Cultural Proficiency
Last Sunday, I started my adult study class with a provocative statement. I said that whenever someone asks me where I am from, it doesn’t put me at ease. Not that I don’t want to share my origin (I was proudly born in the DR Congo), but I always feel that the question is exclusionary in nature.
The question brings to mind the social duality of “us” versus “them.” It is as if someone is saying since you don’t sound like us, you must be from another place. Therefore, you don’t fully belong and integrated until you speak accent free like us.
I remember about 26 years ago when I came to the US, I was a youth counselor in a Methodist camp in Iowa. A nine-year-old girl came to me and asked, “How come you don’t speak like us?” In return, I asked her, "How come you don’t speak like me?" The little girl was confused.
At face value, she asked her question out of curiosity and she was quite sincere, but I doubt she knew that it was a question loaded with social and cultural bias.
In the book we are studying in my Sunday study class “Freeing Congregational Mission, A Practical Vision for Companionship, Cultural Humility and Co-Development," the authors, Farrell and Khyllep, introduce the notion of “Cultural Proficiency." They argue that when dealing in cross cultural encounters, we should all strive to cultural proficiency as opposed to cultural intelligence and cultural competence.
While on the one hand cultural intelligence connotes the idea of an IQ that cannot increase during our lifetime, cultural competency evokes the notion of an all-or-nothing condition, and something to be certified. Cultural proficiency, on the other hand, entails a range of capacities deemed appropriate to developmental stages of cross-cultural encounters.
To work on cultural relationships, the authors recommend that we adopt an attitude of what they call cultural humility. They contend that there is no such a thing as an American normative culture, (monolithic) but rather than cultures (plural).
To live and dialogue in this diversity of cultures requires that we listen and be aware of the multiplicity of cultural differences from different societies.
In the African context for example, people don’t ask where you are from, but rather what is your village? Maybe if my fellow Americans asked not where I am from but rather said something like “you have a beautiful foreign accent,” I would be more inclined to tell them where I got it.
In His Name,
Pastor Will
