Tribe

Why Do All Our Friends Look Just Like Us?

Sandra Mayes Unger

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781506446264
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506446271
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Tribe explores the issues of reciprocity in cross-race and cross-class relationships using stories, narrative, and sociological insights and perspectives derived from urban fieldwork and the author's own life. The volume examines the social and structural barriers to the formation of these kinds of relationships, as well as the transformations that can take place as these barriers are overcome. Stories, interviews, and empirically driven narratives are interwoven with theory from the fields of adult education, economics, sociology, ethics, theology, and history.

After exploring the barriers to the formation of these relationships and the potential of adults for learning new ways of thinking and being, the book makes the case that there are communal and individual benefits to these relationships that far outweigh the difficulties in forming them. The book is set up to answer the questions "Why does it matter if all my friends look just like me?" and "How do I leave behind a siloed existence to live a fully transformational and socially aware life?"

I

The Obstacles

1

Tribal Patterns

Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

—George Bernard Shaw^[1]

A few years after moving to the city, I was at the grocery store with Ricky, Wesley, Jaquon,* and Cortez—four hungry black teenagers in tall tees and low-slung jeans. Boxers out. They lined up behind me in the cereal aisle and started rapping about me and my shopping cart and my Cheerios. Some of our fellow shoppers seemed to be entertained by the beats and the lyrics to this new rap song about the Happy White Lady and her groceries. I was trapped in the moment; there was no quieting them. I was laughing so hard I was crying, proud to be honored this way and only a little bit aware of how popular we had become. Around the third verse, the store manager, who happened to be a middle-aged white man, approached and asked me with great concern if I was okay. It seemed he thought he had arrived just in time to rescue me from the scary group of black teenagers that was following me. I was deflated and I told him in a marginally unfriendly way that these guys were my friends. He seemed disturbed and skeptical, but he left us to our now deenergized, deflated, desegregated shopping experience. To the guys, this was part of their normal life experience. To me, it sucked.

It sucked because it was my own life story serving as an example of tribalism and stereotypes. The message was that my friends and I didn’t belong together, that there was something inherently dangerous about me as a white woman being up close with young black men. I’ve spoken with the guys about this many times over the years. They see it differently. Ricky didn’t see anything strange about the man’s approach. “We should be questioned because this is the kind of people we are,” he says. Being accused and questioned was such a frequent occurrence for them that this was just business as usual. Wesley said, “It wasn’t nothing new; it wasn’t a shock; we just laughed it off.” Although it was also normal for Cortez, he told me, “You had our backs.” That part was not normal.

Our grocery store drama showed a clear boundary between my tribe and the tribe of my friends. The store manager recognized the presence of two distinct tribes and jumped immediately to the conclusion that what he was witnessing was the beginning of tribal warfare. When tribes are consigned to separate physical spaces, operate according to different rules, speak different languages, and share a history of violence and hatred, it’s no small thing to try to build meaningful reciprocal relationships. Tribal barriers can be formidable, as with the divide between Christianity and Islam. They can also be as subtle as a grocery store manager intervening in a humorous event that he has been conditioned to see as a conflict. In both cases, work is being done to maintain the tribal barrier, rather than tear it down. Ernest said it succinctly: “You don’t see a lot of white people going into black folks’ homes and you don’t see a lot of black folks going into white people’s houses. You don’t see that.”

Tribalism Defined

When I speak of tribes or tribalism, I am not speaking of indigenous or tribal people—that is, those who “have followed ways of life for many generations that are largely self-sufficient, and are clearly different from the mainstream and dominant society.”^[2] Rather, I am using the contemporary understanding of “an extended family sharing a collective identity.”^[3] Tribes in contemporary society tend to be differentiated either along lines of race and class or along lines of thinking and behavior. As we will see, these are often the same thing. Tribes have “markers,” which clearly differentiate the insiders from the outsiders.

In my experience, it is unusual for a tribe to have both white and black or both rich and poor members who view one another as extended family members. The tribes in my churches, schools, and neighborhoods have all been homogeneous. As James Vela-McConnell, a sociologist who has researched friendships that cross lines of difference, puts it: “Our friendship patterns generally reflect the social stratification system that exists within our larger society.”^[4] Society agrees with Ricky’s assertion that he and I shouldn’t even know each other. It seems like they would even prefer we not. The only category available to describe a white woman being followed by black teens in the grocery store involves danger. In the narrative that reinforces the stereotypes, I am the innocent white woman who lives in fear of black men, who are always up to no good. I am in need of a white male savior in the frozen foods aisle who will spare me from the nefarious intentions of dangerous rapping thugs.

The tribe I grew up in was white, middle-class, conservative Christian, a tribe that had not only benefitted enormously from white privilege but had never even heard of it. My teenage friends’ tribe was black, poor, and focused on survival. Our tribes are not supposed to mix—in school, in church, in neighborhoods, in life. The story I was raised with was about how not to have reciprocal cross-race and cross-class relationships.

As a child of the suburbs, sticking with my own tribe was the done thing, at least partially because the news from nearby Detroit was that young black men were dangerous. The murder rate was high, and I drew a picture in my head of the dark streets of Detroit filled with gangs of black people shooting each other. And stealing the purses of white ladies. Because I lacked personal contact or any source of accurate information, these streets were real to me. Decades later, some people still believe a version of this reality. Like the grocery store manager. When a person from the Happy White Lady Tribe is being followed by four people from the Dangerous Young Black Men Tribe, something bad is about to happen.

The misunderstanding between tribes works both ways. When I was a police chaplain, I sometimes drove the chaplain car to pick up Ricky from school. I usually did it just to embarrass him. He told his friends that I was his parole officer because he said it was easier than explaining our odd reality. It was fine for him to be seen with a Happy White Lady as long as the Happy White Lady had an official reason for being around. To my tribe, Ricky is dangerous; to Ricky’s tribe, I am a white do-gooder who will be tolerated as long as whatever I do doesn’t cramp their style.

Why can’t my tribe interact with Ricky’s tribe? Why can’t a middle-class white woman have a genuine friendly relationship with a black male teenager, the son of my neighbor? Why does it have to be either dangerous or hierarchical? Even on television, where boundaries tend to be pushed, I cannot find examples of authentic friendships that cross lines of both race and class. Early in the history of television, black people were present serving as cooks or nannies for white people, as in Make Room for Daddy and Beulah. There are shows such as That’s So Raven, The Cosby Show, and The Jeffersons that feature middle-class black people being friends with middle-class white people. As a teen, I watched a show called Benson, in which the black actor Robert Guillaume played butler to a bumbling white governor but was later elected lieutenant governor. In this role, he was served by a primarily white staff. Due to its complete departure from anything in the real world, I think this show may actually have done more damage than good to my understanding of black people and race relations. There is the frequent occurrence of the “black best friend” to the central white character, as in Ghost Whisperer and Ally McBeal. But I haven’t found reciprocity represented that crosses lines of race and class.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889 as part of the growing settlement movement. This movement brought together people of different backgrounds to live together, become interdependent, and work for social justice. Addams recognized that it is in the mundane activities of daily life that people from different backgrounds learn to get along with one another. She believed that time together outside of formally defined relationships would break down barriers. In my first thirty years, I never spent one day in the presence of someone from a different race or class just doing the usual things of life. I never just “hung out” with a black person or a poor person. That seems to be true for many people from my tribe, and when I asked Ernest if he hung out with any middle-class white people before he met us, he laughed long and hard. “Never, ever,” he said. “I been to rich people’s houses because I was selling them something or picking up something. But it was all illegal. But just to hang out having clean white fun? It never happened. I used to joke about that clean white fun.” It is a rarity for people from Ernest’s tribe and people from my tribe to experience what I would describe as normal, human, friendly interactions with each other. Without these shared experiences, our comfort with our own tribe is reinforced and everyone else is relegated to the category of the Other.

The Other

Sociologist Zuleyka Zevallos argues that “otherness” is “central to sociological analyses of how majority and minority identities are constructed. . . . Identities are often thought as being natural or innate—something that we are born with—but sociologists highlight that this taken-for-granted view is not true.”^[5] Rather, identity construction in a society is controlled by whoever is in power. If your tribe or culture is different than the tribe or culture of those with power, you are the Other.^[6]

Once I started to see the world through the lens of the Other—Ernest and Ricky’s tribe—I began to notice injustices. I saw things like the media’s tendency to focus on white victims of violent crime and ignore black victims. This observation is frequently made by my black friends, who believe that white people simply do not see the victimization of black people as being as important as that of whites. “Our sympathies tend to be unevenly distributed,” states David Livingstone Smith, a philosopher who specializes in issues of race and dehumanization. People who are near us, are related to us, or look like us (our “tribe”) evoke our sympathies more readily than others. People who are different from us, says Smith, “are unlikely to spontaneously arouse the same degree of concern.”^[7]

Science journalist David Berreby takes this one step further and says that the tendency to classify humans is innate: “Without work, without awareness, we human beings are experts at sorting people into kinds.”^[8] Every group throughout history has a distinction between “us” and “others.” In many societies, the name used for their own people is the same word they use for “human being.”^[9] Every society also sorts people into smaller divisions within tribes by everything from age to gender to family affiliation. As much as I hate to put this on paper, I have memories as a child of hearing news about children having something horrible happen to them, and I remember the strong feeling of identification with the little white girls who flashed on the screen, and much less so with the little black girls. My innate tribalism was at work.

In addition to the innate aspects of tribalism, there is the reality that tribes simply function differently on a day-to-day basis. Smith explains that “members of a tribe share a wealth of culturally transmitted beliefs, preferences, and rules of conduct.”^[10] My tribe of origin likes to do things on time, spend money conservatively, eat healthy food, attend church, shop at department stores, dress modestly, put kids to bed early, and prioritize school activities, to name just a few distinctives. This shared reality means that it is easier to be around people from your own tribe—

people with a shared understanding of a common way of life, who speak the same language and adhere to the same norms and values—than it is to engage in social exchange with outsiders. Social interaction across tribal boundaries is a minefield, rife with opportunities for misunderstanding, conflict, and—at the extreme—danger.^[11]

Today’s tribalis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Everyone Looked Just Like Me
• The Obstacles
• The Opportunities
• Recommended Reading List
• Index