Having to Be Culturally Mainstream to Work in America

Taking the Mainstream Whiteness Test

through the lenses of blue bloods or regular Joes with  the editors

In our society, when those from economically deprived groups come in contact with authority figures, they are typically inculcated to know that they are rejected, subordinate, unwelcomed, distrusted, and demeaned.   Teachers and school administrators start this from the earliest age.   Many neighborhood businesses and community organizations continue it.   Police and other legal system officials pick it up from there.

The children eventually—often soon—get the message.   They are the “other”.   They don’t belong.   They have no place to belong in the mainstream world.

We know that simple social cues that are accepted and expected in one cultural setting are not so commonly used in another.   An environment of total dejection is one that brings about total abjection.   A downcast look is one that is understood to be the appropriate one.   Looking someone straight in the eyes is known to be the wrong thing to do.

It was many years ago that retail companies, who wanted to employ young people from the downtrodden neighborhoods, discovered that they would specifically have to teach them that their customers expected the employees to look them straight in the eyes.   Many decades of research have confirmed that these companies would have to train them to change their ingrained habits ([*1] [*2] [*3]).

And beyond being able to use the correct social cues needed to interact with any regular Joe, there are, in the corporate world, times when it’s necessary to satisfy the expectations of the blue bloods.

One of us remembers back in the day, when he interviewed with a big American investment firm for a job that was in an overseas office.   All of the people who were to interview him were in the overseas office, so they had the interviews over the phone for the most part.   The one exception was the in-person interview in the San Francisco office of the firm.   The general understanding was that, even though he proved to be personable, articulate, and technically knowledgeable, someone from the firm still had to check him out in person to make sure he would be a “good fit”.

This is what he calls the “sniff test”: the purpose of the interview is to verify the unspoken requirements of cultural and other criteria for hiring someone into a corporate culture.   All of the interactions are a type of test to see if you can or do follow the unspoken rules of the corporate culture into which he ended up being invited.   If there were any cultural transgressions once in the company, the original person who “vouched” for him would be reminded that they let someone in who “just wasn’t one of us”.

He tells us that, over the years, he’s seen several people who had technical skills (he was in information technology for many years) and even good communication skills but “just didn’t get it” when it came to cultural components of the job.   While it wasn’t apparent to these people why their advancement was not as great as others, some would chalk it up to education deficits, lack of particular technical skills, or lack of communication skills.   In a lot of cases, it was because these folks weren’t part of the same cultural milieu that you can identify someone as having been in, therefore it was more difficult to predict whether, given any particular situation, they would react as the other managers might.

That’s what culture does: it makes certain common understandings clear about how the world works and what our place in it is.   If you know someone has the same cultural understanding of the world as you do, you have a shorthand way of knowing someone is “OK”, that they can be trusted, that you are all the same in a fundamental way.   Without this cultural commonality, that person you are faced with is, by default, “other” and needs to be mistrusted until everyone else can do the necessary hard work of figuring out who this “other” is.

Most people just don’t want to do the work.

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