I'm reading an article for my Culture in Education class, and it has started to annoy me a bit. The article itself seems to be of that vaguely defined and hard-to-pin-down "Blame American First" school of thought conservatives love to throw at liberals. I think it's a bit more subtle than that, but since I work with many foreign language and international "area" studies types, it's one I encounter often in subtle ways. I would say that it's an attempt at cultural sensitivity, but ends up being a sort of obtuse and non-reflective slam on our own culture as a way of being sensitive to others.

Take the article I'm reading, an excerpt from Understanding Cultural Differences: Germans, French, and Americans. It's written for business people, and perhaps I should limit my thinking to them. Even so, the article says that we are a "low context" culture, meaning that more information we communicate lies in the actual code or words we say (or materials, etc) than it does in a sort of implicit understanding between us. I disagree. I'll give an example from today. B and I went to hit some balls at the public golf course at Haines Point. (Sidebar: I'm combining hitting golf balls with my breathing exercises and finding that it works quite well! Inhale on the swing, exhale as I hit the ball, watch it fly!). I asked him what I should wear, and he said that there's no dress code, but I would probably want to wear shorts.

When we got there, we were eating hot dogs and watching people when he commented, "It doesn't matter what you wear here, but it so matters what you wear." He came last week with some friends and arrived late for their tee time, but the starters golf carted him out to where his friends were. He could see that they sized him up when he arrived, and he "passed" in a polo shirt and golf shoes. He said that when someone comes in a t-shirt and sloppy clothes, it takes them 1/2 an hour longer to play, because people aren't as friendly.

I think that anyone who thinks America is a low-context culture has not spent much time around WASPs. I had a friend who talked a lot about "white priviledge" in her class, and this is what it means. B and I aren't WASPs, but we "pass" as them all the time due to the way we speak, the way we dress, our understated manner, and our generally non-offensive good looks. Having all of that is as good as gold some days, and hell yes I benefit from "White Privledge." I benefit from more than just that - I benefit from looking like someone from the upper classes, even though I'm not. If that's not high context, I don't know what is. I'm sure other cultures within the American one have similar was of judging how you "fit" as well, but I'm not as aware of them because that's not where I "belong." Even in business, to say that there's a lack of "context," I think it shows a lack of understanding about American business culture. Maybe these researchers never got out on the golf course with the business types they were studying, or never went to a cocktail party where lawyers brought their wives (or husbands, I suppose) along. All of that provides the context for American businessmen. Oops, people. I'm so politically incorrect.

I know I'm going to probably have to nod and smile while everyone talks about how great other cultures are and how "artificial" our high context behavior of calling someone by their first name is. I don't understand how that's artificial - I think it carries an incredible amount of context, and I think that calling it artificial denigrates the context in our culture.