AFTER WORKING THROUGH THIS MODULE, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO:

• Explain the concept of culture and its complexities.
• Describe the dominant (white) cultural ethos and its alternatives.
• Articulate how culture manifests in your library.

INTRODUCTION

Up to this point, we have focused almost exclusively on race and racism. To move forward with our work, we need to add an understanding of the concept of culture. In future modules, we will explore what it means to be culturally competent and culturally humble, as well as what it looks like when we implement culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Before we can engage with any of these ideas, however, we must have a foundational understanding of what culture is and how it works.

WATCH

Watch this video to learn about the iceberg model of culture.

INTERACT

In her book chapter, “Multicultural Teacher Introspection,” Nitza Hidalgo (1993) goes beyond the iceberg model’s distinction between explicit and implicit culture to identify three levels of culture: concrete, behavioral, and symbolic.

1. Concrete: Visible, tangible, material, cultural products and artifacts.
2. Behavioral: Reflects values; social roles, language, non-verbal communication, political affiliation.
3. Symbolic: Implicit, abstract, values, beliefs, spirituality, religion.

For this activity, sort the items in the list below into these three levels. (You may feel that some aspects fit on more than one level. That may be the case; the boundaries between these levels are not rigid.)

• Music
• Holidays
• Greetings
• Family Relationships
• Technology
• Food
• Art
• Games
• Social Roles
• Language
• Rituals
• Nonverbal Communication
• Values
• Beliefs

REFLECT

Think about your own culture. What is most important to how you think about yourself? At which level of culture do those aspects of your culture operate?

Now think about your library’s culture. Generate a list of how different aspects of culture manifest in your library or school.

Now sort these aspects of culture according to whether they are symbolic, behavioral, or concrete. Is one level represented more than the others?

Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede has spent decades mapping the dimensions of national culture. With his colleagues, he has identified “six basic issues that society needs to come to term with in order to organize itself.” He calls this the 6-D model of National Culture¹. The six dimensions are:

• Individualism
• Power distance
• Masculinity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Long-term orientation
• Indulgence

If we consider these six dimensions individually and collectively, we can arrive at a description of “American culture.” Read this archived web page for Hofstede’s analysis of culture in the United States.

Pediatrics educator Marcia Carteret adds the following dimensions in her consideration of the dominant culture in the United States in her book Dimensions of Culture: Cross-Cultural Communications for Healthcare Professionals :

• Time and its control
• Task-orientation vs. relationship-orientation
• Comfort with change
• Personal control over destiny
• Self-sufficiency
• Status
• Language

Libraries and schools tend to express much of their culture through behavioral aspects. Many people, however, define themselves more by their symbolic culture: their values and beliefs. Remember, though, that behavioral aspects of culture often reflect more symbolic aspects of culture.

As Hidalgo points out, “When asked to define themselves ethnically and culturally, some educators have a very difficult time… The difficulty often stems from previous schooling and socialization since the Anglo-European perspective in schools defines the average ‘American’ as one who is White” (1993, p. 102). Dominant culture can be difficult for white people to discern, but “when one examines the ‘common culture,’ the core is primarily Anglo-European values, beliefs, and achievements” (Hidalgo 1993, p. 103). “White culture” is, in fact, a culture.

REFLECT

Libraries, like households, have culture – unspoken “rules” and norms that determine how people act and relate to one another. In many organizations in the United States, including libraries, workplace and organizational cultures reflect whiteness in ways that can be harmful for BIPOC and BIYOC. Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun call this “white supremacy culture.” Examples include individualism, objectivity, either/or thinking, and an emphasis on quantity over quality.

Spend 5-10 minutes exploring 1-2 characteristics from the article above for additional indicators of white supremacy culture along with examples and antidotes. After reading the article, reflect on the following questions:

• Which of these characteristics are evident in your library?
• How do they negatively impact BIYOC?
• What can you and your colleagues do to shift the belief(s) and behavior(s) to ones that support racial justice?

Nitza Hidalgo offers the following additional questions as examples of things you might consider when reflecting on your library culture:

• How are our values expressed in our library dynamics with children?
• How do we perceive authority? Does authority come with an ascribed role?
• What do we consider appropriate behavior for children when interacting with adults? (Hidalgo 1993, p. 105-106)

Further information on white supremacy culture can be explored under Additional Resources.²

REFLECT

Take a moment to consider the characteristics of dominant or white culture shared above. Can you generate any alternatives to these ways of operating in the world? Consider the example below as you reflect:

• Time and its control: In Mexico, arbitrary clock and calendar divisions are less important than patterns of life and cultural calendars (A Geography Of Time: On Tempo, Culture, And The Pace Of Life by Robert N. Levine (Google books)). Read this article from the beginning until the header “Understanding Time across the globe” for more alternate perspectives on time and its control.

A research-based alternative to white culture is the Black Cultural Ethos, originally described by Dr. A. Wade Boykin. Dr. Boykin identifies “nine dimensions that characterize how African Americans perceive, interpret, and interact with the world, particularly those who live in low-income communities” (Bracy, Hughes-Hassell, & Rawson, 2017, p. 32). These nine dimensions include:

1. Spirituality: approaching life as essentially vitalistic and conducting one’s life as though supreme forces govern it
2. Affect: placing a premium on emotions/feelings
3. Harmony: viewing one’s fate as being interrelated with other elements of life
4. Oral Tradition: emphasizing oral and aural modes of communication and cultivating oral virtuosity
5. Social perspective of time: an orientation of time as passing through a social space; time is seen as recurring, personal, and phenomenological
6. Expressive individualism: the cultivation of a distinct personality and a proclivity for spontaneous, genuine personal expression
7. Verve: preferring intense stimulation, variability, and action that is energetic, alive, and colorful
8. Communalism: a commitment to social connectedness; being sensitive to the interdependence of people and committing to social connectedness over individual privileges
9. Movement: interweaving of the ideas of rhythm and percussiveness often associated with music and dance into daily life (Bracy & Hughes Hassell 2017, citing Boykin 1983, 1986)

At first glance, this model might seem to conflate race and culture. Race and culture are two separate concepts, and it is never safe to assume a person’s culture based on their race, or vice versa. While culture is neither race-dependent nor race-determined, however, it can be associated with race in the United States because of the U.S.’s history of physical segregation of ethnic and racial groups. Culture “includes practices that emerge from prolonged participation in particular communities” (Parsons, Travis, and Simpson, 2005). Because physically-bounded, geographic communities in the U.S. have historically been organized based on race and ethnicity, there will be some association between race and culture in spite of the lack of a dependent or deterministic relationship between them.

BUT WAIT!

In this section, we address common questions and concerns related to the material presented in each module. You may have these questions yourself, or someone you’re sharing this information with might raise them. We recommend that for each question below, you spend a few minutes thinking about your own response before clicking “Show more” to see our response.