Monday, March 24, 2014

All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye


3. Displacement: Make yourself the minority. It will help you more fully understand other ethnic and cultural groups. As the majority or dominant culture, you do not have to see things through the minority or subdominant culture's lens. The difference in the way we view the world is often the source of tension. Harris and Schaupp develop this thought in their book, Being White: Finding Our Place in a Multi-Ethnic World.  
Harris and Schaupp write, "...the white person chooses to put herself in a context where people of color are dominant in number and culture and whites are the minority. We call this displacement. Maybe she joins an Asian-led campus fellowship; maybe he goes to live and work on a reservation. Maybe a family moves into a neighborhood and school district that are mostly nonwhite. In this stage, the white person can learn to see whites and people of color in groups. He starts to see our respective racial and cultural systems and how they truly function. The key work in displacement is learning to submit and becoming a student of nonwhite cultures. The white person learns the other culture--celebrations, conflict-resolution styles and so on--and begins having productive, healthy conflict. He learns history through books and people's stories. It is a profoundly stretching stage of the white journey.... The active cross-cultural growth process a white person experiences in displacement causes her to reconsider her white identity in foundational ways... The white person begins to form a new white identity, strong enough to face the truth about white history and current reality... (19-20).   
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2014/03/walking-on-eggshells-five-more.php

Because Leon Brown always sees the world through his narrow racial prism, he's oblivious to the face that white Americans already experience what it's like to be political minorities. A basic problem is that Brown fails to distinguish between numerical majorities and the cultural dominance. A numerical minority can be culturally dominant. For instance, judges are part of the power elite. Judges are a tiny fraction of the total population. But it only takes one Federal judge with blue-state values to impose his culturally elite values on a red state. 

The same thing applies protected classes. The LBGT community is numerically subdominant but culturally dominant. Judges and lawmakers have empowered the LBGT community. They enjoy super rights. 

Christian Americans greatly outnumber homosexuals and trans, but Christians are currently subdominant. Likewise, feminist public (or secular private) school officials are numerically in the minority, but culturally dominant over boys. Female, homosexual, and trans students are culturally dominant while straight men and boys culturally subdominant. 

And it's not just caucasian men and boys. Heteronormative non-white boys are subdominant in relation to girls, homosexuals, and trans. 

Ironically, Brown's racism prisms makes it impossible for him to effectively minister to minorities, for he views the dominant/subdominant axis in exclusively ethic or racial terms, whereas the dominant/subdominant axis more often falls along religious lines, sexual lines, or gender role-modeling. He constantly stereotypes whites by typecasting them in his all-controlling racial narrative. 

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