CHAPTER 10
The Culture of You
Two women sit on a bench holding hands. They are mirror images of each other except for their clothing and accessories. The woman on the left wears a white Victorian dress with a stiff collar. Her bodice is open to reveal that her heart is sliced in half. The darker woman on the right wears a colorful Mexican dress. Her heart is also visible, but it is whole. A thin red vein connects the two women’s hearts. The woman in white is clamping another vein, but blood still drips onto her skirt. The colorfully clothed woman is also holding a vein, but hers terminates in a locket with her husband’s portrait, and does not bleed.
The Two Fridas is one of artist Frida Kahlo’s most famous paintings. Her surrealist self-portrait captures the many culture clashes that made up her self. Born in Mexico in 1907 to a German-Jewish father and a Mexican-Catholic mother, Kahlo defied gender roles and artistic conventions to paint in her own distinctive style. Yet she struggled to win the approval of her husband, the much older artist Diego Rivera. In 1939, as the couple was divorcing, Kahlo painted The Two Fridas to express the battles inside and outside her self, not only between male and female, but also between European and Mexican, rich and poor, and modern and traditional.1
This attempt to reconcile her selves on canvas was not Kahlo’s last. Of her 143 paintings, 55 were self-portraits, all of which blended the many identities with which she was contending.2 She was ahead of her time not just in style, but also in subject. Today, more people are labeling themselves as “biracial” or “multicultural” than ever before.3 On the 2010 U.S. Census, for example, some nine million people checked more than one box to indicate their race.4 And the ranks of the multicultural are poised to explode; one in seven new marriages is interracial or interethnic.5 Hybrid national, gender, and class identities are also on the rise.6
As Kahlo’s art depicts, grappling with the many cultures you inhabit and that inhabit you results in a unique work: your self. In previous chapters, we have shown how culture cycles forge similarities among people. In this chapter, we examine how they feed individuality.
The culture cycles of hemispheres, genders, races, classes, regions, religions, workplaces, and global economic divides give people the raw materials for crafting selves. But because each person interacts with a unique set of culture cycles, no two selves are exactly alike. Also, no two people reconcile the tensions between their cultural identities in exactly the same way.
Consequently, what it means to be Polish, or a man, or middle class, or a firefighter depends on all the other culture cycles rolling through a particular life. Consider two Peruvians. A nineteen-year-old woman attending university in Lima will have a decidedly different self than a fifty-year-old man farming potatoes outside of Cuzco. Likewise, if you are a high-school-educated, Jewish, White, female nonprofit-food-bank employee in New Jersey, your self will differ in many ways from that of a college-educated, Baptist, Black, male oil company executive in Houston. The fact that you are both Americans, however, will mean that you share a similar strand of independence that comes with being citizens of the United States in the twenty-first century.
So what makes you unique is not just your quirky set of chromosomes. Your individuality also comes from all your cultures and how you combine them in your daily life. Like Kahlo, whose personal title was “the one who gave birth to herself,”7 you, too, are an artist of your I, creatively mixing all your different cultural currents to make you you.
Unlike Frida Kahlo, however, you live in a world that not only welcomes many-sided selves, but requires them. Knowing when and how to be independent or interdependent is a twenty-first-century skill—one that will allow individuals to thrive in increasingly diverse societies, and to face the outsize environmental and social problems plaguing our planet. In this final chapter, we leave you with several tools that will help you understand, refine, and deploy both sides of your self.
You don’t have to be an avant-garde artiste with family from all over to be multicultural. All of us interact with many cultures in a single day and across our lives. You are born into some of them, including your nationality, gender, race, ethnicity, region, religion, and class. You pick up others by, say, moving, getting a college education, choosing a particular career, or living in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. Some of these identities come with culture cycles that inspire more independence; others yield more interdependence.
What cultures make up your self? Given your cultural exposures,8 do you tend to be more independent or interdependent? Or are you equally both? In this book, we’ve explored only eight of the dozens of cultural contexts that foster and flow from your self. Yet keeping up with even this small number of cultures can be difficult. To help you sort your self out, we suggest you use this scorecard:
NAME:
To complete the scorecard, think about the culture cycles with which you have interacted for each of the rows. If you have mostly interfaced with independent cycles for a given culture, then give yourself a 1 in the “Independent” column and a 0 in the “Interdependent” column. But if you have rolled mostly with interdependent culture cycles, then mark a 1 in the “Interdependent” column and a 0 in the “Independent” column. And if you’ve interacted with both, then write a 1 in both columns.
In the case of “Hemisphere,” if you have lived your whole life in the United States, for example, you should probably give yourself a 1 for “Independent” and a 0 for “Interdependent.” But if you have spent all your days in Korea, you should mark 0 for “Independent” and 1 for “Interdependent.” And if you’ve grown up mostly in the United States, but spent summers in Korea with family, then you get a 1 in both columns. After you score your self for all eight cultures, add up the columns. The totals will suggest whether you tend to use your independent or interdependent self.
Exactly how your cultures come together to make your self is a big question. We do not mean to imply that you should be able to figure it out during your drive home from work or your summer vacation. But by contemplating all the culture cycles of which you are a part, and how they intersect within you, you may gain a greater understanding of your self.
You may think there are more sides to your self than the scorecard tracks. We agree. In addition to the eight cultural categories we cover in this book, many others impact the shape your self takes. When did your family immigrate to the United States, and did they come voluntarily? Are you straight, gay, bisexual, or some other sexual identity? Do you live in a city, suburb, or rural area? Do you have any psychological or physical challenges? Which sports do you follow? Which teams do you cheer for? How do you let off steam on a Saturday afternoon? These are just a few of the culture cycles that may nudge you toward a more independent or interdependent self.
One particularly powerful cultural force is the generation (or cohort) you were born into. The Greatest Generation (also known as the G.I. Generation, born between 1901 and 1924),9 for example, came of age amid the Great Depression and World War II, and then went on to become the productive, civic-minded, team-playing heroes of the twentieth century. But their grandchildren, the Baby Boomers (born between 1943 and 1960) were a notoriously independent lot. Singing along with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” they protested the Vietnam War, rejected organized religion, experimented with drugs and free love, and demanded equal rights for African Americans, Native Americans, women, and other groups.
Now the Baby Boomers’ children and grandchildren, Generation X (or the Gen Xers; born between 1961 and 1981) and the Millennials (born between 1982 and 2004) are giving their predecessors a run for their independent money. Psychologist Jean Twenge calls this cohort Generation Me because these Americans “take it for granted that the self comes first.”10 Twenge has been tracking generational changes in psychological features for more than a decade. With psychologist Stacy Campbell, she recently reviewed data from 1.4 million people who filled out personality, attitude, psychopathology, or behavior questionnaires between 1930 and today. The authors discovered that, over time, Americans have developed higher self-esteem, narcissism, confidence, and assertiveness, and lower need for social approval.11 As Twenge explains in her book Generation Me, this cohort is even more individualistic than the Boomers, who did not slouch into their independence until young adulthood. Even then, when the Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, they did so in groups. In contrast, the Gen Xers and Millennials like to go it alone.12
Beholding the complexity of your self, you may be thinking, wouldn’t it be better to have a simpler, single-sided I?
Even if this were possible, it wouldn’t be desirable. That’s because self-complexity is your superpower. As Kahlo’s oeuvre suggests, having all those selves at your behest is good for creativity. Recall from the last chapter that people who have traveled to other cultures generate more out-of-the-box solutions than people who stay put. Other studies show that globetrotters, compared to homebodies, come up with many more uses for a brick, generate more names of fruits (durian, anyone?), and spot more connections between seemingly far-flung concepts. (Quick: what word is related to rough, resistance, and beer?*)13 Originality also comes more easily to people who speak more than one language, who work in diverse teams, and who live in societies that have opened themselves to the outside world.14 Not only are these international I’s more imaginative, psychologists Angela Leung and Chi-yue Chiu note, but they are also “less intimidated by the practices, artifacts, and concepts that are different from or even in conflict with those in their own culture.”15
Complex selves are also good for coping with adversity. The more facets you have to your self, the more tools you have to deal with a variety of circumstances, finds psychologist Patricia Linville. For example, say you put all your psychological eggs into the basket of being the best engineer possible. Life might trundle along swimmingly until your company has to downsize, and you find yourself unemployed. Your I is no longer, and you are devastated. Yet if you’ve built a self that is not only an excellent engineer, but also a loving husband, a fun father, a skilled model-builder, and an enthusiastic soccer coach, you have more selves in reserve. These other selves may or may not pay the bills, but they can help stave off the anxiety and depression that often come with unemployment.16
For ethnic minorities, nurturing your psychological bazaar is especially important. Psychologists Veronica Benet-Martinez and Angela Nguyen reviewed multiple studies on how minorities should best mix with mainstream American culture. Rather than accepting the melting pot idea that immigrants should give up their first selves and assimilate to their new home, embracing all one’s identities was the surest path to health and well-being.17 This approach was also better than clinging only to an old-country identity.
Having a complex self is good not only for individuals, but also for society at large. When you appreciate your own complexity, your default assumption about people on the other side of a cultural divide is not that they’re incompetent, uncaring, or evil. Instead, your first guess is that they are operating according to different culture cycles. So you ask questions, judge more slowly, and act more carefully. In so doing, you reduce the likelihood of conflict, and maybe even discover something new about the person, yourself, or the world.18
A quick look at a few contemporary leaders reveals that their selves include both independent and interdependent elements. Consider Barack Obama, for example. Does Obama seem more independent, more interdependent, or equal parts of both?
To answer this question, let’s fill in his scorecard, starting with the “Hemisphere” row. Although some diehard Birthers might argue otherwise, Obama was born and has lived most of his life in the United States. Yet from ages six to ten, he lived with his mother and stepfather in interdependent Indonesia, where he spent considerable time even after returning to the United States. So, on the “Hemisphere” dimension, we assign Obama two 1s.
As a male who identifies as such, Obama gets one point in the “Independent” column for “Gender.” And although his mother was White and his father was Black, Obama refers to himself as Black. So in the “Race” row, he gets a 1 for interdependence and a 0 for independence. (If he considered himself biracial or multicultural, he would score 1s in both columns.) With a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a law degree from Harvard, Obama is highly educated, so in the “Class” row he scores a 1 for independence and a 0 for interdependence. And as a longtime member of a Black Protestant church, he gets a 1 in the “Interdependent” column for “Religion.” (See chapter 7 for more on Protestant traditions.)
For the remaining rows, Obama gets 1s in both columns. The years he logged in the Northeast pursuing his degrees confer a 1 in the “Independent” column for region. But his roots in Hawaii19 and Chicago also earn him a 1 in the “Interdependent” column. When it comes to “Workplace,” Obama’s years at a for-profit law firm put a 1 in the “Independent” column. Being a community organizer, professor, senator, and president, however, give him a 1 for interdependence. (Although “leader of the free world” may sound like an independent gig, at the end of the day, it’s still a government job.) Obama also scores double 1s for “Global Region.” He has spent most of his life in the Global North, which sends a 1 to the “Independent” column. At the same time, his early years in Indonesia and continued connections to family there earn him a tally for interdependence.20
If you guessed that Obama is equally independent and interdependent, you were correct. Here is his completed scorecard:
| Independent | Interdependent | |
| Hemisphere | 1 | 1 |
| Gender | 1 | 0 |
| Race/Ethnicity | 0 | 1 |
| Class | 1 | 0 |
| Religion | 0 | 1 |
| U.S. Region | 1 | 1 |
| Workplace | 1 | 1 |
| Global Region | 1 | 1 |
| TOTAL: | 6 | 6 |
Speaking of leaders of the free world, how about Bill Gates? Does he seem more independent, interdependent, or both independent and interdependent? Let’s take a look at where he’s been to learn a bit more about what kind of self he likely uses most.
The cofounder of the world’s largest software company and the second-richest person alive was born in Seattle, Washington, and has lived most of his life near there, save for the two years he spent at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (before dropping out). This lands him 1s in the “Independent” column for “Hemisphere” and “Region” (West), and 0s in the “Interdependent” column for these rows. A White male who avows no other gender or racial identities, Gates also gets 1s only for “Independence” in the “Gender” and “Race” rows.
Gates is also 1 and 0 for “Class” and “Religion.” Although he technically does not have a bachelor’s degree, his occupation and income have not suffered as a result. Moreover, both of his parents were college-educated executives who clearly conferred on their son no small number of advantages. They also raised him as a mainline Protestant (in the Congregationalist Church), though he now calls himself an agnostic. Both religious tendencies lean toward independence.
Proof that successful people who seem completely independent usually harbor interdependence as well, Gates gets double 1s for “Workplace” and “Global Region.” He is an iconic entrepreneur, and showed a bent for business from a young age. Gates’s sister reports, for instance, that when a teenage Bill borrowed her baseball mitt, he prepared a contract to limit his obligation. In recent years, Gates has also blazed the trail of philanthropy, pledging to give away 90 percent of his vast fortune. To this end, he cofounded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a nonprofit with extensive activity in the Global South. The work of the foundation has led Gates to spend considerable time traveling through and thinking about Africa, India, and South America. So although he has not taken up residence in the Global South, he is earning honorary citizenship there.21
As Gates’s scorecard suggests, his independent self propelled him to the top of the business world. But his interdependent self is what may establish him as a global visionary.
NAME: Bill Gates
| Independent | Interdependent | |
| Hemisphere | 1 | 0 |
| Gender | 1 | 0 |
| Race/Ethnicity | 1 | 0 |
| Class | 1 | 0 |
| Religion | 1 | 0 |
| U.S. Region | 1 | 0 |
| Workplace | 1 | 1 |
| Global Region | 1 | 1 |
| TOTAL: | 8 | 2 |
Just as Bill Gates has a surprisingly interdependent side, Mother Teresa had an independent streak that moved her to practice her good works on a worldwide scale. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her more than forty-five years of ministering to the poor and sick, Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Albania, where she lived until moving to India at the age of eighteen. With her life thus divided between East and West and the Global North and South, she gets a 1 in both columns of the “Hemisphere” and “Global Region” rows. Since she was a White woman, the “Race/Ethnicity” row of her scorecard reads 1-0, while the “Gender” row reads 0-1. Her “Class” is also 0-1, because neither she nor her parents received a formal college education.
As a Catholic nun, Mother Teresa posts a 0 for independence and a 1 for interdependence in the “Religion” category. And as an employee of the Catholic Church and founder of five hundred nonprofit missions throughout the world, she likewise nets a 1 for interdependence on the “Workplace” dimension.22
Summing the columns, we see that Mother Teresa is mostly interdependent, but with a healthy dose of independence:
NAME: Mother Teresa
| Independent | Interdependent | |
| Hemisphere | 1 | 1 |
| Gender | 0 | 1 |
| Race/Ethnicity | 1 | 0 |
| Class | 0 | 1 |
| Religion | 0 | 1 |
| U.S. Region | N/A | N/A |
| Workplace | 0 | 1 |
| Global Region | 1 | 1 |
| TOTAL: | 3 | 6 |
In accounting for how particular culture cycles have given rise to independent or interdependent selves, we have applied rather blunt rules. In the case of “Gender,” for example, we gave the men a 1 for independence and the women a 1 for interdependence, regardless of how they might think or have thought of themselves. Yet people’s gender identities are often more complex. Obama, for example, frequently notes how much women shape his actions—his top three foreign policy advisers are women23—so he might lobby to change his 0 for interdependence on the “Gender” row into a 1. Likewise, Mother Teresa was a woman, but many of her actions defied traditional female roles. At a young age, she walked away from her family and home, never to return.24 Perhaps like many people called to the cloth, she might have felt that her self either transcended gender altogether or embodied both gender roles. Thus she might have given herself either two 0s or two 1s in the “Gender” row.
About these famous folks, we can only speculate. But you have the inside scoop on yourself. So, in calculating your own scorecard, feel free to apply more complex and subjective criteria.
Now that you know more about both sides of your self, what do you do with them? How do you know which self to use when? Although every situation is different, we’ve distilled the fine art of being the right person at the right time into a simple three-step process:
1. Lead with interdependence. In early interactions with people, try interdependence first. When you are in an interdependent frame of mind, you can better assess what selves others are bringing to the situation and adjust your self accordingly.
One way to summon your interdependent self is to think of how you are similar to other people. Psychologist David Trafimow and colleagues showed the power of this simple trick in an experiment with both American and Chinese participants. The research team first asked half the participants to consider how they were different from their friends and family, and the other half to consider how they were similar to their loved ones. They then asked the participants to describe themselves. When participants thought about their similarities to loved ones, their self-descriptions included more relationships and roles than when they considered differences.25 Other studies show that reflecting on how you are similar to your conversation partners makes you pay more attention to them, which helps dispel stereotypes and pave the way to more peaceful and productive exchanges.26
2. Match or contrast. Next, if you want to go with the flow of the situation, match your self to that of other people. But if you want to change the state of affairs, then try a self that runs counter to the prevailing trend.
For instance, say you are a Philadelphian who has just taken a job in Duluth, Minnesota. Having surveyed the scene, you will likely conclude that your coworkers lean more toward interdependence than you do. If you like your job and your company is pleased with your team’s progress, it’s probably best to search your self for its more interdependent qualities, and learn how to bring them to the table more often. But if you’ve been hired because your company feels it is stagnating and wants to bring in a little “fresh blood,” now is the time to let your independence shine.
Likewise, if you are a female nonprofit executive who is trying to rouse your mostly female employees to greater cohesion and productivity, you should probably use the matching strategy and let your interdependent self do the talking. Similarly, if you are pitching your $1.2 million idea to a roomful of business executives who might pony up for the project, matching your independent self to theirs will most likely bring in the bucks. But if that roomful of business executives is guilty of polluting your community’s groundwater and you’d like them to stop, a plea from your contrasting interdependent heart might move them to better behavior.
In all these cases, your particular style of being independent or interdependent will not perfectly match that of the people you are trying to swim with or against. For instance, a middle-class Black female teacher’s way of relating and adjusting will likely not be the same as her working-class White male students. Nevertheless, their mutual appreciation for connecting and enduring will help bridge this divide. Similarly, a Ugandan Protestant artist’s manner of expressing her uniqueness and exerting control will not perfectly mirror her French-Catholic collaborator’s. Yet their shared focus on individuation, mastery, and freedom will help them to make exciting art together.
3. Switch. If the first self you bring to a situation doesn’t give you the results you desire, try the other one. For many people, the realization that you have two equally legitimate selves marks a 100 percent increase in psychological resources. Until you get the hang of which one works best where and when, experiment.
When you’re in the thick of one way of being, though, it’s sometimes hard to remember how to summon the other side. So here are a few fast tactics for calling forth each self:
| Independence | Interdependence |
|
|
Your individual thoughts, feelings, and actions are only one level of the culture cycle. You can also leverage the interaction and institution levels to bring out the self you want to use in a given situation.
As we have emphasized throughout this book, culture cycles operate largely at the unconscious level, nonchalantly steering the self without troubling the conscious mind.27 Subtle cues in the environment (mostly practices and products at the interaction level of the culture cycle) do much of this heavy lifting. These cultural “primes” make it more likely that we will think, feel, and act in some ways rather than others. For instance, psychologist Wendi Gardner and her colleagues asked European-American students to circle all the pronouns in a story describing a trip to the city. Half the students were randomly assigned to read a story in which all the pronouns were independent (I, me, my, and mine); the other half were randomly assigned to read the exact same story, except all the pronouns were interdependent (we, us, our, and ours).
This simple activity jogged something that you wouldn’t think could be so easily shaken: people’s values. Participants who circled the “we” pronouns later rated interdependent values such as “belongingness,” “friendship,” and “respect for elders” higher than independent values such as “freedom,” “choosing one’s goals,” and “living an exciting life.” Most of these participants also thought they had a moral obligation to help a friend in need. In contrast, participants who circled the “I” pronouns rated the independent values more highly, and only half thought they were obligated to help their friend.28
Many cultural primes are like this: seemingly insignificant yet surprisingly powerful. Because cultural primes are so subtle, they can be difficult to change. This is why cultures themselves are so hard to alter; millions of tiny cues keep them rolling without much effort on any individual’s part. But once you know what to look for, you can start shaping the primes in your environment and, by extension, the thoughts, feelings, and actions of your individual self.
Psychologist Ying-Yi Hong and her team demonstrated the power of cultural symbols to shift selves. They chose as their site Hong Kong, a former British colony on the south coast of China. Hong Kong hosts many of the independent elements of the United Kingdom’s culture cycle, as well as many of the interdependent elements of China’s. The researchers wondered how easily they could prime Hong Kong students to use their British or Chinese selves.
The outcome the researchers examined was how people explain one another’s behavior. Recall from the introduction and chapter 2 that interdependent people more readily look outside at a person’s situation and relationships for the causes of her behavior, while independent people more readily look inside at her dispositions and preferences. Psychologists Michael Morris and Kaiping Peng gave a fun demonstration of this difference. Showing participants an animation of one fish swimming in front of a cluster of four fish, they asked, “Why is the fish swimming alone?” True to their independent ways, American respondents offered internal explanations such as “He wants to lead the other fish” or “He doesn’t want to be a part of the crowd.” And true to their interdependent ways, Chinese respondents offered situational explanations such as “The other fish are chasing him” or “He is lost.”29
Hong and colleagues guessed that, with a simple flip of primes, they could make Hong Kong students respond to the fish task as either situationists or dispositionists. They first showed half their participants classic Chinese icons: a Chinese dragon, the Great Wall, a rice farmer, and a Chinese dancer. To the other half they showed classic Western icons: Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the U.S. Capitol, and a cowboy. These small prompts had big effects. After viewing the Chinese primes, Hong Kong students adopted a situationist style, explaining that the first fish was responding to pressures from the other fish. But after viewing the Western primes, students took a dispositionist stance, saying that the lead fish was acting on his own ideas and preferences.30
The languages we speak also prime which self we bring to a task. In Canada, Michael Ross and his coauthors randomly assigned English-Chinese bilingual students, all born and raised in China, to answer a questionnaire about themselves in either English or Chinese. Students who responded in English made significantly more positive statements than negative ones, reflecting the independent tendency to focus on one’s uniqueness and positivity. In contrast, students who responded in Chinese made the same number of positive and negative statements, reflecting a more interdependent tendency to fit in and seek the middle way.31 (For more about these tendencies, see chapters 1 and 2.) Indeed, organizational psychologist Donnel Briley has found that, when making decisions, Hong Kong bilinguals seek compromise and moderation more when they speak Mandarin than when they speak English.32
Even within a language, which words you choose can prime which self you use. In one study, for instance, psychologists Caitlin Fausey and Lera Boroditsky asked a large online sample of English speakers to read about Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. Half the respondents read a more passive account of the incident: “a snap unfastened and part of the bodice tore!” The other half read a more active report: “[Justin Timberlake, Jackson’s dance partner] unfastened a snap and tore part of the bodice!” Compared to respondents who read the passive language, respondents who read that Timberlake actively ripped the bodice blamed him more for the fashion gaffe and thought he should pay a higher fine. Although the authors did not directly measure the selves of respondents, their findings are consistent with the idea that highly agentic language primes an independent self, while less agentic language primes an interdependent self.33
Research on priming is a growth industry.34 From these and other studies, we can make a few recommendations. Depending on which of your selves you want to prime, install the tchotchkes, enact the practices, and speak the language of a culture you associate with that self. In English, for example, use I and other individual pronouns when you want to elicit independence, and we and other collective pronouns when you want to evoke interdependence.
At the institutional level of the culture cycle, you can also create organizations that reflect and support different selves for different occasions. Stephanie Fryberg and her team are doing just that. A professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and a member of the Tulalip Tribes of Washington State, Fryberg now spends half her time as a school district administrator at the Quil Ceda and Tulalip Elementary School, which is located on the Washington State reservation where she grew up. The school’s mission? To teach the children and their teachers to deploy both sides of their selves.
Some 71 percent of the school’s 570 students are Native Americans, 10 percent are Latinos, and 19 percent are European Americans. Most of the teachers are European Americans.35 And 95 percent of Washington’s schools score higher than Quil Ceda and Tulalip on standardized tests.
Pained that the school was shortchanging its children, Fryberg decided “to bring together what I know from being my middle-class professor self with what I know from being my reservation Native self.” From her own experiences, she knew that the roots of the problem at the underachieving elementary school were long and tangled: poverty (76 percent of students qualify for free lunches), discrimination, unemployment, substance abuse, and a long-standing lack of trust between Native and European-American communities. Yet as a cultural psychologist, Fryberg also knew that a few adjustments to the school’s culture cycle could make a big difference. With the school’s administrators on her side, she was ready to try a few ideas.
As in many large, underresourced schools, Quil Ceda and Tulalip Elementary has more than its fair share of discipline issues. One day, for example, Fryberg heard a young teacher struggling in vain to get Thomas,36 a first-grade Native student with a difficult home life, to come out from under a table.
“Thomas,” the teacher pleaded. “Think about what you’re doing. Make the smart choice that you will be proud of. Come out from there.”
Thomas did not budge.
Watching Thomas stand his ground, Fryberg intuited that he was probably using his independent self. Like African Americans and other groups that have actively confronted discrimination, Native Americans have high levels of both independence and interdependence. (See chapter 4 for more on the independence and interdependence of African Americans.)37 Fryberg decided to try his interdependent side: “Look,” she said, “you don’t want your friends to see us pulling you out from there. That would be really embarrassing.”
Within moments, Thomas was out from under the table and back at his desk as if nothing had happened.
Over time, Fryberg found that reminding young students of friends’ and family members’ expectations could be a very effective tactic. “Raina, what would your Grandma say if she saw you fooling around and not reading?”
But some of the teachers were worried about this approach, arguing that the children needed to do the right thing for themselves, not because of what others might think. Fryberg agreed that the school needed to hone student’s independent selves alongside their interdependent ones.
So working together, the school’s staff introduced a series of interventions. First, teachers adopted the jigsaw classroom technique we described in chapter 5, but with an independent twist. As per the usual intervention, teachers divided students into small groups to research Tulalip culture. Within each group, individual students were assigned a topic (food, religious traditions, economic systems, etc.). But unlike the usual jigsaw classroom, in which students next collaborate on a group presentation, the students wrote individual papers and made individual presentations that integrated their group’s research. In this way, students cultivated both interdependent and independent skills.
Quil Ceda and Tulalip’s staff also put in place a program called GROW, which features boosts to both independence and interdependence. Partly informed by psychologist Carol Dweck’s research on growth mind-sets (see chapter 2), the program urges students to Grow their brains at least six hours a day; Respect themselves, others, and all living things; Own their attitudes and actions; and Welcome all people who come into the community. The school also developed a book in which a tribal elder explains to a young Native that if she works hard and grows her brain, she will always be able to help people.
To inspire its Native students and keep them in school, Quil Ceda and Tulalip Elementary also knew it had to do more to improve the image of Natives. Fryberg was well acquainted with the problem. Most people outside the Native community know very little about Native Americans. When they think of Natives at all, they usually conjure sports mascots—Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, North Dakota Fighting Sioux—or Disney’s Pocahontas. She also knew from experiments in her lab that these seemingly innocuous images undermine the self-esteem, efficacy, and academic motivation of Natives. Starved of images of themselves succeeding in school, many Native students surmise that they don’t belong there.38 To broaden the Hollywood vision of an American Indian, the school now highlights contemporary examples of Native lawyers, doctors, elected officials, scientists, and artists.
Through extensive interviews, Fryberg and her team also discovered that relations between teachers and student families were strained, which made Native students feel ambivalent about Quil Ceda and Tulalip. The teachers said that many Native parents were reticent to talk. The teachers also worried about appearing culturally insensitive or racist to the parents.
The parents, in turn, were not sure they should trust the school, as many of them had endured bad experiences there growing up. Because they respected the teachers’ authority, they didn’t feel comfortable sharing their ideas or criticisms. Observing the teachers’ easier and more frequent interactions with European-American parents led the Native parents to feel like outsiders. The researchers also noted that although the teachers claimed to be color-blind, they sent Native students to the principal’s office more often than European-American students.
With these observations, Fryberg worked with the school’s staff to create a space where teachers, students, and their families would all feel that their multiple identities were valued and “safe.” (For more on identity-safe spaces, see chapter 4.) Teachers were encouraged not only to push their students to achieve, but also to get to know students’ families and to attend community celebrations. Instead of singling out individual students for recognition (the usual American practice), classrooms selected families to receive a bumper sticker that read, “Our Family Was Honored by Quil Ceda and Tulalip Elementary.” And although district guidelines counsel against touching children, the teachers now routinely hug their students.
To get the entire community involved, the Quil Ceda and Tulalip team now actively recruits Natives to serve in various volunteer and paid roles. A newly developedteacher-training programwill grant college credit to Natives working in the school. Over time, seeing more Natives as teachers and school leaders will signal that, contrary to what some Native students may have assumed, school is a place for them.
Taking their efforts up to more powerful institutions, parents and teachers are also lobbying governments at the state and local levels to ban Indian mascots in the public schools. Washington’s neighbor, Oregon, has already passed similar legislation.
On the reservation and off, empowering people to use both their different selves requires making it okay to have two selves in the first place. On this count, independent cultures are more challenged than interdependent ones. Because independent selves are allegedly made up of stable, internal, unique traits, they are not supposed to vary too much across situations. When they do, disdainful observers have a few words for their more flexible brethren, including hypocrite, phony, two-faced, inauthentic, and fraud.
Now interdependent selves have a word for their more uniform counterparts: WEIRD. An acronym that stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic,” this is the term that economists and psychologists use to describe the historically, economically, and geographically odd people who, among other psychological anomalies, think that selves are and should be singular and consistent. Because most scientists are WEIRD, we know a great deal about WEIRDS but vanishingly little about the other 85 percent of people alive today.39
A second stumbling block that besets the two-self solution is many cultures’ desire for national, racial, ethnic, tribal, or religious purity. In the United States, for instance, interracial marriage was illegal until 1967.40 In addition, the so-called one-drop rule meant that if a child had one Black parent and one White parent, the child was considered Black in the eyes of the law.
In the past decade, however, movements to make way for multifaceted selves have heated up, with advocates acting at every level of the culture cycle. At the interaction level, parents of multiracial children have taken the lead by creating products and practices that reflect and support their children’s selves. These products include children’s books with multiracial characters and titles such as Black, White, Just Right!; guides for raising multiracial children; and toys and clothing targeted to the biracial market. T-shirts boast, “Mixed to Perfection!” and “Hybrid Vigor.” Shampoos claim that they are specially formulated for “mixed chicks.” The Real Kidz company produces mixed-ethnicity dolls, one of whose birth certificate reads, “Hi, my name is Willough. My mom is White and my dad is Hispanic. They created me out of love, and I am a perfect mixture of both!” News and social media target mixed-race audiences, and popular television shows such as Modern Family feature multicultural households.
At the level of institutions, many people hoping to legitimize their multiracial and multiethnic selves lobbied the U.S. Census Bureau to add a “multiracial” box to its forms. Their efforts were unsuccessful, however, partly because traditional civil rights organizations fought against them. These groups worry that the multiracial option will thin their ranks and thereby undermine their political power. (The federal government allocates money to community programs according to the size of the racial and ethnic groups they serve.) Multicultural activists did enjoy a partial victory: the current compromise, effective as of 2010, is to allow people to mark as many races and ethnicities as apply to them.
Meanwhile, multicultural people have formed their own grassroots organizations to help them face their unique issues. The Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA), for example, founded in 1988, is a multiracial advocacy group that lobbies the U.S. Census on behalf of mixed, blended, or “hyphenated” groups.41 Swirl, with chapters in locales ranging from New York City to Starkville, Mississippi, is another national multiethnic association that hopes to “challenge the idea that all should be able to fit in one neatly packaged identity,” according to the organization’s website.42
As we have stressed in previous chapters, people with more power (money, status, decision-making authority, etc.) can more easily alter culture cycles than can people with less power. Nevertheless, as the growing success of multicultural movers and shakers testifies, there is also strength in numbers and persistence. We expect that two-sided selves and the culture cycles that make and mirror them will become more common in years to come.
In 1954, Frida Kahlo passed away at the age of forty-seven. Whether she died of disease, an accidental overdose, or suicide is unclear.43 But what is clear is that her dueling selves brought her both pain and inspiration until the end of her too-brief life.
Some fifty-seven years later, Amy Chua published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Although the world was beginning to recognize and even appreciate diversity, Chua also suffered from her inability to match her self to the selves of her daughters and to the culture cycles rolling around them all. Part of this was the world’s doing; although some change has come, the calming of the clashes within and between our selves is still a long way off. Part was Chua’s doing; she tried mightily to instill Chinese-style interdependence in the selves of her more multicultural daughters. By the end of her book, it is Chua who gets the lesson. Her children teach her the importance of being more than one self, and of knowing which self to be when and where.
Embracing our many cultures and selves is an enormous challenge for all of us. But as the planet gets smaller, flatter, and hotter, we can no longer afford to fear or ignore diversity. Instead, we must harness the energy of our clashing cultures for a more creative, cooperative, and peaceful twenty-first century.
*The answer is draft.