Maybe you’ve heard about the culture wars. Maybe you’ve even heard about something called cultural competence. Cultural competence is a term used in places like healthcare when talking about dealing with immigrants or what are sometimes called marginalized communities. Marginalized communities is a term that refers to racial or ethnic minorities or sometimes LGBT+ people and the like. Minorities means people who aren’t white.
Cultural competence refers to the idea that healthcare works better if you are able to understand, communicate with, and interact positively with the cultures of the immigrants or racial and ethnic minorities you’re dealing with as patients or whatnot.
And it seems like a reasonable idea. It’s probably correct. It’s probably common sense.
Ideas of cultural competence also hold a hidden assumption. The assumption is that the people providing healthcare are not immigrants. Or racial or ethnic minorities. Or LGBTQ+ or whatever. So that the people providing healthcare are of a different culture than the patients they’re dealing with.
In the minds of people who come up with terms like ‘cultural competence’ all professionals are white. Liberal. College-educated. Well paid. They belong to the culture of the coastal elites. The privileged.
So they need to be very nice and solicitous of the poor, disadvantaged, uneducated immigrants they are there to help.
Ideas Like cultural Competence can be Patronizing
This is a patronizing assumption.
Some people pick up on that patronizing attitude. Such as white Americans who are not liberal. And who are not college-educated. Or well-paid. Or part of the coastal elite.
And they come to the apparently warranted conclusion that white college-educated liberals from the coastal elites are culturally incompetent. When it comes to everyone who isn’t one of them.
It’s true that liberal elites ARE culturally incompetent when it comes to conservatives. They don’t understand conservatives. Or communicate with them. Or interact effectively with anyone who doesn’t reflect their worldview.
The rap on cultural incompetence is that it deepens mistrust. Immigrants who are already skeptical of authority, institutions, the government are gonna freak out and not cooperate with the medical establishment. But culturally competent healthcare can swoop in like a rescuing eagle and convince the recalcitrant to see the wisdom of Western medicine and diabetes medications.
Liberals in the US treat politics much the same way. Except without the idea that they need to be culturally competent. But they seem to think they can just swoop in like rescuing eagles and convince the recalcitrant to see how stupid they are.
how the political left and right try to understand each other
It’s not that the political left in the US makes no effort to understand the political right. It does. It tries real hard. And mostly comes to the conclusion that adherents of the political right are just incomprehensibly defective.
These efforts to understand the culture of the political right remind me of Rush Limbaugh. So he devoted a lot of effort to trying to explain to his listeners how the left thinks about things. He did not do a very good job.
So obviously there’s a pretty big divide. But that does not mean the left cannot do better. It could do a LOT better.
It could make a real effort to understand fear of socialism. Defense of billionaires. And concern about immigration. Ideas about taxes, guns, small government, and so on. The actual beliefs, the pillars of thought that people (not professional right-wing trolls) use to reason through political issues.
To understand the ISSUES. Not the ‘defective’ wiring of people who hold different ideas on the issues.
Variations in thinking are always going to exist. Variations are biological. And inborn. Important. Necessary even. Differing values reflect real-world conditions that need to be addressed.
That’s not the problem the US faces these days. The problem is that we need to start COMMUNICATING with each other instead of patronizing each other like we do. We need to have effective interactions with each other.
Above All, We need to start behaving with cultural competence.
Difficult as that is. And that means, sigh, having direct encounters with each other.
Unlike what cable television believes, direct encounters do not mean opportunities for two disagreeable people to shout insults over each other. It means opportunities for both to try to understand each other.
Because here is something the liberals really need to understand. To many people on the right, you might has well as be billionaires. AND YOU ARE THE HAVE TOO MUCHES. The Richie Riches. The very people keeping the HAVE HARDLY ANYTHINGS from having hardly anything.
Your privilege isn’t everybody’s privilege. Additionally, your experiences aren’t the experiences of all white people. Your sources of information aren’t everyone’s sources of information. And your education isn’t everyone’s education. Additionally, your jargon is offensive.
As far as many are concerned, you are the big bad folks waging an unholy war against the little guys. You don’t need to defend yourself. You need to understand why it seems that way. Maybe even where you agree with your critics and perhaps your enemies.
You need to be pretty fed up with a political ecosystem that rewards cultural incompetence when it comes to the people you need to understand the most.
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