The laws and politics of cultural competency

According to the National Center for Cultural Competence,

• Cultural competence requires that organizations:
• have a defined set of values and principles, and
• demonstrate behaviors, attitudes, policies and
• structures that enable them to work effectively
• cross-culturally.

The key words here are "work effectively cross-culturally." In the ideal, this is a grand idea. We ALL could benefit by developing ways of behaving that honor the behaviors, attitudes....of others. A nice two-way street. We honor their culture, they honor ours.

The reality, unfortunately, is not quite so grand.

Culture is a curious thing. It is not, of course, just opera or fine art. It is the way we tend to behave in a particular group. The issue, however, is not quite that simple. We behave one way around our parents, another way around our friends, another way at school, another way in church, another in our clubs, and on and on. We have various groups and our behavior is strongly influenced by the situation and by those who are around us. To make this more complicated, in the US, we like to be autonomous and we hate hierarchies. This means that even though we know what appropriate behavior is in a certain place/event, we purposely violate all the rules to let people know what we think of their "blankety-blank rules." To make it even more complex, we pretend we are members of groups that we know nothing about and we copy people (such as movie stars) we have never seen and probably will never see. We are not always conscious that we are copying. While I could go into a long diatribe here on copying, I will end this paragraph by saying that what we call cultural behavior, as a result of all these factors, is quite complex.

If we take it upon ourselves to try not to offend others, to be polite, then cultural competence is not so much an issue. This may require, however, that we stop contributing to the conversation, as anything we say may and probably will be taken to be offensive. This situation, in turn, is offensive to the person who is trying to be polite, as they are aware that they might as well not exist.

While many things lie inbetween (indifference, lack of awareness), the other extreme is that we don't care if we offend. In so doing, we often offend.

What I have found that cultural competence now means is that one party in an interaction wants and takes all the power. The other parties have none. In other words, cultural competency is replicating the very system it was designed to combat, a system in which only one group had rights. In other words, the first scenario I described is the one that often currently exists.

What I realized long ago is that cultural competency is all about politics and little about behaving in an appropriate way. What it means today is that angry people, who may be rightfully angry, have taken all the power into their hands and anything that you say or do that they don't agree with is ipso facto culturally incompetent. This, in many cases, means the you have tried to tell them the truth or point out some facts that they do not want to hear for some reason, or done something that for some reason they don't understand or appreciate. Cultural competency is not about truth, or competence, it is about power. Power, one would think, would need to be shared and politeness, kindness and patience, would need to go both ways, if relationships are to endure. This is not true of cultural competence, but then it is about power, not about relationships.

I remember once talking to Latinas, in a nameless place, about a nameless meeting that they had conducted that, to me and many others, had been offensive to African American and American Indian women. The Latinas could not see that the fact that they switched back and forth from Spanish to English would not be frustrating for non-Spanish speakers. They could not see that the fact that the only fun events were completely in Spanish could be offensive. They did not notice that the African American and American Indian women got up during the meeting and walked out. To these Latinas, cultural competence meant that things were appropriate for Latinos. They never did understand and at the end of the discussion they called me a racist and culturally imcompetent for trying to point out the problems. Perhaps, I should admit that they apparently did listen a tiny bit, as the next year they did have the American Indian women working in the kitchen to make fry bread (culture, you understand) for the Latinas. The fact that the American Indian women spent the banquet in the kitchen was apparently irrelevant. How much better it might have been to have the Latinas serve a dinner to those they had offended. That event, however, has never happened. To these women, cultural competence was doing what they collectively liked and felt happy and comfortable with. It did not involve other cultures, even though cultural competency implies more than one culture is involved.

While these are sad events that create the tapestry of our lives, the worst part of cultural competence, however, may lie in the fact that the current ideas give people the power to ruin lives playing the race card frivolously, stay filled with rage while refusing to address the serious problems in their communities and in other communities, and refuse to listen to obvious facts, even when those facts may be critically important.