Dan Fishback: Where cultural critique becomes cultural imperialism

Weird." I was reading a Daily Pennsylvanian column about young black men who believe they can become professional athletes. There are too many, and most of their dreams will be crushed, wrote the columnist, who was genuinely concerned. Unavoidably, the argument was a bit murky -- the statistics left unanswered questions, and the counter-arguments were touched on only briefly, with no analysis. And yet, overall, the whole thing was generally just "weird" to me, because the adjacent columnist head cut showed a white man.

"Hmmm," said my gut. So I showed it to a friend on the Walk. "Hmmm," she said. So I showed it to some people in class, where skeptical "Hmmm"s buzzed all round.

It seemed, as a general matter, that it somehow wasn't this man's place to be saying these things. Regardless of the intricacies of his argument, regardless of whether or not he was "right," should anyone make a cultural critique from outside of the critiqued culture?

More specifically, should anyone from a dominant, powerful group of people indict the pitfalls of a minority? Should such critics be praised for projecting their voices over politically correct paranoia or should they rather mind their words, acknowledge their empathetic limitations and let critical dialogue unfold within the questioned community?

An African-American man I talked to didn't quite buy that. If something is true, he said, it's fair game for anyone.

Fair enough. Quite reasonable, actually. And yet, isn't the whole basis of a multicultural society the existence of multiple truths? Can anyone genuinely understand anyone else's cultural experience well enough to accurately assess it or to engage its problems in a public forum?

My gut response is an emphatic, "Yeahumerrrrrr..." On the one hand, true understanding is, for all things, ultimately elusive. I could never really understand what it means to be black in America, just as a heterosexual could never really understand what it means to grow up gay.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. In fact, I'd say it's our responsibility to try to understand each other -- to imagine ourselves walking a mile in every possible pair of shoes. And I wouldn't want to discourage those journeys by condemning cross-cultural critique. And yet the very elusiveness of all that imaginary shoe-walking casts an inherently awkward light on such criticism, even if it is saturated in good intentions.

There are extreme cases, like an e-mail I got last year from a concerned Christian reader. He suggested, quite politely, that homosexuality caused AIDS, and perhaps that was a message from God denouncing my "lifestyle." The text was peppered with friendly :-) and ;-) as though he could say such things to me over tea without getting a lap-full of hot chamomile. The lesson here was clear: this guy was so biased and out of touch with reality that he had no business assigning condemnations. His "critique" crossed a very important line, and became unilateral insult.

But where is that line?

After all, there are other extremes. Whenever Westerners condemn female genital mutilation, we are called "cultural imperialists." We are told we don't have the subjective ability to appreciate "female circumcision" as part of some beautiful tradition. To that, I usually respond, "You're right, I don't -- if I did, I'd be taking pleasure in mass torture." Here, the subjectivity of the cultural outsider illuminates something painful and hideous.

And yet, wouldn't the e-mail-writing Christian say the same thing?

Just as we probably see ourselves as friends to the victims of genital mutilation, he probably thought he was being a friend to me. In these cases, we all find ourselves frazzled and angry, screaming, "No but you don't understand: I'm right and you're wrong!" In the end, these cases probably amount to irreconcilable value conflicts. These are the extremes.

The case of the white columnist and the black athletes is more common and more complex. There is still an honesty here -- an honest wish to help. And it's easy to feel helpless in a desire to be helpful.

To do nothing is to aid injustice, but to assume a role of cultural critic may not be entirely welcomed. It feels paternalistic somehow, unavoidably condescending, an unintentional affront to cultural self-determination.

Perhaps the trick, then, for those who wish to engage in cross-cultural theorizing, is to simply acknowledge subjective limitation -- to stop short of definite conclusions and offer only thoughts -- but most of all, to be darn sure you know what you're talking about. After all, a community in trouble needs friends. But real friends are humble and unassuming. Ultimately, they don't direct the struggle: they support it.

Dan Fishback is a junior American Identities major from Olney, Md.

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