Leadership Exchange

People who were assumedly diverse were called “people of color,” harkening back to the race-based beginning. But as the issue of group identity was extended to more and more groups, particularly White Hispanics and White women, the idea of “color” became increasingly metaphorical. One mercifully short-lived variation was

“people of diversity,” but for the most part the generic term has become “non-dominant group members,” which refers to the condition of institutional power rather than to color or diversity.

Increasingly, the idea of “culture” has entered the lexicon of intergroup relations. For instance, the term “multicultural” has largely supplanted the more political term

“pluralistic” to describe the condition of having many groups around, although the term “global” in reference to international diversity is gaining ground. Contact among groups is “cross-cultural,” which demands that everyone gain “ intercultural” skills and develop intercultural sensitivity.

of other groups of students. For instance, a group of African Americans could identify ways in which an aspect of their communication style generally differed from that of European Americans on campus. With some basic intercul-

Intercultural sensitivity means the
ability to experience one’s self and
eventually others in terms of cultural
identity and behavior.

Promoting Intercultural Sensitivity

Intercultural sensitivity means the ability to experience one’s self and eventually others in terms of cultural identity and behavior. Intercultural sensitivity is not meant to exclude sensitivity to institutional power issues, or sensitivity to individual personality issues. An intercultural approach to group identity, intergroup relations, and social justice has three underlying principles:

1. Social equity is served by assuming the equal complexity but essentially different experience of all human beings. To this end, it is appropriate to describe the normative behavior of people according to broadly-defined groups (subjective culture) and for people to identify with one or more of these groups.

2. Intergroup relations is served by improving intercultural communication. This involves identifying relevant cultural differences and predicting potential misunderstandings.

3. The avoidance of abuses of power in cross-cultural situations is served by mutual adaptation. When people of different cultures equally attempt to adapt to one another, they generate “virtual third cultures” that allow constructive communication to occur.

On college campuses today, student affairs officers have no trouble identifying myriad “identity groups.” But these groups may have very different goals and effects on the campus climate. Sometimes the groups are largely political, oriented to exposing oppression and providing their members with an “us” identity opposed to all the other “thems.” According to models of ethnic identity development, it is not surprising that such groups are popular at the age and circumstance of non-dominant college students, so some element of polarization is probably inevitable on campuses.

The identity groups that contribute more effectively to improved intercultural relations are those that identify their own subjective cultures and how they differ from the cultures

tural training, such observations can be made without stereotyping either group.

Student affairs officers should encourage the development of such identity groups for all cultural constituencies on campus, including those of the dominant culture. Groups of White men can and should discuss their cultural differences with other groups on campus. If the White men’s group becomes a political instrument to decry what it might define as “reverse racism,” then it becomes as troublesome as a Black men’s group that does the same thing.

It is consistent with an intercultural approach to use culture terms rather than color terms to refer to groups. This is fairly standard for African Americans (US Americans of African heritage); The parallel term would be European Americans (US Americans of European heritage). European Americans need to resist the impulse to define themselves in more specific terms, such as German Americans or Italian Americans, since only recent Americans of African heritage are also able to place a national boundary on their heritage. People of Mexican, Guatemalan, or Argentinian Latino heritage could look to their Asian compatriots for a model of how to use the general term Asian American while maintaining the country-specific terms—Chinese American, Japanese American—when appropriate. This practice of “semantic equality” is really rather important in establishing the kind of social equity necessary for good intercultural communication.

Developing Intercultural Programming

Intercultural programming establishes the existence of culture and defines frameworks for identifying cultural differences. Such frameworks are culture general. They apply to a wide range of cultures, and they are learning-to-learn tools, which means they alert the user to categories of important differences, but do not include much detail. In other words, they are not ethnographies. A typical list of such frameworks would include: