Photo Credit: ianmunroe

Divorce. DIVORCE. It’s one of those things America is known for around the world, along with Hollywood and blue jeans. I’m sure most of you have heard the statistic that “half of all marriages in America end in divorce”. And it’s commonly thought that it’s even worse if you marry outside your race, culture, or religion – if the average American couple has such a difficult time staying married, wouldn’t marriages where the husband and wife seem to have major differences (a built-in area of conflict, if you will) be even more prone to divorce?

With a reputation like that, it’s understandable that a non-American family – one which strongly values familial ties (like many Indian families) – may hear the 50% divorce statistic and be a bit panicked when a son or daughter announces plans to marry an American. The logic, I suspect, goes something like

This American, growing up among divorce – perhaps even having divorced parents or other family members – probably has different expectations about how marriages work and how long marriages last. Thus, if we want our son/daughter to have a good marriage for life, they shouldn’t get married to an American, since that means they’ll have a 50% chance of getting a divorce! Fifty percent!

There’s enough concern about the issue of America’s pesky divorce rate that there’s even a thread in the forum here on family divorces, and how, if, or why they ought or ought not be disclosed to Indian family members.

Truth is, however, the statistics of divorce are rather complicated, and it’s very easy to misinterpret what they mean for individual marriages. And that 50% divorce statistic? Not true .  Especially for interracial, intercultural, or international couples, where things get a bit more complicated.

Conditional Probability and What It Means For Real Life

No, don’t panic. I’m not going to start throwing mathematical equations up onto the page. But to understand how to correctly interpret divorce statistics (or any statistics, really), it’s important to understand the concept of conditional probability. In simple terms, conditional probability is about how the likelihood of an event occurring changes depending on what subgroup of the larger population you fall into.

As an example, let’s consider the unemployment rate for people in the US. Perhaps some of you have heard that there’s this recession thing going on? Looking at this nifty graph from the New York Times, we can see that the average unemployment rate for all people in the US from September ’08 to September ’09 was 8.6%. However, this does not mean that everyone has an 8.6 out of 100 chance of being unemployed. Playing with the graph, you can see that for the group of Americans with college degrees, the average unemployment rate was only 4.5%, which is not much higher than you’d expect to see from the usual frictional unemployment that all economies, good and bad, have. If I add in my race, sex, and age into the calculator, I can see that for the group that best fits me the average unemployment rate is a mere 3.6%! And that’s without factoring in the geographical area I live in, which has extremely low unemployment rates generally (ah, the life of a government contractor!).

This is what conditional probability is all about. Yes, the average unemployment rate (for the time period we’re considering) is 8.6%, which is pretty worrying. But, once we take into account my specific characteristics – i.e. calculate the probability of unemployment conditional on the fact that I’m a mid-twenties, college-educated, white woman – we can see that, all other things being equal, it’s not really that likely that I’ll end up unemployed.

Divorce in the US and You

As you can see from the example in the previous section, employing conditional probability to figure out the likelihood of something occurring for people similar to you can really change how bad (or good) a situation looks. This is why I’m typically very skeptical about applying general statistics to myself, or most of the people I know – it’s just unlikely that any individual is “average enough” for a statistic to be very meaningful. (Of course, this also goes for most generalizations – as I wrote in my post on categories, generalizations, and stereotypes, they’re only useful in extremely limited circumstances.)

The situation is no different with divorce in America – the divorce rate for different sorts of people varies dramatically. Luckily for us,  a “probability of divorce” calculator for Americans (similar to the New York Times’ unemployment graph) has been developed by a very cool economist. Strangely, it’s called a marriage calculator, but, well, whatever. If you enter in your details (don’t worry, I don’t see them), you can find out the divorce rate statistics for Americans much more similar to you than the “average” American population. Play around with it a bit – the numbers can really vary dramatically depending on what subgroup you target.

Pretty neat, huh?

Interracial Divorce Statistics

Of course, the widget above doesn’t take into account whether you’re in an intercultural or interracial or international marriage  – which, theoretically, should matter quite a bit. Unfortunately, the United States hasn’t been keeping great statistics on interracial related things (it was only in the last census that choosing mixed race was even an ethnicity option!). However, there is some data that has become available, and I recently found an article (spurred on by a post over at My Life in Brown (and White)) that discusses divorce probabilities -  “But Will It Last?”: Marital Instability Among Interracial and Same-Race Couples (pdf) by Jenifer Bratter and Rosalind King, published in 2008. I highly encourage you to read the article yourself if you’re interested in this topic, but I’ll give you guys a basic summary (with a few simplifications for clarity) of it’s findings:

1. Historically, the research regarding interracial divorce rates has been mixed, and has only dealt with all types of interracial marriage (white-black, white-Asian, black-Hispanic, etc, etc). This is problematic because, theoretically, you’d expect different sorts of pairings to have different divorce statistics, just as different sorts of same-race couples (white-white, Asian-Asian, etc) have different rates of divorce. What little data there is suggests that interracial marriages are more likely to end in divorce (13% more likely, according to one study) compared to same-race marriages. However, the interracial factor did not seem to have as much of an effect as things like age when married and education level.
2. It does seem like interracial couples, taken as a whole, are more “mixed” in regard to other socio-economic factors, such as class, education level, age, etc, than same-race couples. Since these other factors are also correlated with divorce, there’s a bit of chicken-and-egg problem in the correlation versus causation area: do interracial couples end up divorcing because they’re too different, or are people more prone to divorce to begin with also more likely to marry interracially? Right now we just don’t have the data to tell.
3. Overall, interracial marriages account for about5% of marriages in the United States - but this statistic doesn’t include some marriages that most people would think interracial, such as a marriage between a Korean and an Indian (since they’d both fall into the category of Asian) or the marriage of a person identifying as Hispanic white with a person identifying as a European white (since they’d both fall into the category of white). Here’s a breakdown of the percentage of various interracial marriages in the study:
   
4. The study did show elevated levels of divorce among interracial couples (taken as a whole) compared to same-race couples, just as previous studies have reported. The authors only considered marriages as “intact” if the couples made it to 10 years of marriage – this is because, if a marriage ends in divorce in the US, on average it ends by the eighth year. So if a couple makes it to ten years, it’s reasonable to say that they’re unlikely to divorce. If a couple was still married at the time the data was collected (2004), but hadn’t been married for ten years their information “censored” in the study in order to not bias the results (there are statistical techniques available to account for this).
   
   Marriages were also censored if they ended in the death of the partner.
5. The likelihood of divorce for intermarriages is greatly affected by the type of interracial marriage.
   • Marriages that do not cross a race barrier, but do have different ethnicities (i.e. white/Hispanic white) have a rate of divorce just a little higher than white/white marriages.
   • Interracial marriages that have one white person and one person of another race mostly only show higher divorce rates when the white spouse is a female (i.e. white guy + other race girl don’t show particularly high divorce rates compared to same-race couples).
   • Black husband/white wife marriages are twice as likely to divorce as white/white marriages, and Asian husband/white wife marriages are about 60% more likely to divorce as white/white marriages. Which, I suppose is an unfortunate statistic for Aditya and me (and one I didn’t expect at all)!
   • White husband/black wife were nearly 50% less likely to divorce than white/white couples, and white husband/Asian wife couples had pretty much the same divorce rate as white/white couples
   • Compared to Hispanic/Hispanic couples, Hispanic white/white couples showed a higher likelihood of divorce (not surprising). Likewise, Asian/white couples were more likely to divorce than Asian/Asian couples. However, black/white couples only show a higher rate of divorce compared to black/black couples if the white person in the relationship is a woman.
   • The researchers were unable to evaluate other sorts of interracial marriages, such as black/Asian, because of the low number of such couples in the sample data.

The Bottom Line

So, by looking through these various statistics,  you can probably get a better idea of the likelihood of divorce for people more similar to you than the general American population. In the case of my marriage, for example, I get bonus points for the generation I belong to (the Baby Boomers were the big divorcers in America), for being pretty well educated, and for making it (so far) to three years of marriage. On the negative side of the ledger, Aditya and I seem to belong to some riskier groups, since we married relatively young (for Americans) and are an Asian male/white female couple. But how much should we care for these more accurate statistics? The bottom line is that these statistics are meaningful and important, but not the end all & be all.

It’s a very common impulse to dismiss these statistics by saying that your marriage is above-average, and the statistics just don’t hold for your individual case. Frankly, while that may be true, it’s more likely that, like the 93% of American drivers who think they’re above-average drivers, you’re overestimating yourself. These statistics do matter. If you seem to have ended up in a particularly high-risk group, I think it’d be valuable to think about ways you can work to strengthen your relationship. The point here is not to think that you’re doomed to divorce because you fall into a high-risk group – but that you can learn from the (sad) examples of others similar to you, and do your best to avoid their fate.

That being said, do note that there are a lot of factors being left out of these statistics. While the marriage divorce calculator above and the study on interracial couples do hit on many of the key characteristics that have been shown to predict divorce, there are other variables in play. For example, researchers think that interracial couples (as a whole) are more prone to divorce largely because they often lack support from their families, friends, and local community. So if you’ve got a great group of supportive friends, or your families are welcoming of your marriage, or you live in an area where there are lots of interracial marriages, you may be better off than other interracial couples that lack those things. (And if you don’t have those things, well, no one’s stopping you from moving or developing a better support network of friends.)

In the end, I firmly believe that we’re all in control of our own destinies. If you and your spouse are a great fit for one another, then there’s no reason why your marriage can’t last. If you’re looking forward to an interracial marriage, you certainly shouldn’t change your mind because of these statistics. Yes, we shouldn’t leap before looking – but, once you’ve looked and become mindful of the risks, don’t let fear keep you from taking a plunge.

A new commenter, Lurker frequent, brought up this interesting topic in regards to intercultural marriages in the comments section of my last post.

As an Indian in the USA; the only reason I would not want to marry a local is to not “lose” my own traditions and culture. Minds meeting , and matching interests and hearts are more important, but certainly , coming from an old and rich tradition, one would want to preserve it by having a completely Indian family, no? Thoughts?

It seems to me that there are several issues in play here, some of which Aditya and I discussed in the comments section when Lf first wrote out his comment (do check it out).

1. What is meant by cultural continuity? Is it something we should value, and if so, why? Does intercultural marriage (which often leads to Third Culture Kids) automatically mean that the cultures of the parents is ending?
2. What does it mean to say that India has an “old and rich tradition” (compared, presumably, against America or other Western cultures’ younger and poorer traditions)? Is it something we should value? What exactly do we mean by tradition, anyways?
3. What sort of culture – or cultures – do we want to have in our own lives? For those of us in intercultural relationships, what (if anything) are we losing by not creating a monocultural family? Will our lives be richer for it? Poorer? What about extended families?

Well, that’s a lot of questions! Enough for a book or three, certainly, so I’ll just give a simplified sketch of my own views on this matter, than open it up to the rest of you.

What is cultural continuity?

Let’s get one thing straight: cultures – all cultures – are constantly changing. And by culture here, I mean “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a society” – i.e. culture is the sum of all learned human behaviors in a particular society. What one generation learns from the previous will change as a society adapts to different conditions. The rate of the change that a culture goes through will generally vary based on the internal and external conditions or pressures a society faces, such as technological innovation, changing resources, and contact with other cultures.

For example, most Americans today would not be able to survive for very long in the wild, but the pioneers in the early days of our nation certainly could and did. As “frontier America” transformed into towns and cities knowing how to live off the land became a less important skill than those that allowed you to work in an office or factory in town.

So what is cultural continuity, if all cultures are constantly in a state of flux? Well, while everything in a culture can change, certain societal structures and beliefs – often embedded in religion or religious belief itself – are resistant to change and experience it more slowly. Hinduism in India, and the caste system which has become entwined to some extent with Hinduism, are both good examples of long-standing cultural traditions. But even they have changed over time to stay relevant, as my husband, Aditya, mentioned in his original response to Lurker frequent:

The survival of traditions is in being able to remain relevant with changing times. Even following Hindu traditions & scriptures, you can see clear evidence of the evolution of Hinduism when it responds to new “challengers” like Buddhism (Bhagavad Gita), Islam (Vedanta revival) and Christianity (Vivekananda).

So it’s not that culture continuity requires that a culture stays the same – that’s impossible – just that certain central aspects of a culture, such as particular beliefs or traditions, remain. To return to the example of “living off the land” in the US, while most Americans can’t survive out in the wild, there remains an ethos of individuality in American culture: a belief that a person should be able to stand on his own two feet without help from others or the government, just as pioneers were required to do.

Should we value cultural continuity?

I personally think that a part of the human mind craves traditions, rituals, and continuity, although this need is expressed to a greater or lesser extent in individuals. So, yes – to some degree cultural continuity is a desirable feature to have, both in society at large and in our individual lives. That being said, it isn’t the end all and be all: “tradition for tradition’s sake” is an argument easily overrode by more pressing “goods” such as freedom of choice, happiness, justice, and so forth. By that I mean that traditions cannot justify actions that hurt people or deny them their basic human rights.

As Aditya said in his comment:

I do think that the argument (or preserving traditions) are well intentioned, but the fact of the matter is that traditions must be revisited constantly to remain relevant. If we froze our traditions as they were in the 16th century, we’d still have women locked in the kitchen.
Unfortunately, this argument is also being made all over the world today to deny basic human rights to minorities and oppressed groups… from the denial of political rights to women, to outlawing gay marriage, the mantra of “this is not how it has always been” has become the central “argument” against progress of society.

Leaving aside the moral argument, which I hope all of you understand without my expanding upon it, following some traditions in the modern age is simply irrational. Traditions, after all, were formed to help societies function well – but societies today don’t exactly look like (or require the same things) as they did when these traditions were developed. Consider, for example, the traditionally arranged economy (the Indian caste system is one version of this), where a child follows in the work of his father. This system only functions as a good tradition in societies where

1. The work doesn’t change much from one generation to another.  Otherwise, there’s no point in having the child learn a skill at the knee of his father that will be antiquated by the time child is old enough to enter the workforce, and
2. The work isn’t specialized enough that only some people have the particular skill set, mental abilities, and personality to do it well. Otherwise children will be trained from childhood to do a job that they aren’t well-suited for – there’s no reason to expect my future kids will rock out as product managers just because Aditya does.

In today’s economy, neither of these points holds true, and thus the traditionally-arranged economy should be abandoned purely on utility grounds – a society that practices it won’t do as well as a society that doesn’t.

So for a tradition to be continued today, it should:

1. be rational – actually help the society & people that practice it
2. be moral – not hurt individuals or their free practice of their basic human rights

With the increased pace of technological innovation today, many long-standing traditions have been ending, amid outcries from critics that capitalism or globalization or American cultural imperialism are ruining cultures left and right, leading to a homogenization of the world. This is largely bullshit.

Yes, societies around the world are becoming more similar – there is more of world-wide culture today than ever before. But subcultures and individuals’ choices within cultures are more diverse than ever before as well. People today have (more of) a choice of whether they want to follow a tradition that isn’t actually rational in today’s world – or one that violates people’s human rights, such as the caste system. Moreover, today we are able to witness some amazing creative efforts as people combine two traditions to make a completely new – and wonderful – tradition or art form. See, for example, my post on Michael Jackson and bhangra. (Now, while I’d like to move the focus back to intercultural relationships, if you’d like to read more on this topic I recommend starting off with economist Tyler Cowen’s article Creative Destruction, which can be found here as a word document.)

Intercultural marriage and creative destruction

Intercultural marriage is a perfect example of the creative destruction that, when successful, leads to both great innovation and happy, meaningful lives. Every marriage consists of the creation of a new family culture – but with intercultural marriages each individual is bringing a completely distinct culture and set of traditions to the table to be combined. Yes, there will almost certainly be fewer pieces of a Indian culture or Bengali culture in Aditya’s and my “family culture” than there would be if he had married another Indian – but we can choose to keep the worthwhile traditions while eliminating the rest.

We can keep statues of the gods around the house to remind us of our values, we can play and watch cricket on the weekends, remember that our home is also the home of our family, and have lovely saris and Indian tunics in the closets. We can also keep the best of American traditions and culture. We celebrate a secular family Christmas with an exchange of presents, watch (too much) great tv programming that comes out of Hollywood, train our dogs following Western methods like crating, and have (fasionably) torn jeans in the dressers.

It takes effort to combine two cultures successfully, and a willing attitude to learn from both partners. But I personally feel the effort is more than paid back by the results. Is it worthwhile for everyone? Of course not! Intercultural relationships are hard work. (All relationships require hard work, of course, but there tend to be more difficult variables in an intercultural marriage than a monocultural one.)

If you really want all of the traditions you grew up with to be part of your adult life, then you should probably choose something other than an intercultural match, since that’s unlikely to happen in an intercultural marriage unless your partner is willing to give up all of his or her cultural traditions. Of course, given the speed of cultural and technological change, it’s unlikely that all of the traditions you grew up with will be a part of your adult life anyways. As Aditya said,

In the reality of the globalized world of today, intercultural relationships give us a glimpse of a future where the free flow of information and people have broken down meaningless antiquated boundaries.

I was most struck by the first third of the documentary, which focused on the (negative) attitudes that the couples have experienced by being in an interracial marriage. My personal experience has been quite different from that of the couples’ in the film. I have had very few negative encounters regarding my relationship with Aditya. I have cared about very few of the negative encounters I’ve had regarding my relationship with Aditya.

This might be partially because of geography – the couples in the documentary are from Central Texas, I believe, while Aditya and I have spent the majority of our time as a couple living in Silicon Valley, metro D.C., and on a small college campus (albeit in rural Indiana). We simply haven’t had that many encounters where it seemed like people were negatively judging us because we were dating “across the races”.

I think it is also partially because, to a large extent, I just don’t notice or care about other’s reactions to me unless they get in my face about it. I had a discussion regarding this a couple of weeks ago on a post at Gori Wife’s blog. She was writing about how she and her Pakistani husband get stared at all the time when they go out together, especially by other South Asians. I commented that I never notice stares when my husband & I are running around town together – and it turns out that Aditya & I live only a mile away from the mall where Gori Wife gets stared at! (This may be the final proof that Aditya needs to prove that I am socially incompetent & oblivious.)

Reflecting on this, I’ve come to wonder how much awareness is a good thing when it comes to the social tensions that intercultural relationships often bring up. Generally my stance on intercultural issues is that more thought and awareness is better. If you don’t know about a problem, you can’t fix it or be ready for complications arising from it. Yet I don’t think my obliviousness to getting stared at by strangers (if it does, in fact, occur) has been a bad thing. I can’t imagine any negative consequences – only positive things like less stress and annoyance. Now I’m wondering – should I be caring more? Should I notice more?

Anyways, the rest of the documentary is quite interesting, and it slowly becomes more upbeat. The middle portion has a few excellent notes from Dr. Rebecca Bigler of the Gender and Racial Attitudes Lab at U of T on the race perceptions of young children and how media affects our attitudes on the matter. The documentary concludes with the couples telling of how they met – it’s beautiful to see how varied and filled with love the relationships are.

“The intercultural learner moves amongst cultures, in a process of continual negotiation, learning to cope with the inevitable changes, in a manner that is ultimately empowering and enriching. The home culture is never denied nor demeaned,  yet the intercultural learner will find his or her attitudes and beliefs challenged by contact with others and the process of interaction will lead to the kind of personal growth characterized by ‘progressive’ curricula.” (J. Corbett 2003)

Corbett writes this within the context of explaining good intercultural education, which he describes as neohumanist, for it “places respect for individuals and their many cultures at the heart of its enterprise”.

Thoughts?

My husband and I don’t speak a common language. Never have, never will. Sure, I’m a native English-speaker, born & raised in America, and Aditya grew up speaking English both in the home and at school – and he even majored in English Literature at the Midwestern university we both attended. Nonetheless, we will always be shouting to each other across a ravine – a gap created by our different cultures.

Those of your who are in an intercultural relationship – or who interact regularly with people from a different culture, as I discussed last post – know that this gap goes far beyond the ones created by so-called gender wars, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” talk, the accents or incomplete vocabularies of non-fluent speakers , or even the basic idea from philosophy of language that no person can know exactly what you’re thinking in your head. The culture we grew up with inevitably affects the framework of the world we perceive – and thus the world we communicate to and with. Lest I end up sounding too pessimistic, however, let me hasten to add that that the difference in world views created by dissimilar cultures isn’t insurmountable. Sure, you’re never going to completely conquer the gap between two cultures – but every little bit helps!

Today’s post is on one of those little bits that help. Or maybe it’s a big bit – I’ll let you decide.Before we get going too far, I admit that my dear husband would probably laugh his socks off if he thought I was claiming expertise in the arena of communication. So, to spare his socks, let’s be clear: I’m no professional communicator. What I am, however, is a reliably trained research monkey whose idea of fun is skimming through academic journals and books on all manner of things. And today I’m writing about something I found in one of those books – a framework put forth by Dr. Michael Bryam that has helped me tremendously in thinking about – and doing – intercultural communication. This framework organizes the six interrelated skills, attitudes, and knowledge sets – each a savoir – which together make up intercultural communicative competence. The first three are preconditions for any true cross-cultural communication – without them you’re lost. The last three are necessary for the successful development of intercultural competence. Let’s dig in!

Savoirs: knowledge, plain and simple

Savoir - without the plural ‘s’ – means “to be aware” or “to know” in French. Savoirs - with the ‘s’ – is the knowledge dimension of our framework of intercultural communication. This is the background information about a culture or nation  you need to know in order to have a snowball’s chance of understanding subtle references or remarks. In the US, for example, you often hear the phrase “he hit that one out of the park” when someone answers a question particularly eloquently, or otherwise performs well. If your foreign friend didn’t know the first thing about baseball and home runs, that idiom would make little to no sense to him – and communication stops when you use it. And thus you fail savoirs in not one, but two ways – not knowing what his culture consists of, and failing to realize the unique facets of your own. There’s two cultures being represented in the conversation, and you need to know about both.

However, savoirs is more than just that. Beyond knowing the nitty gritty about a culture – the gestures, symbols, values, “high” culture,”low” culture and so forth of the person you’re trying to communicate interculturally with, savoirs also requires you to understand meta-culture. What are the things that make up any culture? Where are the areas you’re most likely to misstep with the particular person you’re talking to? What are the things you don’t know about this person’s culture? Or, as Bryam defines it,  savoirs is “knowledge about social groups and their cultures in one’s own country, and similar knowledge of the interlocutor’s country on one hand, and similar knowledge of the processes and interaction at the individual and societal levels, on the other hand.”

Savoir s’engager: critical engagement

Critical engagement – or savoir s’engager - is the second of the requirements for any sort of true intercultural communication. It’s defined as “a critical engagement with the foreign culture under consideration and one’s own” by Bryam, but I like to think of it as being willing to jump off the high dive – and hope you stick the landing. Basically, it’s holding the general disposition that you’re going into a discussion with a person from another culture with eyes wide open and ready to critically think about whatever gets tossed up to you.  Generally, I think this attitude is one that everyone should make an effort to have everyday – but it’s especially important in a cross-cultural setting where closing your eyes to the true differences – and similarities – in cultures will mean inevitable confusion and failure to understand one another.

Savoir être: critical openness

Bryam defines savoir être as “the capacity and willingness to abandon ethnocentric attitudes and perceptions and the ability to establish and maintain a relationship between one’s own and the foreign culture”. Quite the mouthful, eh? I initially had some difficulty understanding – and accepting – this savoir, as I very much believe in a concrete right & wrong, independent of culture. I thought that Bryam’s definition was calling for me to give up this view. But then I realized that savoir être is really just the other side of the coin from savoir s’engager – where one calls for you to be critically engaged in the idea of culture while communicating interculturally, the other calls for you to be open to the ideas of the other culture. Savoir s’engager says to look about yourself sharply, but savoir être requires you to not look about so sharply that all you see is things to criticize.  That doesn’t mean that there might not be some things worthy of criticism in a foreign culture (there’s no such thing as a perfect culture, just like there’s no such thing as a perfect human) – but you should also open to the good things that every culture holds. If all you can express is criticism, the problem lies  with you and your lack of savoir être, not the culture. And you can expect that your unwillingness to budge away from your ethnocentrism will stop members of that culture from even attempting to communicate with you.

Savoir apprendre: skill of discovery

Apprendre is better translated as “learn” or “learning”, I believe, but discovery better fits the flavor of the idea that Bryam is trying to get across. He defines savoir apprendre as “the capacity to learn cultures and assign meaning to cultural phenomena in an independent way.” In other words, kicking yourself in the butt to explore a culture actively, rather than wanting things spoon-fed to you. Of course, if you somehow manage to get some basic knowledge, and you have the critical attitudes I discussed above, you don’t have to independently explore a new culture to hold a reasonable discourse. But you aren’t going to improve your communications skills by sitting like a stick in the mud either. If your goal is to be a truly competent intercultural communicator, you have to be able – and willing – to explore foreign terrain on your own, to engage others through interaction. Your significant other, friend, or teacher won’t always be there to translate new-to-you cultural phenomena.

Savoir comprendre: skill of understanding

This is likely the simplest of the savoirs in definition – “the capacity to interpret and relate cultures” – but one of the hardest to master. Luckily, it’s also what you’re taught to do in your formal education – take information, and then interpret it, analyze it, and place it within a larger context. Basically, it’s a research paper, but applied to the culture you’re interacting with, not your English lit text. Of course, in order to have material to ponder, you’ll first need to discover it through savoir apprendre. But the payoff of learning to learn in a new setting is always worth it – as you understand a culture and then incorporate your understanding of a culture into your communications, they discussion you have will grow much, much richer.

Savoir faire: knowing what to do

Finally, we’re left with the one that wraps it all up: savior faire, which is “the overall ability to act in an interculturally competent way in intercultural contact situations.” Other possible translations are “don’t put your foot in your mouth”, “don’t freeze” and above else, “be cool.” If you’ve developed the five other savoirs in your quest to be a good intercultural communicator, savoir faire is applying them to an actual, real-time interaction with others from another culture, and succeding beautifully.

So there we all are – the six components. Going through these, step-by-step, has helped me realize what areas I need to work on in order to improve my interactions with both my Indian husband, Aditya, and all my crazy non-American coworkers (I’m totally a freezer! Also not big on going out into the wilds to discover new stuff!). I hope it’s helped you a bit too. And I’d love to hear what others think of this framework – it’s not the only one the intercultural academics have come up with, but it’s certainly the most detailed one. So, valid? Not valid? Missing a key part of the way you think of intercultural communication? Too theoretical?

Most of the blame for this “situation”, so to speak, could simply be laid at the feet of circumstance or chance – we happen to live in a very multicultural area, participate in activities that naturally bring a diverse crowd, and my choice of careers was more due to, you know, the job I would be doing than the diversity of people at my office. But I don’t think it’s as simple as chance – the choices Aditya and I have made both individually and as a couple, as well as our prior experiences, have made an outcome like this probable.

So.  This past week I’ve been thinking more about cross-cultural connections outside of my intercultural marriage with Aditya. How do these two spheres of life – home & husband and outside work & community – interact with each other? There’s no doubt that my relationship with Aditya has given me a fair bit of traction with the South Asians I run into – but how has it affected my relationships with people from other cultures? And how has working with an office full of immigrants and different cultures changed my marriage?

Obviously, the answers to these questions will be complex – which is why I’ll be discussing my thoughts on this subject in a series of posts. But the keystone to my ideas lies in the lovely concept of intercultural communicative competence. This term was developed as part of an effort by theorists of foreign language instruction a decade ago, and has slowly been evolving in the intercultural studies academic community. The initial discussions of this topic related to how instructors could teach their language learners how to communicate in a foreign language with real, live foreign people – not just speak a bunch of funny-sounding words. Mostly it involved learning the specifics of the culture associated with the language – things like “Germans are überpunctual – if you’re on time, you’re actually late.” Since then, though, the idea has expanded to incorporate both the specific knowledge and the skill set that all people who interact cross-culturally – i.e. intercultural learners – need to have to be successful, whether they’re speaking a foreign tongue or not.

This skill set is what I believe translates back and forth between my relationship with Aditya and my cross-cultural relationships out in the community – and each one is strengthened by the other. Next I’ll start delving into the specifics of what constitutes competent intercultural learning, but before then I’d love to hear what everyone’s initial thoughts on this matter are. Do you have many cross-cultural connections out in your community or workplace? Do you think it’s affected your closer personal relationship with a friend or significant other from another culture? Anyone else feel like they work for the U.N.?

This is a pretty sensitive topic. In talking about cultural differences, I’m careful to not make too strict generalizations – I’ll hedge what I say by emphasizing I’m talking about my own, personal experiences, or suggest that a group seems to act in a certain way, or that some (but not all!) people from a particular culture do a particular thing. But it’s impossible to avoid making any generalizations at all about cultures or to keep from categorizing people – and silly to even try.

Human beings thrive on making categories and developing generalizations. Evolution equipped us with these abilities for our own good. Any caveman hunter who couldn’t figure out that the grazing animals & the sharp-toothed animals belonged in different categories, one labeled hunt and the other avoid wouldn’t last very long. And the gatherer who used his experience with the different categories of plants to generalize about what was tasty and what was poisonous tended to survive a bit longer. This is a good thing! We’re talking about the beginning of science!

So we can’t avoid making generalizations, and, anyways, they seem pretty darn helpful. However, when we move onto categorizing and generalizing people & cultures, we run into a bit more of a problem. People are just so… complicated. And there’s so many of ‘em! Do you really think that any of us can easily make a generalization that will, for example, apply to all one billion Indians in the world? Really? Even Indians have major trouble with it – most anthologies about the subcontinent have at least one or two essays devoted to just trying to describe what, besides birthplace, connects this vast, diverse group of people. (My money’s on cricket, but I’m just guessing from my personal experience.)

The rest of this post is on how we can use our little analytical minds for the forces of good generalizations, rather than for the evils of stereotypes. How can we create useful categories for the different people we meet? And then how can we accurately and fairly generalize about these groups, given that we’re going to generalize some anyways? And finally, how can we avoid from moving from a generalization to an unfair stereotype?

Creating categories – blonds & brunettes should suffice, right?

When my Indian husband, Aditya, first came to the US, he had difficulty identifying differences in white faces, particularly with girls. To solve this problem, he ended up lumping all the young women on his dorm room floor first semester into one of two categories: “blond” or “brunette”, and leaving it at that. I’m not sure if there weren’t any redheads on his floor, or if there were so few that he could manage to tell them apart without the need for another category. Either way, he was definitely missing out on, oh, about 95% of the “subtle” differences that any American who’d lived through high school could see in his floormates – that one dresses preppy, this one is the classic girl-next-door, here’s a girl jock. Forget about noticing the “tells” of each type – Aditya didn’t know half these social categories existed!

Of course, he can pick out a North Indian from a South Indian with ease. And he’s very good about guessing which caste an Indian belongs to, just off of a person’s name, language, clothing, and the like. See, these are the categories that often matter in India, so these are the ones he learned about. We all make categories based off of our needs in the society we live in. Or, to put it another way, the sociologist Joel Charon*** says

… we isolate a chunk out of our environment, distinguish that chunk from all other parts of the environment, give it a name, and associate certain ideas with it. Our chunks — or categories — arise in interaction; they are socially created… Much of our learning is simply aimed at understanding what various categories mean, and this involves understanding the qualities that make up those categories and the ideas associated with them.

So what does this mean for those of us who discuss cultural differences?

1. We should be aware of the limitations – and strengths – of our personal categories. When I first started dating Aditya I didn’t realize just how diverse Indian culture is – Indians, Nepalis, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis were all pretty much the same group of people in my mind. And it’s not just me: consider the use of the pejorative Paki used in Great Britain for all South Asians.
2. Categories are not absolute things; instead they develop as our social needs change. Since meeting Aditya, I don’t group all South Asians together. Instead, I have many different categories for Indians – Calcuttans, Bengalis, Mumbaiers, urban folk, village folk, the different castes, and so forth. I’m not saying that I know all about these groups, or that I can even distinguish between one and another, but I do know enough to recognize that they’re different enough to need separate mental categories.
3. A category is a tool for understanding & organizing knowledge, and nothing more. You shouldn’t judge a person based on which category he does or does not fit into. Duh! Categorizing is only a good thing if you use it to understand why people have different qualities. Knowing that Aditya was an Army brat who moved around a lot, for instance, helps me understand both his need for travel, and his desire to put down roots somewhere.
4. Categories are unlikely to all-important for understanding any individual. This is basic statistics – even if you develop good categories, and accurate generalizations about that category, that information will likely be of only some help in understanding any particular individual. Sure, most people who grow up moving from place to place (like Army brats) tend to enjoy travel – but I’m sure there’s a decent number who hate it. And, when dealing with any one specific individual, how are you to know which type you’ve got on your hands? Everyone belongs to multiple categories, and even the sum of all those categories doesn’t tell you everything about a person. (I suspect there’s a whole post just in this point.)

Generalizing about generalizations – the good, the bad, and the ugly

We’re all individuals, right? So isn’t generalizing about people always a bad thing, since it denies people’s individuality?

Well, yes and no.

Bad generalizations - aka stereotypes – are worse than plain ignorance. Accurate, nonjudgmental generalizations can be a useful tool in understanding others.

The problem with generalizations based on categories is that it is very, very difficult to do them right. As I pointed out above, humans are so complicated, and humanity is so diverse that it will never be possible to make an absolute claim about any group of people. And it’s difficult for individuals to even make a fairly accurate generalizations, given their limited personal experiences with any particular group. I think Dr. Charon goes to the heart of the matter when he defines what, exactly, a generalization is:

A generalization describes the category. It is a statement that characterizes objects within the category and defines similarities and differences with other categories. “This is what an educated person is!” (in contrast to an uneducated person)… When it comes to people, generalization is very difficult to do well. The principle reason for this is that we are judgmental, and too often it is much easier for us to generalize for the purpose of evaluating (condemning or praising) others than for the purpose of understanding them.

So how should you deal with cultural generalizations?

1. Never, never, never use them to judge, only to understand. The moment you start to view a cultural generalization as a good or bad thing is the moment you fall into stereotyping. This doesn’t mean you can’t judge actions that other cultures sometimes take: I have no problem taking a firm stance against female infanticide (a fairly major problem in some Indian states), and I’ll condemn any Indian that does such a horrible act. However, it’s a big jump from saying “Indians who commit infanticide are horrible” to saying “Since Indian culture in some circles encourages female infanticide, Indian culture is horrible and all Indians are horrible.” Doing so would be ignoring the numerous Indians who speaks out against this social problem.
2. Try not to base your generalizations on personal experience alone. There are a million and one reasons why you shouldn’t try to make cultural generalizations from personal experiences, but they mostly boil down to the fact that people are biased. You’re biased, I’m biased, all the children of the world are biased. As I point out in my About Page, I’ve had significant contact with exactly one extended Indian family of one ethnicity from one region (and I have a few good Indian friends, but still…). I’m lucky if I can predict what Aditya will be doing tomorrow – I’ve got a snowball’s chance in heck of making any accurate sweeping pronouncements about Indian culture in general. I do have some mental generalizations, of course – as I pointed out above, it’s impossible not to. But, whenever possible, I try to base my generalizations on things other than just personal experience…
3. Look to the social sciences for accurate generalizations. There’s a whole army of sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and the like who make it their lives’ work to scientifically study different nations and cultures. While they don’t always get it right, as an insider I can tell you that most of ‘em try awfully hard to develop theories based off of accurate, unbiased data. I don’t expect you to read academic journals to understand everything the world, but if you’re really interested in a subject, try, say, reading blogs by the experts in those fields to make sure your generalizations have at least a passing familiarity with the real world.
4. Recognize that any generalization is tentative and subject to reevaluation as new evidence comes in. There’s an economist at Harvard, Emily Oster, who made her career a few years back by showing that some of the “missing girls” in Asian countries – suspected of being the victims of female infanticide – were actually “missing” because of the effect of Hepatitis B on the reproduction system. It was suggested that the virus changed the expected gender balance of fetuses, although the exact biological connection was unknown. Well, the big story in economic circles this week is Dr. Oster’s newest paper, where she shows that Hep B actually can’t be a major factor in the “missing girls” problem. I say major kudos to Emily Oster for admitting her error, and changing her stance in light of the new evidence. Try to emulate her, and accept that all generalizations are subject to change with new data.

Stereotypes – how to recognize them

I think that you all are smart enough (and I’ve harped on it long enough) that I don’t need to tell you why stereotyping is a bad thing. But because I’m really the type to harp on these things – and I want everyone to be absolutely clear on this matter, I’ll give it one more go, by once again using the clear prose of Joel Charon:

Stereotypes are highly oversimplified, exaggerated views of reality. They are especially attractive to people who are judgmental of others and who are quick to condemn people who are different from them. They have been used to justify ethnic discrimination, war, and systematic murder of whole categories of people. Far from arising out of careful and systematic analysis, stereotypes arise out of hearsay and culture, and instead of aiding our understanding of the human being, they always stand in the way of accurate understanding.

Okay, that’s the last time I talk about why stereotypes are bad (in this post, at least!). But now that we all know exactly why they’re so horrible, let’s discuss exactly what is a stereotype. As Charon points out, a stereotype is a specific kind of generalization, one that is likely to lead to bad & inaccurate beliefs about the category being generalized. The things that separate out the s-word from regular generalizations include the following:

1. A stereotype is judgmental. The person who holds a stereotype about a category believes that people belonging to that category are somehow better or worse than others because of certain characteristics they hold. If I said “Asians are generally shorter than other ethnicities” I’m not indulging in a stereotype unless I’m somehow attaching a badness or goodness to this fact.
2. A stereotype tends to be an absolute category. By this what I (and Charon) mean is that people who hold stereotypes rarely recognize that there are exceptions – perhaps many exceptions – to the rule. Rather than using a generalization as a tool to understanding, they use a stereotype as an ultimate statement.
3. The stereotype tends to be a category that overshadows all others in the mind of the observer. That is, the sterotyper fails to recognize that we all belong to many categories, some of which are more important to our personal identity than others.
4. A stereotype doesn’t change with new evidence. This goes back to bullet point number 2 – even when you point out many counterexamples to the stereotype, the person holding it will still believe that the stereotype is generally true & useful. It’s like arguing with a wall.
5. The stereotype wasn’t created carefully in the first place. Most people who hold stereotypes base them off of limited personal experience, or what they’ve learned from others who aren’t informed by data either.
6. The stereotype doesn’t encourage a search for understanding why human beings are different from each other. Stereotypes focus on increasing the chasms between people, rather than making bridging the differences through understanding. Obviously, this sort of attitude does not bode well for intercultural communication and relationships.

The bottom line

You can’t help generalizing about cultural differences, as it’s the main way humans organize knowledge. What you can do is recognize how and when you’re generalizing, and take steps to make them as accurate and useful as possible.

Think about the way you categorize different groups of people. Are there big swaths of populations that you group under one heading? Why? You can’t break every population down into tiny categories, but recognize where you have good, distinct categories, and where they’re a bit fuzzier. Be open to developing more categories as you learn that what you thought was one large group is actually a number of small, interrelated groups. And be aware that others have different categories from you – so they’re understanding the world in a fundamentally different way from you.

Think about the way you form generalizations. Always question them. If you don’t know much about a group, consider doing a little scientific research, rather than relying on what you heard a few years ago from some dude at a party. Emulate Emily Oster, and be open to reevaluation as new data & experiences come in. Remember that your generalizations are only one small tool when dealing with individuals.

And, finally, always challenge stereotypes. That’s the only way progress happens in intercultural understanding.

*** A great deal of the theory behind this post should be credited to Dr. Charon, and his excellent essay Should We Generalize about People? from his introductory sociology textbook Ten Questions (1995).

Many people subscribe to the idea that your personal life is nobody’s business but your own – as long as you aren’t maiming others, anyways. While I generally agree with the sentiment this idea expresses, I also think it’s important to realize that, like it or not, your actions affect a wide swath of people. In fact, at the margin, your actions affect the entire world.

Let’s all pause for a moment to ponder that grandiose thought while breaking out into The Circle of Life.

Everyone back? Good. I brought up this topic because being in an intercultural relationships has a tendency to disrupt the “social equilibrium,” if you will, of the people around you. In almost every country and region an intercultural relationship is the exception, not the norm. So while being in any relationship might affect those close to you – my dad still hasn’t gotten over the fact that I’m no longer his little girl – intercultural relationships are both a regular ol’ relationship and something of a challenge to the status quo. As if romantic relationships weren’t tough enough on their own!

In this post I’m focusing on how intercultural relationships, in particular, affect those around us. I’ll start out by laying out a (non-comprehensive) list of the type of people who can be affected by your intercultural marriage or relationship, continue with how these effects ripple out through the social web of life, and then finish up with how much you should really care about it all. This post developed as I thought about how parents can react to their children’s intercultural relationships – I’ll be applying the principles and theory I develop here to that post, which will be the next “serious” one.

So just who is affected?

I wrote above that everyone is affected, and I do believe that. I’m not trying to say that an intercultural or interracial marriage is a political event (now, at least), or that couples in intercultural relationships are dating to change the world through their example – almost all intercultural couples are in it for love, not ideological reasons, according to at least one study. The way people are affected, however, depends on their relationship to you. With that in mind, I’m going to break it down into different categories that helps me mentally organize these ideas – but remember that this is not meant to be comprehensive.

1. You
   Hah – you thought I’d just be talking about other people, right? Nope – an intercultural relationship is going to change you, and those changes are going to affect everyone you know. These changes can be fairly superficial – new recipes in the kitchen, foreign language films on the netflix list – or they can be deep and life-changing – a different religion, different priorities, or a home in a new country. And this is in addition to the typical mental stretching that happens in any relationship.While you’re probably okay with the changes that are happening due to your intercultural relationship – otherwise, you’d change or end the relationship – others around you might not be. Or they might just be surprised by the parts of your personality – parts that have always been there – that become more prominent in the light of your new relationship.Personally, while I don’t feel like any deep part of me was changed through my relationship with Aditya, there were a lot of minor changes that did occur. And at least some members of my family were alarmed by this – early in our relationship, one person even came to me to tell me that she was worried Aditya was planning to take me off to India and make me, uh, an Indian housewife with no rights, or something. *shrug* I have no idea where that came from.
2. Your Partner
   The guy or gal in your life is being stretched by your intercultural relationship, just like you are. And those changes can freak out his family, friends, and acquaintances too. Occasionally you might get blamed by your partner’s family or friends as the cause of changes they dislike or fear. It may be hard to hear, but in some ways, they are right to blame you – if she hadn’t met you, she probably wouldn’t have changed in just those ways, at least not at that time. But just because you’re the cause of those changes doesn’t mean that you’ve done something wrong, unless you’ve forced your partner to change in ways he didn’t want to. And at this point I put in the obligatory warning that you’ve heard from anyone and everyone regarding relationships: don’t get into one with the intention to change your partner. It just doesn’t turn out well.
3. Close Family and Friends
   There are a few ways that those who are close to you can change because of your intercultural marriage or relationship. First, their beliefs about the “proper” way different races or cultures should interact might be challenged. Maybe they’ll become more accepting of intercultural interactions – but maybe they’ll become worse. A relative of mine, for instance, once told me point-blank that he thought that I shouldn’t ever date a black or African-American man, since that would just be wrong. I actually did date a black guy after this comment, but didn’t tell this relative, since it was a very casual, short-lived thing and I wasn’t interested in a fight with said relative. I do wonder what would have happened if I had told the relative, though – would his thoughts on the matter have changed?Second, those who are close to you might also change their ways because of their new exposure to your partner’s culture. My mom loves all the little details she has picked up about Indian culture through her son-in-law. She’s also in line (after me) to learn some Indian cooking from Maa.Third, family and friends are affected by the changes in you and your partner (depending on whose family and friends they are). If your partner changes substantially, for instance, it may be that his parents and siblings feel less connected to him.
4. Extended Family and Acquaintances
   By “extended family” here, I mean family members who are not particularly close to you or your significant other – not the type of extended family where a third cousin is as close as a brother. These are people who are less affect by changes in you, and more affected by changes in your status as seen by others. Maybe your intercultural relationship convinces a younger cousin that is now “okay” to do that in your culture, so she starts dating the cute white boy she’s friends with. Or maybe simply knowing a person in an intercultural relationship makes an acquaintance think a bit deeper about race relationships. These are small changes, but in the aggregate they matter.
5. The people of your subculture, or those of your partner’s subculture
   These are people who don’t even know you, but share your culture. How could they possibly be affected by your personal relationship? Well, one example that springs to my mind is the dying out of languages around the world. When a person chooses to date or marry outside of their culture, often (not always!) they or their children lose parts of their native culture. Language is one example of this. The Jewish community’s efforts to maintain their culture in the face of a significant amounts of intermarriage is another example.
6. “Society”
   My general catch-all for people who don’t fit into those other categories. As I stated above, if you’re in an intercultural relationship in a place where it’s uncommon, whether you choose to or not, you’re making a general statement to society that intercultural relationships are okay. And bit by bit, this can change people’s opinions on the matter.

The Ripple Effect

But the changes don’t stop just here. As each person changes, it affects their relationship with everyone else. The social equilibrium has become unbalanced, and everything will shift about a bit to regain a new equilibrium. This is what I’m calling the Ripple Effect – the effects of your intercultural relationship will ripple through the social web of everyone around you. As your partner changes, for instance, his relationship with his parents will change – and this is something that they might worry about. And if your partner’s parents change, their relationship to their other children might change. Aditya’s parents, for instance, were softened up for my appearance by his brother’s intercultural marriage to a Punjabi Indian.

Other ripples that you might worry about are pressures from “society” or acquaintances or even extended family on your close family or friends for “allowing” your intercultural relationship. Your family is now the-family-with-the-intercultural-relationship, and others may see that as good or as bad.

A person affected ≠ a person who cares much

The vast majority of “society” that you pass on the street probably doesn’t care that they’re affected a teeny tiny bit by your intercultural marriage. Some close friends of mine couldn’t give a hoot that I’m in an intercultural relationship, even though it does affect them through me (mostly because of my Coffy Bite supply). I’m not sure if my brother has ever even realized that Aditya is Indian – he’s completely oblivious to (major) things like that. Just because someone is affected by an intercultural relationship doesn’t mean that they’ll care much – and even if they care, they may not say anything. It’ll depend on their personalities, their feelings and background in intercultural undertakings, and any number of other idiosyncratic things.

A person who cares ≠ you caring about their cares

Even if a person cares a lot about the fact that they’re affected by your intercultural relationship doesn’t mean that you need to care about their opinion. I’ve had a couple of random people tell me that I shouldn’t date outside my race, and that they were personally offended that I was doing so, and making it seem more acceptable to society at large. I don’t particularly care that they’re upset about this. I’m A-okay, in fact. I bet most of you are too!

If someone close to me was upset about the effects of my intercultural relationship on them, it’d be a little different, of course. I’m lucky enough that I’ve never been put into that situation – no one who’s opinion mattered to me has ever suggested that my intercultural relationship was affecting them negatively. Of course, these sort of situations do occur – we’ve all heard the stories of Indian parents, for instance, losing social status within their communities because of intercultural relationships. I imagine there might even be a few people who sniff at my inlaws for allowing their son to marry a Gori – luckily Maa and Baba aren’t the type to care about that, either.

Before I sign off on this huge post, I’d like to make one thing very clear: I’m not condoning racism in any way, shape or form. Racism is an evil thing, and people who have issues with your intercultural relationship because of their racist views should be told where to shove it, in my opinion. But there’s a difference between someone disliking an intercultural relationship because of the (true) negatives affects it might have on him or other entities he cares about, and disliking it because you’re a racist or just don’t like people of different cultures mixing. My point here was to make it clear that, because of the wide-ranging, rippled effects that your relationship might have others, there are legitimate concerns they might raise about your relationship. I personally believe that the benefits from an intercultural relationship – or heck, any relationship where two people love each – almost always outweighs any of the possible negatives, but others’ opinions might differ.