beards. So if we hold values to be dear, and superior to their alternatives, why not state them and defend them?

I believe that my values are superior to other people’s, not because they happen to be mine, but because when I encounter a superior value, I adopt it, and when I discover a flaw in one of my values, I amend or discard it. As an avowed cultural absolutist, one of my dearest values is, perhaps ironically, a form of cultural relativism called free speech. The value of free speech asserts that all ideas are not equal, but all are protected from violence or governmental restrictions on liberty. The value of free speech says that almost all speech is protected from government censorship (the exceptions are well known and include shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, truth in advertising, conspiracy, and few others), and that the best response to objectionable speech is more speech. Free speech finds itself defending objectionable speech because only objectionable speech needs defending. It’s a form of cultural relativism because the value of free speech fosters the evolution of values in the marketplace of ideas; it doesn’t presuppose which ideas are superior.

Most religions presuppose which ideas are superior, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have a history of killing people who express certain ideas. At the heart of Christianity is anger at the killing of someone for his ideas, but rather than learn from this that it is not a good idea to kill people for their ideas, Christianity spent many centuries operating as if the lesson was that the only problem with Christ’s crucifixion was that the wrong person was killed and the wrong kind of thoughts criminalized. Currently, there are some important Muslims who think that any depiction of Mohammed should be responded to by executing the people responsible for the depiction. No democracy can be established on such a premise, which is why the separation of church and state is so central to our way of life.

I don’t know whether our foreign policy should project more American strength or more American cooperation. Here’s what I learned from living through Vietnam: I don’t know what’s going on overseas, and neither do you, and neither does the State Department or the CIA. It takes an extreme commitment to critical thinking, self-examination, study of the human condition, and interrogation of my own perspective just to get an inkling of what’s going on in the room I’m in, so it’s no surprise that we don’t know what’s going on overseas.

But I do think that we can’t choose oppressors of ideologies, regardless of which ideology is oppressed, and expect democracy to be the result. The greatest threat to American democracy in my lifetime was indeed Communism, not because Communism had a real chance to take root in this country, but because the effort to rid the country of Communism almost took root, and that produced our closest brush with totalitarianism so far. I hope America stands up for free speech, and I am not much interested in risking American lives to protect people who are no more democratic than their oppressors. Whether that describes the body politic of any particular country, I don’t know, but it seems to me to be the crucial question.

We put people into racial categories for various reasons, some of which are quite sensible from an evolutionary perspective. In a tribal society that describes its members as human and outsiders as something less, you have to know whom to include in the human embrace, whom to trust, whom not to waste resources on. Where homicide between tribes is among the main causes of death, categorization is even more crucial to survival. One need only read the Bible to realize how much of history is concerned with the violent movement of tribes, be they Israelite, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Median, or Greek.

Emotionally, people need to make sense of tribes that, whether recently or historically, inflicted death, rape, and devastation on the tribe they identify with. The easiest solution is to conclude that one’s own tribe is good and the other tribe is evil. An even more difficult problem that also leads to the derogation of other tribes is making sense of one’s own tribe’s violent behavior. What that happens, it is overwhelmingly tempting to justify it by trashing the worthiness or humanity of the victims. On a personal rather than societal level, my experience has been that the people who really despise me are those who have mistreated me, not those that I have mistreated—the latter as a rule accept my apology and move on.

In America, there are still places where tribalization is useful for survival, especially as a reaction to other people’s tribal conduct. A black man in Boston must learn that it is dangerous to venture into Charlestown, even in broad daylight, just as an Israelite from Ephraim had to learn not to get caught among Israelites from Gilead in Jephthah’s reign. Many prisons become tribal, and inmates find they must gang up if they are to survive. When tribal hatred was between Israelites, those from Gilead had to find a way to distinguish themselves from those from Ephraim, and they made the latter say the word, shibboleth, because they believed, apparently accurately, that the hated Ephraimites could not pronounce the “sh” sound. Skin color is an easier marker for categorization than a phoneme, and is often relied upon, but Hutus murdering Tutsis in Rwanda had, like the Israelites, to find more subtle distinctions to know whom to kill.

In most parts of America, tribalization is used for financial advantage rather than for killing, but in a country like ours (compared to Nazi Germany, say, or slavery-based America), you don’t lose your money and opportunity and feel grateful for just being alive, so even though survival is a relatively rare concern, people understandably fume over physical abuse, lack of safety, derogation, and lost money or opportunity. Economic disadvantages to being perceived as Protestant or Catholic in parts of Utah, to being perceived as white in certain sports and occupations, and to being perceived as black nearly everywhere breed less, but similar, avoidance and hatred than is bred by concern about survival. It’s only sensible, knowing that another group hates the category you are placed in, whether the hatred is based on the way they have treated us or on the way we have treated them, to teach one’s children that the other group is best met with suspicion and caution.

Race is in the eye of the beholder, but racism is not. I refuse to take responsibility for harms inflicted on people by members of my race or sex, because I don’t consider myself to be a member of my race or sex just because someone else puts me in those categories. Plus, as I’ve said, to the extent that I do at times identify as a man, I think it is part of being a man to feel guilty about other people’s suffering only if I caused it. But it would be stupid not to take notice of how one’s physical presence alarms some people and doesn’t alarm others, or not to take notice of the harms done by such alarms, or not to take notice of how much easier it is for me to avoid alarming people in the vast majority of American scenarios than for someone perceived as black. One of the few times it’s useful to think in categories is when you’re trying to decode what has happened to people because of the categories they have been placed in. But in so doing, we must be very careful not to get literal about the category or the individual’s membership in it.

When I was five years old, my father cursed the New England winter and took a job in Miami, then (pre-Castro) a one-story, major Southern city rather than the sky-lining capital of the Caribbean it is today. On our first shopping trip, my sister and I wandered to the back of the store in search of a water fountain and we felt lucky to find two! One had a sign on it that said, “White,” and the other had a sign that said, “Colored.” We were smart enough to read, but not smart enough to know what the signs meant. The signs could not possibly, I reckoned, describe the water, so they must describe the users. I knew I wasn’t white, because white was a specific color that you found in snow, clouds, and paper. “Colored” sounded like a box of crayons, and that didn’t seem to fit either. We had already lived in enough states (Florida was my fifth, her sixth) to know that you don’t go drinking water like you own the place; you have to account for local cultural practices. So my sister, age six, whispered in my ear, “Let’s just go.” We found our mom and avoided that confusing corner of the store.

Soon after, I walked out to the front yard of my house and saw eight or nine neighborhood kids sitting in a circle on the lawn across the street, annoying a dog, pulling up grass and chewing the oniony roots, and half-heartedly complaining about having nothing to do while reviewing television sitcom plots from the previous evening—in other words, being Southerners, except no one had socked anyone else while I was watching, which I eventually learned was a long time to go without a fight with one’s close friends. Suddenly, Mrs. Biferie—Italian, dressed in black—stormed out of her nearby house, took me by the shoulder, and marched me across the street to the group of children.

“What’s your name, little boy?”

“Michael,” said I.

“Everybody! This is Mike. He plays.” She stormed back into her house. The kids in the group looked me over, looked back toward each other, and forgot I was there.

I tracked the ball and wanted to tell them I knew how to throw and catch it. I tracked the dog and wanted to tell them I wasn’t afraid of it (this was before the big dogs showed up). I tracked the conversation and wanted to tell them that I had also seen those shows the night before. I shifted my weight from foot to foot and tried not to look too eager, failing miserably.

Suddenly, Mrs. Biferie was beside me, her hand again on my shoulder. “His name is MIKE! If I say he plays, HE PLAYS.” And that was that. The circle parted like the Red Sea, and I found the promised land of friendship.

Morals: 1. You don’t have to choose a category. 2. Channel your inner Mrs. Biferie and insist on playing.

A colleague of mine named Joel Dvoskin recently wrote that “conservatives are for individual freedoms, so long as no one ever tries to use one, and liberals are for diversity and tolerance, so long as no one disagrees with them.” What I have found is that when I tell my conservative friends that I like Barack Obama, they are likely to say, “I hate Barack Obama.” When I tell my liberal friends that I like George Will, they are likely to say, “I hate you.”

I think this has to do with how personal a political issue can be for the particular liberal or conservative. There can be an intellectual, mutually respectful disagreement about whether government is too big, and about how much income tax is too much. But the intellectual tone and mutuality of respect disintegrate around certain personal issues. These include abortion on the conservative side and some civil rights on the liberal side. Some people idiosyncratically personalize other issues as well, such as the liberal who gets quite activated at the idea of genetically-altered food and the conservative who gets irate on the issue of the capital gains tax. When the subject of politics becomes personal, you have to expect the discourse to become emotional.

What makes me crazy is the issue of gay rights. I would have thought racism or the First Amendment would do it, if I’d had to guess, knowing what I know about myself and my upbringing. I suppose this has to do with the fact that I came late to understanding that gay people and straight people are just the same, so I get angry at the self I was, not just at the issue in front of me. I’m not saying this is true of every angry reaction in politics, that it is psychological—I’m saying it’s true about me. I always knew (I always had been taught) that black people and white people are just the same, but it wasn’t until Stonewall that I even began to think about gay rights, and it wasn’t really until my twenties that I made friends with a few gay people and could see the idiocy of invented distinctions between gays and straights. (There are uninvented distinctions that make perfect sense, such as matchmaking your straight friends with members of the opposite sex.)

Because I’m personally implicated, I can also get a little heated on the issue of white guys.

When I was growing up in the protected middle class, politics had a lot to do with elections and not much else. Disenfranchised people worried about political issues, not us. Even during the violence around race, I sympathized, but it didn’t seem to have much to do with me, much like Sudan and Syria now. Then, the Vietnam War made everything political. For one thing, I was personally involved, since the wrong lottery number could have sent me packing. For another, the discourse got ugly because it was accompanied by ugly pictures of people dying at the hands of Americans. Either you were a murderer, an abetter of murder, or someone calling other people murderers, many of whom were mainly (if clumsily) trying to protect the world from totalitarianism. Everything got ugly.

You can be a liberal without imputing racism, homophobia, and callousness to conservatives. You can be a conservative without imputing immorality, communism, or hyper-emotionality to liberals.

White guys don’t have to be taught to empathize with the marginalized; they have to be taught not to. You’ll hear that a white guy who empathizes with the marginalized does so because he has some marginalized identity himself. He must be gay, or he married an Asian woman, or he was mistaken for black, or whatever. Alternatively, he must have gone through multicultural training, that growth experience of realizing what a privileged, racist, sexist, homophobe he is. (Not all multicultural training is like this, but people who think that white guys have to have their noses rubbed in their privilege are thinking of this sort of thing.)

Everyone starts off empathizing with the marginalized because everyone starts off powerless, disqualified, and functioning differently from other people’s expectations. Your parents rightly did not treat you as an equal, but sometimes they pulled rank on you purely for convenience, and you experienced the frustration of powerlessness. You experimented with different social roles (this is called “play”) and it was all they could do not to laugh out loud when you sang, at age 11, the McCartney lyric, “I’m not half the man I used to be.” Your parents developed a sense of who you were based on their experience of you, but within six months their expectations were outdated. This is similar to the way people develop expectations of others based on external traits and then box the others into behaving according to those expectations. Just growing up means you weren’t normal, to the extent that normal means “as expected.”

So white guys grow up marginalized, just like everyone else. Look at the horror and rage that accompanies many white guys’ loss of privilege—it turns out that white people dislike being put in their skin and stereotyped as much as people of color do. But that horror and rage, as Erving Goffman points out, occurs not because the loss of privilege and face makes white guys fearful of what will happen to them; it’s because they know exactly what is happening to them. They’re being made into boys again.

Many men are taught that it is humiliating to be like a child—short, emotional, and powerless (but not Wordsworth, that white guy extraordinaire, who wanted as a man to have his heart leap up at rainbows as it did when he was a boy). We are taught to disown all that is weak, vulnerable, emotional, and joyous. Then we dedicate ourselves to pretending to be, for want of a better term, cowboys. And while it’s true that a socially marginalized identity element or an experience of self-disgust can undo that ridiculous posture, an easier path to self-acceptance is, well, self-acceptance. I don’t have to know what it’s like to be black to identify with the diversity agenda; I just have to know what it’s like to be me.

Down the road, I’ll question the meanings of manly and womanly. For now, having specified what being a man means to me, I thought I’d take a crack at a womanly ideal. I wanted to post the exact same description, not because I really believe a good woman is just the same as a good man, but because I want to believe it. Instead, I drafted a guest blogger of the female persuasion.

This from Janna Goodwin:

When I was a kid, growing up in Wyoming, I liked to ride my bike, hard, up and down the hilly, dusty “jumps” that cut through the vast fields around our neighborhood. I played basketball, not well, but with joy. I read books on the front porch, listening to lawn sprinklers. I dreamed of travel to distant cities and adventures in foreign lands. I imagined saving peoples’ lives; I wanted to a hero. I liked dressing in blue jeans and shirts with the sleeves rolled up. I bossed my little brother around. I played cowboy with Scott, Dave, and Dolores in the beekeeper’s field across the street. I drew pictures constantly. I took up conversational issues with heated excitement and confidence in my own ability to reason (even when I could have used some tempering of my certainty with evidence). I did not like the way it felt—vulnerable, exposed—to wear skirts, patent leather shoes, frilly blouses. I couldn’t bear the high-pitched squeal of giggles or the gossipy insipidness of girly-girls. I wanted to be the Artful Dodger. I wanted to be Little Joe. Ilya Kuryakin. My notion of being a Good Woman involved wearing padded brassieres, bearing children, taking dictation, making sandwiches, wiping noses and butts, and sacrificing one’s vitality and independence for others and frankly, I wanted no part of it. I didn’t want to be a Bad Woman, either, which apparently entailed sexuality (gross!) if not narcissism and gold-digging. I wanted, instead, to be a Brave Soldier, a Fine Lad, and a Brilliant Artist. That’s about as close as I can come to expressing what I intended to grow up to be. I didn’t envy the penis, but I wanted the options.

Experience, maturity, college, and feminism changed my perspective. I was treated well, treated badly, hurt, dismissed, fondled, mauled and otherwise objectified, given some opportunities and denied others—which, as, it turns out, happens to most people, some more wrenchingly, systematically, and detrimentally than others (we all make up reasons for our bad experiences and rejections, explanations that have little to do with our personalities or luck and much to do with unfairness. Sometimes, we’re spot-on in our assessments and other times, we’re way off: sometimes, it’s sexism or racism or classism and sometimes, it’s just bad breaks or they didn’t like you as much as they liked the next one).

By age 30, for me, Good Womanliness involved blooming self-righteousness and the constant arrival, via literature and critical thinking, of insights that inflamed my sense of personal, historic, and global injustice and enlarged my capacity to dislike others, particularly men and seriously—damn them—Straight White Men, who were obviously all full of themselves, wealthy, tall, controlling, and oblivious to their own undeserved privileges. I spent too long feeling mainly pissed off, especially (yeah, go ahead, hate me for saying it, but it’s true) every month when I had my period. I began to wonder if I actually liked being an Angry Woman (not so much, it turned out) and whether Angry Woman equated to Good Woman.

In settling on an identity, I definitely didn’t want to be a Womyn, a Witch, a Crone, or one of the Sisterhood, all of which smacked of cultiness. I wasn’t even, in the end, completely at ease with the Feminist label, having grown tired of the sense that one could never be outraged enough or prove oneself sufficiently intellectual or dedicated to just finally say “Whew!” and to get on to enjoying a life largely free of indignant wrath.

By 38 or so, I was fully cognizant, in a permanent and behavioral way, of both my middle-class and skin color advantages—such as they may or may not have been, depending on the situation—even while coming to grips with the disadvantages, both actual and perceived, that I faced as a Woman—and particularly as a Straight White Woman approaching middle age, the kind of Woman most easily dismissed by all other groups (including ourselves).

Anyway, the more I became me, and the more I liked that me, the less important it felt to correct the rest of the world. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that concentrating on the shortcomings—and perceived shortcomings—of other people isn’t fun! It is what plenty of women (not, in my book, the Good ones) enjoy most. Side observation: for the Righteous Woman, correcting others as a way of gaining status and control really beats the hard work of figuring out what kind of person she wants to be, what kind of relationships she wants to have and what kind of life she wants to live. I’d guess that right now, someone reading this wants badly to reach out and correct me, to explain why and how I’m wrong to have my perspective and to speak my sense of the world aloud. Because I obviously don’t know how fortunate I am (and the Righteous Woman or Man obviously knows more about me, my life, and my circumstances than I do)… and I need to be educated, trained, enlightened. You know who you are.

So, today, I’m a full-fledged Woman. I’m possibly a Fairly Good one, though certainly not, you know, clearly and sincerely Good. I focus, as much as possible, on what makes me feel happy, healthy, competent, reliable, responsible, and strong. The values, characteristics, and practices I try to cultivate in myself and my life as I age—and become, I daresay, Better at being a Woman, a Man, and a Person—include curiosity, critical thinking, compassion, humor and playfulness, creativity, connectedness, physical wellbeing, relational wellbeing, reflectiveness, robustness, responsiveness, agency, liveliness, inner peace. I keep myself as aware as I can of the variety of contexts that inform not only my own experiences but the experiences of others, and that awareness keeps me on my toes in a good way. I don’t like, but nonetheless invite, social, psychical, and physical discomfort, and it visits me often, sometimes savagely. I maintain the right to succeed, fail, make mistakes, declare my perspective, argue, reject or accept claims, botch things, improve things, fall on my face and pick myself up. I reserve the right to laugh. I suppose that, since these are all foundational to me, and function as guiding principles, they’d constitute what I think of as Good. Or at least Pretty Darned Good.