Listening well as a person of privilege: Recognize the limitations of good intentions

This is the fourth in an series from Dr. Christena Cleveland on listening well as a person of privilege that originally appeared on her blog. Christena is a social psychologist in Minneapolis, MN with an upcoming book “Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart” that you'll definitely want to check out.

Privileged Christians almost always mean well. No one (or at least hardly anyone) consciously sets out to silence, oppress and dishonor diverse people. No one (or at least hardly anyone) wants to be prejudiced toward diverse people.

Even those who discover that they are biased feel pretty awful about it and want to make things right. For the most part, when it comes to treating others with respect and love, privileged Christians’ hearts are in the right place.

So why is it that many people of color feel marginalized by privileged Christians? In his devastatingly accurate account of a common black experience in white evangelical America, Edward Gilbreath quotes Bruce Fields, a black professor of systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. “People sometimes ignore you. Or, if there is attention directed toward you, it is subtly communicated that you are not to be taken as seriously as a white person of similar status, experience, and credentials.”

When privileged people hear such reports from oppressed people, they often respond with, “But we didn’t mean to ignore them!” or “We try so hard to be really nice and welcoming to them. I don’t get why they don’t see that.” When they do this, they make the grave mistake of thinking that intentions are (mostly) all that matter.

“It’s the thought that counts” is a belief that permeates Christian culture. Cultural psychologist Adam Cohen* has studied differences between Christians and Jews and found that if a married man thinks about having an affair, Christians consider this adultery, but Jews do not. Cohen concludes Christians believe that thoughts are equal to or more morally important than actions, but that Jews believe the opposite. For many Christians, having a heart in the right place is the most important thing.

The Christian overemphasis on attitudes and intentions wouldn’t be a problem if people’s attitudes and intentions generally matched their behavior. But unfortunately they do not. Research on the link between attitudes and behavior has consistently shown that attitudes often fail to predict people’s specific behaviors.** Privileged folks with good intentions can believe that it’s important to honor diverse people and then fail to act in a way that is consistent with their beliefs and intentions.

Those who desire to listen well must recognize the limitations of good intentions. At the end of the day, whether privileged people’s hearts are in the right place matters very little if the people around them feel silenced, ignored and marginalized. Jesus spoke eloquently of love and then famously backed it up by demonstrating love in a way that resonated with the targets of his love. Privileged people must measure the outcomes of their interactions with oppressed people, not just their intentions.

Research suggests that attitudes/thoughts/intentions are more likely to match their behavior when both the attitudes/thoughts/intentions and behaviors are specifically spelled out.*** For example, a person’s attitude in favor of general health will not predict their likelihood to jog four times a week. (Plenty of couch potatoes believe that exercise is generally a good thing.) However, a person’s attitude toward jogging four times a week will absolutely predict their likelihood to jog four times a week.

If privileged people want to avoid a mismatch between their good intentions to their behaviors, they must identify both their specific intentions and the specific behaviors that correspond with those intentions. A general attitude in favor of reconciliation won’t necessarily lead to behaviors that reflect that attitude. More specific attitudes like “It’s important to empower the women of color at my church” are needed. And the specific attitudes need to be matched with specific behaviors like developing leadership/mentoring programs that successfully target women of color and addressing cultural biases that discredit diverse leadership styles. In order to accomplish this task, both the privileged and oppressed people must work together to spell out the specific intentions and behaviors that are needed.

Following Jesus’ example, privileged people with good intentions must find ways to demonstrate them in ways that resonate with oppressed people. Good intentions alone will not suffice.

Continue to part 5...
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*Cohen, A. B. (2011). Religion and Culture. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 4(4).
**Wicker, 1969; Kraus, 1995; Glasman & Albarracin, 2006
***Azjen, 1987; Azjen & Fishbein, 1977

Friday Fruit (05/31/13)

On Fridays, BTSF offers links to other discussions about race & Christianity. It's an opportunity
for you to read about racial justice & Christianity from other perspectives, and for me to give props to the shoulders on which I stand...

Weekly Round Up:

• Abagond's advice to white people

• ‘What Kind of Asian Are You?’ [Video]

• Yassin Bey’s (aka Mos Def) on Stop-and-Frisk [Video]

• All Racists Have Two Stories

• The White Default

• In the Richest Country in the World, 1 in 4 Struggle to Afford Food

• Members Of Congress Urge Washington R*dskins To Change Name

These are some of BTSF's links of interest this week. What are yours?

Feel free to contribute your own links in the comments section, or submit items you feel should be included during the week. Self-promotion is encouraged.

Listening well as a person of privilege: Communicate on their terms, not your own

This is the third in an series from Dr. Christena Cleveland on listening well as a person of privilege that originally appeared on her blog. Christena is a social psychologist in Minneapolis, MN with an upcoming book “Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart” that you'll definitely want to check out.

I’ve talked with many privileged people who, after months of intentional “listening”, are frustrated that oppressed people rarely “speak their minds” to privileged people. One of my educated white friends who’s been living among and building solidarity with young, urban Latinas for over a year recently complained, “I’m listening, but no one’s talking.” From my friend’s perspective, the young women don’t share openly about their experiences, their fears, their emotions, anything.

Oppressed people often communicate well with the privileged folks around them, but privileged people’s expectations of direct communication can blind them to the indirect communication that’s going on right in front of them. I’ve written about privileged people’s fine-tuned critical-thinking skills. But in order to listen well as a person of privilege, privileged folks must also develop critical-listening skills.

It’s all about the listener
The U.S. is a listener-centric culture*; all communication is centered around and caters to the listener. As such, speakers do everything they can to communicate in a clear, engaging and relevant way so that the listener just has to sit back, relax and soak in the information. Since the speaker is responsible for communicating in a verbal manner, the listener isn’t expected to pay attention to nonverbal behaviors or contextual cues in order to decipher the message.

The speaker is responsible for doing all of the hard work of communicating well and for the most part, the listener gets to chill. How does the Nirvana song go? “Here we are now, entertain us.” Yep, that’s the attitude listeners typically have in listener-centric cultures.

Privileged people who have mastered this active speaking/passive listening pattern of communicating can unintentionally continue to use that pattern when communicating with oppressed people. Here’s what it looks like: when privileged people are the speakers, they often attempt to do the hard work of communicating clearly to the oppressed listener. But when the privileged people are the listeners, they often sit back, relax and expect the oppressed speaker to do the hard work of communicating clearly to them.

The unfortunate and counterproductive result is that when privileged people (who haven’t considered the effects of their active speaking/passive listening style) attempt to listen well, they end up playing the passive role of listeners in a listener-centric communication style that centers on and caters to the needs of the privileged person. In the end, it’s all about the privileged people.

Listening well as a person of privilege means it can’t be all about you, the listener
As people of power who have not been systematically silenced, privileged folks are accustomed to openly speaking their minds; if they have something important to say, they typically say it. So when privileged people show up to intentionally listen to oppressed folks, it’s easy for privileged people to expect oppressed folks to start sharing openly ASAP, preferably in a clear, verbal manner that is easy for the privileged person to understand. But it seldom works that way.

One reason oppressed people may not raise their voice is because they’re coping with the effects of years of being silenced and ignored by privileged people. When you’ve tried to speak up in the past to no avail, you become less interested in speaking up. 

Another reason is that due to a variety of societal injustices, oppressed people may not have had opportunities to “speak up” over the years and may not have developed the self-efficacy and communication skills to feel comfortable speaking up now, especially in a listener-centric culture that puts so much pressure on the speaker to communicate clearly and eloquently to the listener. When you’re rarely given the mic, your emcee skills tend to get rusty.

Consequently, while some oppressed folks speak up in a “direct” manner that’s easy for privileged people to understand, many don’t. But that doesn’t mean they’re not talking to you in profound and relational ways! I’ve found that a lot of my communication with oppressed people in my neighborhood occurs in the form of nonverbal behaviors and contextual cues. My neighborhood friends speak loudly, clearly and wisely in this manner, but it’s easy for me to miss their thoughts if I’m not willing to communicate on their terms, in the medium of communication that makes sense in their cultural context. If privileged people want to listen well, they must think outside of the cultural box and adopt a different communication approach – one that is all about the speaker.

Making it all about the speaker
Consistent with the posture of humility and self-sacrificial love that I described in Part 1 of this series, I’d like to suggest a speaker-centric approach** to crosscultural communication between privileged and oppressed folks. In this approach, the listener does the hard work of understanding the speaker, gleaning everything he/she can from verbal communication as well as contextual cues and nonverbal behaviors. 

In order to do this, the listener must become a student of the speaker’s culture, taking the time to learn the elements of the culture that help him/her interpret emotion, understand inside jokes, and discern hot button issues whether the speaker verbally communicates this information or not. In this speaker-centric approach, the listener is responsible for gathering the supplementary information that might be needed in order to understand the speaker.

Here are some suggestions for privileged folks who want to adopt this voracious style of listening:

1. Try not to underestimate the communicative power of nonverbal behavior. For example, if one of my neighbors hosts a family birthday party and invites me to it, whether I talk much with my neighbor or not at the party, I pay close attention to her behavior at the party. I try to think of the invitation to the party as an invitation to a conversation and my neighbor’s nonverbal behavior as words. When I do that, I learn more about my neighbors values, expectations for her children, even some of her scars than I would have if I’d had a one-on-one conversation with her. By inviting me to the party – into her inner circle of friends and family – she is speaking to me. I just have to participate and pay attention.

2. Seek feedback. When observing and deciphering contextual cues and nonverbal behaviors (like I might do at my neighbor’s party), it helps if privileged folks communicate their observations and ask those around them to confirm or disconfirm them. Indirect communication is tricky, especially if you’re a cultural outsider. It’s best to set the record straight by seeking feedback.

3. Ask clarification questions. Lots of them.

4. Pick up a book (or ten). In order to ask informed questions and better understand contextual cues, it’s

helpful to read books about the speaker’s culture. (This seems obvious but you’d be surprised at how often I meet privileged people who haven’t read anything about an oppressed person’s culture yet expect that person to tutor them in everything they need to know about the person. Not cool.)

5. Ask the speaker if you’re listening well and if he/she feels heard by you and understood by you. Don’t forget to pay attention to nonverbal cues when the speaker is responding to this question!

Any other suggestions?

Continue to part 4...

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*The technical term is “low context” culture.
**Adapted from research on “high context” cultures.

Friday Fruit (05/24/13)

Colorlines.com

On Fridays, BTSF offers links to other discussions about race & Christianity. It's an opportunity for you
to read about racial justice & Christianity from other perspectives, and for me to give props to the shoulders on which I stand...

Weekly Round Up:

• The Goodness of Diversity: A Pentecost Proclamation

• "Ethnic"

• 'Crack Babies': a retrospective tale from the drug wars [Video]
• Thanks for the rec, Eileen!

• Deported Parents Who Return Found Dead In Desert or Locked Up In Prison

These are some of BTSF's links of interest this week. What are yours?

Feel free to contribute your own links in the comments section, or submit items you feel should be included during the week. Self-promotion is encouraged.

Listening well as a person of privilege: Solidarity first, collaborative problem-solving later

This is the second in an series from Dr. Christena Cleveland on listening well as a person of privilege that originally appeared on her blog. Christena is a social psychologist in Minneapolis, MN with an upcoming book “Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart” that you'll definitely want to check out.

Privileged folks are problem-solving wizards. They can draw from experiences, tools and social

networks that make problem-solving a snap! For example, privileged people have critical thinking skills that were expertly sharpened at expensive liberal arts colleges. They have easy access to information via their Kindles and their iPads and their friends with master’s degrees in random disciplines. They rarely suffer from learned helplessness because they haven’t been systemically and repeatedly told that they’re stupid or angry or only good at sports. They possess high self-efficacy because, among other things, they can easily see themselves in the many successful people in society (e.g., teachers, politicians, pastors, etc.) who share their gender, race and/or class. And they have friends in powerful places.

Earlier this month, I spoke at a church conference in Ohio. After my presentation, an elderly black woman approached me and told me that she had recently purchased a new home and in the process had become the first non-white resident in a housing development of over 100 homes. Apparently, her neighbors were not crazy about the increase in diversity.

With tears rolling down her cheeks, she told me that her white neighbors were actively shunning her at association meetings and harassing her by placing large piles of junk on her lawn. I looked into her eyes and could see that her spirit was broken and that she felt entirely alone in her predicament. Horrified, I sat with her and listened to her and cried with her and prayed for her and expressed anger on her behalf.

Later, I alerted some of the church staff to her situation. Not surprisingly, they responded with genuine concern for the elderly black woman and vowed to reach out to her. One white, well-educated staff person said, “I’ll call my lawyer friend.” Privileged people know lawyers.

Privileged and oppressed folks can and should collaborate to solve problems. God knows I’m grateful for the privileged people who have utilized their problem-solving skills to create a more just and inclusive space for people like me. But problem-solving should never precede solidarity. Even Jesus the Great Problem-Solver spent 30 years standing in the ditch of humanity before he flexed his problem-solving muscles and performed his first miracle.

In the two years that I’ve lived in my predominantly black, low income neighborhood in Minneapolis, I’ve seen dozens of teams of privileged folks come in and try to fix a glaring problem without taking the time to build solidarity with the great people in my neighborhood. Typically, within months the good-intentioned privileged folks retreat back to their privileged spaces, leaving behind a devastating trail of benevolent classism and racism.* Last summer, a few kids on my block told me that they don’t trust the white people who come into our neighborhood because they “don’t understand us and they always leave soon anyway.”

If Christian privileged people aren’t careful, their problem-solving heroics can easily dishonor the image of God in oppressed people. Most obviously, this occurs when privileged people bypass the crucial stage of “weep with those who weep” listening. This type of listening requires the privileged people to stand in paradigm-shifting, time-consuming and uncomfortable solidarity with oppressed people. Instead, they go straight to the “Let me solve your problem for you” type of non-listening.

I believe there are several reasons why this happens so often:

1. Solving oppressed people’s problems rids privileged people of their own discomfort. Privileged people have the luxury of remaining oblivious to the everyday challenges of the oppressed. Privileged folks who voluntarily forfeit their ignorance (and its associated bliss) and choose to listen to personal and devastating accounts of oppression may not be prepared for how discomforting it is to be aware of such ugliness. 

When you’re used to living life on the clean, paved sidewalk of society, it can be uncomfortable to descend into the muddy ditch of oppression in order to stand in solidarity with the oppressed. In their haste to escape their own discomfort, privileged folks can choose the easy route: to fix the oppressed person’s problem ASAP, thus ridding the privileged person of the discomfort of standing in the ditch or even the awareness that such a ditch exists.

I periodically ask myself, whose discomfort is motivating me to act – my own or the oppressed person’s? Oftentimes, I must admit that my own discomfort with oppressed people’s suffering primarily motivates me to advocate for oppressed people. I feel better when they are no longer suffering and I no longer have to stand with them in their suffering or think about their suffering. When this occurs, their feelings and needs are secondary to my own. And once again the situation revolves around me, the privileged person. Mission not accomplished.

2. Privileged folks often underestimate how much they need solidarity with oppressed folks. Privileged folks who think that only oppressed people need rescuing will never be healthy collaborators. Time spent in solidarity with oppressed folks exposes the truth that privileged folks need oppressed folks as much as they think oppressed folks need them.

Solidarity with the oppressed rescues privileged folks from their myopia, their cultural shortcomings and the ditches of privilege that prevent them from truly experiencing God’s grace.** Solidarity is designed to show both privileged and oppressed folks that they are irrevocably interdependent and that they need each other’s help in climbing out of their respective ditches (see 1 Cor. 12:12-26). Healthy collaborative problem-solving only occurs after this lesson has been learned and lived out.

3. The idolatry of privilege. Many privileged people are so accustomed to relying on their agency, power, and skills to solve problems that temporarily refraining from doing so in order to listen well first seems unfathomable. “If I don’t solve this problem immediately, then who will?” they might ask themselves. So they skip out on the listening part and get right down to the business of problem-solving.

In this scenario, the unspoken assumption is that the privileged person’s agency, power and skills are the key to setting oppressed people free. Privilege is god. As such, there’s no need for God and the resurrection power in the battle against oppression. This approach can lead to hasty problem-solving strategies that fail to surrender to God’s timing, rely on God’s power or involve oppressed people in a collaborative and empowering way.

So…

Seek solidarity first. Seek to experience life from the perspective of the oppressed. Seek to rejoice when oppressed people rejoice and weep when oppressed people weep. Seek to understand the specific ways to honor the image of God in the oppressed people around you. Seek to be influenced by the oppressed folks around you. When you’re ready, you’ll be invited to collaborate with your oppressed brothers and sisters on problem-solving efforts that are powered by Jesus and led by Jesus.


Continue to part 3....

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*Benevolent racism and classism consist of attitudes the individual thinks of as favorable toward a group but that have the effect of supporting traditional, subservient roles for members of oppressed groups.

**The Peter and Cornelius narrative in Acts 10 and 11 is worth pondering in light of this truth.