Culture Clash

On the blog Faith Outside the City, co-authored by Jim Purcell and Melissa Gaffney, Purcell has an interesting post, About hospitality...and White and Black America.

While his prose is somewhat confusing, I think Purcell is trying to constructively distinguish differences in the black and white experience.

Purcell said,

"In class, my classmates and Dr. Hendricks were discussing an experience I could not identify with. "If I was down to my last few pieces of food, I had to get used to giving that to someone else if they showed up," one of my classmates said. The experience my black classmates were discussing was dramatically different than my own.

But my experience, one that is not uncommon to the kids I grew up with, is qualitatively different. Whereas the other students in the class (from the black experience) were talking about commonly receiving guests with great warmth, my experience is that in my parent's home, and the homes of my young friends, guests were not welcomed with food, celebration or even much warmth. But, this is not saying that my parents or my friends' parents were bad people. It was more like the custom to not make a big to do out of guests. It is not a matter of better or worse, though, yet this example of difference represents variance. And, where there are divergent experiences, it is hard to form the same basis of thought used for decision-making (as in drawing conclusions)."

While it is not clear to me how Purcell sees his black classmate's transforming from having "to get used to" giving the last of his food to a guest to "receiving guests with great warmth", his story reminded me of an experience I had as a teen aged college student in Washington, DC.

I was a "Big Brother" for a young black male from Northeast Washington, DC who lived in public housing with his mother and sister. Sadly, I can't remember the youth's name, but I have thought of this experience often in the last 30 years. More so since I started my inquiry into race relations this past July.

Every Saturday morning I would drive a University van to Northeast to pick up my "brother" and other participants in the program. We'd spend the day together in Washington, usually on campus, and I would drive them back in the afternoon. I always fed "my brother." He said it was the best food he ate that week and described his sparse diet to me. Several weeks into the program, upon arriving back to the public housing project "my brother's" mother came out to the van and insisted that I came into her home.

She had prepared a hot meal for me, and only for me. Pork chops, corn and potatoes. The table was set for me to eat while "my brother," his sister and mother were to watch me consume this feast. This freaked me out. My insistence on sharing the food, at least with the children was angrily rebuffed by Mom.

I quit the Big Brother program that week, rather than have "my brother's" food stamps go to feed me. I suspect my behavior was offensive on a few levels to "my brother's" mother.

Several years later I had another educational food/culture experience. This time it wasn't a black/white culture clash. Rather it was an Italian/Irish culture clash. I was deliverying a new car to an Italian family in Elizabeth, NJ. I arrived with the car around dinner time on a week night. The whole family was there to see the new car. After we finished the paper work and went over all the equipment on the car, the wife/mother invited me to stay for dinner. I thought I was gracious in my decline, explaining that I still had another customer's car to deliver.

The next day, I called to thank my customer for the business and to make sure she was happy with the car. She loved the car but hated me for not staying for dinner. The anger in her voice sent a chill down my leg. I was besides myself and I haven't turned down food from an Italian since.