No Future For People Of Color?
May 16, 06 | 7:35 pm by John T. KennedyThe Seattle public school system denounces as racist any characterization of “future time orientation” as normal:
Definition of Cultural Racism: Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.
Apparently planning for the future is all white and stuff. Likewise all that nonsense about individual rights.
May 16th, 2006 at May 16, 06 | 10:53 pm
Ya, don’t you just love these racists who claim to be anti-racists. Wasn’t Seattle the home of one of the white supremist skinhead clusters for awhile, or was that Portland?
May 17th, 2006 at May 17, 06 | 3:25 am
This definition is itself an example of cultural racism.
May 17th, 2006 at May 17, 06 | 12:58 pm
“emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology”
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh too stupid
May 18th, 2006 at May 18, 06 | 11:06 pm
Doesn’t “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” tend to undermine racism?
And what the hell is “future time orientation”?
May 27th, 2006 at May 27, 06 | 3:17 pm
I don’t think they are saying that HAVING future time orientation (FTO) is racist. And they are not saying that non-whites don’t have FTO either.
What they are saying (as far as I can see) is that the assertion that someone is inferior because they DON’T HAVE such time orientation is racist, especially if that assertion is based on race.
A concrete example might be: native americans may be considered inferior because they don’t think about the future in the same way as white americans do, i.e traditional native americans are present time oriented rather than future time oriented.
Another example might be that a kid from an underpriveledged background (the majority of which are also from ethnic backgrounds) might be considered supid/lazy/uninterested by his/her school teachers because he/she tends to live in the “now” and not think about the future. In reality, the nature of the kids life, i.e severe financial restrictions means that thinking about the future (which depends on financial stability) is just not possible. Rather than understanding that, a teacher could easily attribute this “attitude” to the kids race rather than their social background.
I think that’s what the Seattle Public Schools board is trying to get at. It’s not how WE think that is racist, it’s what we assume about how OTHERS think that is racist, i.e that they think the way they do because of their race and because they are inferior. Just my $0.02
May 27th, 2006 at May 27, 06 | 4:37 pm
Jake,
Doesn’t my first sentence state their position on time orientation succinctly?
You write:
To simply observe that those who plan for the future are more productive and successful than those who do not is not racist. Yet the authors of these guidelines clearly hold that such observations are implicitly racist.
It’s an historical fact that white men produced the Enlightenment and brought it to these shores. It is demonstrably superior in countless ways to all previous frameworks of human thought. And yet there is nothing the least bit white about the Enlightenment.
May 27th, 2006 at May 27, 06 | 4:54 pm
One of racism’s characteristics IS collectivism.
May 28th, 2006 at May 28, 06 | 1:13 pm
hi John,
I don’ t think the Seattle definition is saying that there is a problem with considering “those who plan for the future are more productive and successful than those who do not”. I think the problem is, as you do say succinctly in your first line, defining a particular kind of time orientation as normal.
The pros and cons of future time orientation Vs present time orientation is irrelevant. Of course one can be argued is better than the other depending on your point of view, but I don’t think that’s the point. The seattle definition it seems is simply looking at the fact that future time orientation is considered normal, any other orientation therefore abnormal, and how that can amount to racism. They are not judging one as better or worse than the other, or suggesting that to think so is racist. Good & bad should be seperated here from normal & abnormal. The Seattle definition I think deals with what we consider to be normal and abnormal, not good or bad.
Obviously there is no “normal” with time orientation because it is relative to culture. There is only normal within a given context. A white american for example could well have present time orientation if they were raised by native americans or in africa, or if their economic social situation determined it and in that context such time orientation would indeed be normal.
It can be assumed that cultural norms apply to humanity as a whole, which is what I think the Seattkle definition tries to address. Almost as if there is somehow a default template for being a human being, and future time orientation is part of that default. So a person who does not fit a certain cultural norm such as the native american or any other ethnic minority is literally considered abnormal by the dominant social group in society, in this case white americans. Racism is about subdugation and as history has shown one of the easiest ways to subdugate a group (intentionally or not) is to consider them as abnormal.
May 28th, 2006 at May 28, 06 | 1:40 pm
Jake,
I don’t know what you could use the word normal for in that case, I guess we have to junk it.
Suppose instead I say that it’s backward and inferior to fail to sufficiently consider the future?
I wonder why the native americans never thought of subjugating the whites by considering them abnormal. Seems like that little trick could have saved them a lot of hardship.
May 29th, 2006 at May 29, 06 | 7:11 am
John,
The word normal is fine, as long as we recognise that normal only exists within a given context.
Saying it is “backward and inferior” is not very meaningful. According to who? According to what? Whether it is “backward and inferior” really does depend on the context. Future time orientation could be considered an inferior way of thinking (in practical terms) if you lived in a different culture with a different set of values, i.e if it were in a different context.
The native americans couldn’t subjugate the whites by considering them abnormal. That’s the point. It is only the dominant social group in a society which can. That’s why it is important to look at how white people define what is normal and abnormal, because it is that definition which will affect the most people, because whites are the dominant social group. I believe that is why the Seattle board tried to address that in it’s definition. Though in my opinion, their wording was very bad which has led to it being misread and therefore misunderstood by lots of people, wich is a shame. It’s also a shame that, as far as I’m aware, they haven’t released a clarifying statement. Surely they must know how people are reacting to their definition.
June 1st, 2006 at Jun 01, 06 | 11:12 am
The pros and cons of the stated three time-orientations are very much relevant to the discussion. Your defence of the SSD’s definition of racism is at least thoughtful, but is still suffering under the falacy that there are no arbitrary “better than” or “worse than” when applied to these topics. While I understand that the argument outlining “normal” and “abnormal” has merit, it underminds everyone involved because it is the wrong argument to have.
This all falls back to the falacy that cultures cannot be judged to be superior or inferior to one another. This is very much a product of modern liberalist thought and, from where I’m sitting, exists as axiomatic only in the vaunted halls of academia. In the real world, superior cultures flourish and inferior cultures wither and die. History has proven this over and over. What always fails to suprise me is the level at which modern liberalism forgets some of its own holdings in order to make arguments. Therein lies the delima for the social Darwinists among us. For instance, animals, Peter Singer would say, deserve equal moral consideration with humans because there is no intrisic difference between the two groups. However, whenever someone points out that the natural world is one of constant conflict, arms races, and ruthless aggression, modern liberalism holds that we should be able to rise above the baser instincts because of our cognative abilities. While, at first, this would seem to be a non sequitor, the two are very much connected.
Put simply, regardless of the racial realities we currently find ourselves mired in, future-time orientation is inherently superior to past- and present-time orientation because it is more successful at propagating itself while the other two eventually stagnate and die out. The argument should not be about whether or not this is a racist statement because maintaining that it is, as the SSD has done, is inherently prejudiced in and of itself. Rather, we should be finding ways to teach future-time orientation to everyone because it is logically (without all the history to back it up) the most successful. Bitching and moaning about how that makes some people feel is just one of the small cuts in the death of a thousand we seem to be undergoing in this society.
June 1st, 2006 at Jun 01, 06 | 11:40 am
One further point, Jake.
You will find a direct link between present-time orientation and cultures that are limited to oral histories only, such as the Native American culture you cite. Being limited to oral history only limits a cultures relationship to the actual passage of vast tracts of time/history and their impact on what has happened, is happening, and will happen. Past-time orientation can obviously exist where detailed recorded histories are available, such as pre-communist China, and the culture is content to exist on the traditions that have “always been”. But the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and just plain-old scientific method proved to be to powerful an influence on the progression of human abilities.
June 2nd, 2006 at Jun 02, 06 | 6:39 pm
Every place in the world has a dominant group, culture, ethics. Generally speaking, people will be more successful (by the standards of the dominant culture) if they behave in ways that are rewarded by that culture. If I were dropped into an African village, the things that made me successful in America might not be highly useful or valued. If that village tried to get me to recognize and adopt behavior in line with their norms, that would not be racist in my view. I might not always like it, and I might be stubborn, but ultimately I would figure out that to do well in that culture I would have to adapt to it. And I would figure out that their efforts to acculturate me were for my benefit at least as much as theirs. The SSD has an obligation to prepare students to live in America, where future time orientation is important to success. To emphasize that is not telling a student that he, his family and his race are inferior, it is giving him information he needs to succeed in the dominant culture.
June 4th, 2006 at Jun 04, 06 | 3:09 pm
Scott, you make a good argument for the pros of future time orientation, but I still think it irrelevant and this is why; Future time orientation is not inherently racist. Having future time orientation is not inherently racist. So Believing that future time orientation is “better than” present or past time orientation is not inherently racist and the Seattle Board’s definition does not say otherwise. “The argument is not about whether your views on time orientation are racist. It is about how a mode of thinking causes us to perceive other people, and how this can amount to racism. Yes, cultures certainly can “be judged to be superior or inferior to one another” on the basis of cultural attributes, but individual people cannot.
If future time orientation is superior to other time orientations, what does that make someone who is from a culture which has a past or present time orientation? Backward? stupid? lazy? underdeveloped? Of course not. The problem is that many cultural attributes, such as time orientation, are used (usually without intention) to define individuals, not only the cultures. Saying present time orientation is inferior to future time orientation is not racism, but this cultural belief permeates - through social dynamics - from the cultural level down to the individual level, distorting on the way and turning into racism.
For example: the dominant social group in the US believes (at a cultural level) that present time orientation is inferior to future time orientation. Present time orientation is a cultural attribute of native Americans. Joe Blog is a native American. It is easy for those with future time orientation to believe (at an individual level) that Joe Blog is therefore inferior. Joe Blog could well be an investment banker, i.e. a success from the dominant groups point of view, but if all that was know was that he was a native American, a negative picture could easily bee drawn based on a knowledge of the the cultural attributes of native Americans, rather than on the personal attributes of Joe. This happens so subtly that it is almost an unconscous process.
So it’s a Chinese whispers effect. The initial cultural belief is not racist, but that initial belief gets distorted at a personal level. The Seattle board are commenting on that distortion which the board defines as cultural racism, but many have taken this for an attack on the cultural belief itself, which I think is a misunderstanding.
So what to do? Not have cultural values? Obviously not. But talking about how and why cultural values can become distorted and affect people on an individual level I think is a valid start to any serious attempt at understanding and dealing with the issue of racism. It’s just a shame that the poor wording of the Seattle Board’s definition has caused it to seem invalid in so many people’s eyes.
June 4th, 2006 at Jun 04, 06 | 3:42 pm
“the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and just plain-old scientific method proved to be to powerful an influence on the progression of human abilities.”
Indeed, but it is an assumption that scientific progress and “enlightenment” are good things. Just living peacefully with your environment and nothing more can also be seen as a good thing. It is interesting that cultures with present time orientation such as native Americans were virtually squeezed out of existence by the “enlightened” European cultures. That shows that on the basis of conquering others, European culture certainly is superior, but on the basis of living at peace within your environment, native American ( including Aztec) culture, and African culture were more successful. In some cultures, extinction may not even be considered a “bad” thing and survival a “good” thing. It depends on what you define as good and bad, who is doing the defining.
June 5th, 2006 at Jun 05, 06 | 9:04 am
This may be a duplicate post, but I’m not seeing the reply I gave last night so, here goes…
It is a fallacy to believe that the “native” American peoples existed in peaceful harmony within their environment. Substantial archeological and evolutionary evidence points to the fact that soon after the first mass migration to the Americas from Sibera, more than 1/3 of the species therein became extinct. Slash and burn agriculture was used widely in Central and South America resulting in, by that world’s standards, huge impacts on the local ecology.
Rather, it is more accurate to say that what became to be called the Native American peoples, especially in North America, were simply not numerous enough or technologically sophisticated enough to have a lasting impact on the environment/ecology other than what I mentioned above…which is aggregious in an of itself.
The reality is that the European-decedent cultures conquered the locals simply because of technological sophistication. Remove that from the equation and you’ll find that the Native American people were just as adept at slaughter, rape, enslaving others, massacre, and just plain old xenophobia in general as their European counterparts, wiping out entire peoples in their wake (the Olmecs come to mind).
I do not argue that future-time orientation is better simply because it leans more toward technology and progress. If I took a bushman to downtown London, I do not say he’d rather be there than back in his stone-aged village. I can easily see quite the opposite. Take the youngest children, however, and do the same…you might find differen results, but I digress. My point was going to be that I believe humans everywhere in every stripe of life hold fundamentally similar values. One of those fundamental similarities is the fact that nobody likes to work harder than they need to to accomplish a task. TV’s and Internet may mean nothing nor be desirable to our stone-age bushman, but if you show up with a shipment of steel blades and the means to service and produce them, I’m betting they’d sure as hell be interested. And what is required to continue producing and using those tools, and better and better tools, requires planning, forthought, goal-setting and reaching…etc.
June 5th, 2006 at Jun 05, 06 | 10:57 am
…with the latter being the reason for the former.
June 5th, 2006 at Jun 05, 06 | 9:09 pm
Jake,
Okay, so how do you define good and bad?
June 7th, 2006 at Jun 07, 06 | 4:23 pm
I’m not arguing for or against future time orientation or any other orientation. Just trying to show the other side of the argument to the one presented.
I agree that not having to work harder than necessary to achieve a task is believed more or less universally by people as being a good thing and that this can be described as a fundamental similarity between people. Obviously though it is not reflected universally among cultures, which shows that the attributes of individuals do not make up the attributes of their culture. So we have some cultures that cling to the past, rather than orientate themselves to the future.
Yes it can be argued that because future time orientation enables the development of tools that allow people to achieve what is commonly believed to be a good thing, such time orientation is better than other time orientations which only serve to limit such development. But concentrating on that is really to miss the main point that all this shows.
Which brings me back to the point about racism that I was making originally: The attributes of an individual can, but do not have to be, the same as the attributes of the culture that an individual is from; The attributes of an individual may, or may not be, the result of the culture that an individual is from. In a nutshell, an individual is not representative of a culture and a culture is not representative of an individual.
So the argument that the native American has present time orientation, such time orientation is inferior, therefore the native American is inferior, Joe Blog is a native American, therefore Joe Blog is inferior, is a fallacy. Unfortunately it somehow develops from a perfectly legitimate (in the sense of not being racist) cultural belief, i.e. the superiority of future time orientation. Through the social dynamic, that cultural belief filters down and gets applied at the level of individuals, so poor Joe and other individuals from the same culture become inferior, which is not a legitimate assertion (and is racism). Because of the close association with an acceptable established cultural belief, this misnomer then becomes very hard to separate from the genuine cultural belief it developed from.
The result? Those who comment on this process and try to understand how cultural values turn into racism, become mobbed by those who believe they are attacking the actual cultural beliefs themselves. The Seattle board (remember them anyone) has been trampled on (unfairly) for this very reason. Granted the wording in their document was very poor, which lead to much misreading, but I think the Seattle board has been painted with the “political correctness gone mad” brush all to quickly by most, which has hindered what I think was a serious attempt at setting out the elements for real dialogue about racism.