A few days back, I found out in my cultural psychology class that it is true that those expats who believe in essentialism (with respect to either culture or race) have more problems integrating. A study was done at Bei Da of foreigners in Beijing (by sending out researchers to talk to foreigners at Sanlitun, nonetheless) that correlated essentialist views of identity with failure to integrate into Chinese society. It’s not a surprise, perhaps, but I’ve often wondered if it really could be so. I have my answer.
Essentialist views of identity are responsible for a great deal of the cultural marginalization that third culture kids can encounter. The ‘push’ to be one nationality or another, once race or another, whatever stark choices we are asked to make - stems fundamentally from the idea that we have some sort of magic ‘essence’ inside us, bestowed by some unclear combination of genetics and birth place, that determines who we are. Perhaps one of the strongest resistances third culture kids as well as multiracial people in race-salient environments face comes from the emotional discomfort and lack of closure we create for people with essentialist views of identity.
When your parents don’t give birth to you anywhere remotely close to where your genes evolved, it becomes hard to argue that there is magic essence in your birth place that can make you completely different from your parents. (Of course, unless you abandon essentialism and acknowledge the role that society plays in shaping us.) On the other hand, when you repatriate and act like you’re a foreigner, it is hard to argue that genes and ethnicity holds magical essence powerful enough to eradicate cultural divides. (I myself am an example of that.) Multiracial people challenge essentialism, even when they’ve only lived in one country. Third culture kids challenge essentialism in both ways mentioned above. And multiracial third culture kids just give people identity politics dyspepsia.
I’ve seen expats do some (to me) bizarre things that just seem maladaptive for themselves, things that don’t hurt or annoy the locals but cause significant inconvenience for the expats. I’ve gotten the feeling before that expats do impractical things in host countries (like after 4+ years in China, wearing diamond and gold earrings to markets) because they think that if they integrate, they will disappear somehow. As if not wearing expensive jewelry that serves as an identity marker in their home country but means something else in their host country will make their identity erode day by day. It sounds and seems so ridiculous to me that I figured that there must be some fantastically compelling emotional reward for doing these sorts of things that I’m unaware of. After some more observation, thinking about what I do instead and why I do that, I started to zoom in on identity issues.
Perhaps it is fair to assume that expats who are integrating poorly are simply afraid, then. Identity is a very potent thing, as third culture kids that identify as such know, and maybe pre-move training for expats ought to include an explicit discussion that challenges essentialist views of identity in a constructive way, by showing how you will not disappear if you adjust to a new culture. In fact, if you expatriate for the first time as an adult, you are virtually guaranteed that you will never cease to be what you started out as culturally. The odds that you are so good at cultural adjustment that you forget all about your life so far are so small, they can be dismissed. You are far more likely to not integrate enough, and have daily frustrations and problems as a result. Out of the two, the latter is clearly the case to worry about.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Jane // May 3, 2008 at 10:26 am
Although blacks are 12% of the population in reality it is just 2% of the blacks that commit 50% of the murders and a greater percentage of other crimes. Consider: black females - 6%. Blacks from zero yrs. to 12 yrs. and black males from 50-100 years commit an infinitesimal percentage of the crimes. Therefore we are left with two percent. If we eliminate crimes committed by this two percent from the U.S. statistics our country compares very favorably with all Western countries. Fact — blacks kill 7 times more than whites kill. Fact — blacks kill whites 20 times more than whites kill blacks. Fact — blacks mug or commit group crime against whites 50 times more than whites commit against blacks. Fact — blacks rape white women 2000 (yes 2000) times more than whites rape black women. In New York City, about 300 white women are raped by blacks every year BUT there has not been a black woman raped by a white male in anybody’s memory (going back over 20 yrs.) Consider: Al Sharpton had to go upstate New York to find a hoax and that was almost 20 years ago. (Source NYT 4/22/05)
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 2004 report (released May 2006), blacks commit 54 percent of the homicides in America even though they constitute only 12 percent of the population.
An individual black male is seven times more likely to commit murder than an individual white male. It so happens that black felons commit 43 percent of aggravated assaults, 66 percent of armed robberies, 27 percent of rapes and 85 percent of interracial crimes of violence, mainly against whites (this last figure from a Justice Department report 2003). However, it’s not just in the United States. The greatest dicators in recent years have emerged in Africa. People like Idi Amin of Uganda, Hastings Kamuzu Banda in Malawi, Mobutu Sese Seko, in Zaire, self-anointed Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Mohammed Saidi Barre in Somalia, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe — the list is endless.
Blacks are dumber as well, statistics analyzed by the New York Times (July 4, 1999) dispel the poverty argument by establishing that impoverished white children whose parents earn less than $10,000 a year score higher on standardized SAT tests than black children whose parents earn more than $70,000 a year. Also, nearly 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock.
2 globalistgirl // May 3, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Very sociologically interesting reply.
First of all, it has nothing to do with my post. That you feel the need to not only reply exhibiting a specific instance of racial essentialism, but also bothered to dig up or make up statistics (which I, by the way, am not going to bother to check, because even if they were correct they wouldn’t prove essentialism), says quite a bit about you. I’m a bit surprised that anyone would feel so strongly about not only believing, but also spreading racial essentialism.
Second, your reply is interesting because you completely ignore the effect of (white) colonialism in Africa, along with the effects of legalized guns and various other social causes of the statistics you talk about. Those dictators didn’t arise out of a vacuum. One could make nasty essentialist theories about the evilness of white skin as well - are we destined to exploit and oppress people wherever we go and whatever we do? Can you be moral and have white skin too?
Third, it is interesting because in order to sustain your (seemingly fervent) belief in racial essentialism, you have to either ignore or be ignorant of some basic facts of human genetic makeup and how genetics work in general.
Put together, it seems like it is more important to you to believe in racial essentialism than to be logical and informed. That’s more than a little concerning.
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