Black and White Styles in Conflict

by Thomas Kochman

Argues that cultural differences and differences in the style of communication can lead to conflict or embarrassment between Blacks and whites

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Sociology, African American

177 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1900

Reviews

[Mish Middelmann]

Thanks to Thomas Kochman for braving a topic that opens him up to racial criticism. I am finding the book hugely valuable as a South African, even though he clearly addresses US racial issues and doesn't make more universal claims.

So far all I've read are his opening chapters, up to and including one about how black and white styles show up in US classrooms.

In his first chapter, "Black Culture," Kochman debunks the normative perspective that all people are the same. He acknowledges that comments on racial difference have been and still are used to support negative judgements about relative racial inferiority and makes clear that his purpose is to celebrate differences from a position that welcomes the value of all groups on this earth.

His second chapter draws mainly on his own experience in teaching racially-mixed classes in the US - particularly in situations where the racial mix is (I imagine unusually for the US) approximately 50-50. Refreshingly, he is able to report in a way that rings true to me the differences he observes between black and white styles in the classroom. To summarise, he finds black students more passionate, more personal and more expressive, while white students are more reserved, more focused on depersonalised intellectual debate and cooler.

What he then points out is that the rarefied intellectualism prized in white academic culture seems devious and irresponsible from a perspective that values personal expression and commitment. Writing in 1981, in many ways he foreshadows the current emergence in mainstream Western (i.e. white dominated) leadership culture of the importance of passion, personal commitment and authenticity. What his black students were saying in the 1970s to the whites ("come on and take a stand") is now becoming a wakeup call in the corporate world. What is fascinating is the way Kochman traces racial-cultural differences deep into the heart of confrontations in the classroom and elsewhere: our cultural starting points tend to drive us to negative ethnocentric judgements about how others operate.

Some good examples of this come from public debates where issues of social justice come up, for example race. He points out that the white style of "just be calm and logical" shows up in situations that are deeply emotional and painful as an attempt to tilt the playing field. To leave emotion at the door in a discussion on social justice feels as if we are conceding that it is merely an academic debate when actually people's lives are at stake.

The bigger universal themes I hear resonating in this book are about logic and emotion, structure and human relationship. In the US culture he describes, the urge for formal authority structures (wait for the teacher to give you permission to speak) and dispassionate Descartian logic (speak for the idea, not your feelings) is strongly associated with the dominant white culture. Being personally expressive, taking emotion and personal relationship as integral to life as well as debate, and taking a personal stand in a discussion rather than keeping it "academic" are associated in his observation with black American culture more than white.

I think the white "Western" world has spent recent centuries - particularly the last 250 years or so - strongly focused on separating intellect from emotion, creating depersonalised structures within which individuals are "free" to engage in private pursuits. Somehow this combination of formal structure and individual freedom has in my opinion been central to the extraordinary success of the "West" in developing technology and amassing wealth and power in the world. As a child of this culture what I strongly feel is that this process has been at the cost of losing much of the value of emotion, personal relationship and connection to soul. As a South African, I recognise the way these values are enshrined in African philosophies like Ubuntu - "a person is a person through other people."

My yearning is to reclaim my heart and soul connections with the world and integrate them with scientific method, formal structure and individual freedom. While there is no way in which I think one racial group has ownership of any of these attributes, my personal experience matches what Kochman reports in terms of racial patterns and my desire is to embrace diversity and share the contributions that come from different heritages. So I gain hope from a book that explores how black and white styles might draw value from each other.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is from 1980. A lot of the observations are either a) citations from the seventies or b) the author's observations of black vs white behavior in his own classes. The main takeaway, that I feel makes reading this books useful:
Black culture allows for more emotional expression than white culture, and the ways the two cultures interact tend to be that white culture's emotional repression is "right" --if a black person is engaging in lively debate and get riled up, it just means they're connected to the discussion, not that they're about to lose it like a white person might if behaving in the same manner. The epilogue indicates that this means white people and black people guilty of essentially the same offense are often punished differently.

I'm outraged that we knew this in 1980 and still haven't fixed it.

Now, the bad:
The entire chapter about relationships between men and women. It's... a very 80s view. Basically, it discusses "courting rituals" that sound more like street harassment--it shows, basically, the different ways black women and white women respond. Namely that black women will either respond with a put-down (which is acceptable and sometimes expected discourse in black culture) or stop to chat. But it also mentions things like "black women are allowed to show sexual interest where white women are not" which... is either the route of the stereotype or playing into the stereotype. I'm not sure.

There is an anecdote about a black woman who was fired from a bank for "getting emotional" when reporting her coworkers for racist slurs and messing with her purse. No, she was fired because her bosses were racist. Who wouldn't be upset by that?!

(The author is white, but apparently taught race relations until stepping aside to let a black colleague do so. Grading on a curve for the year, good for him.)

So, this book is generally valuable, but to be taken with a grain of salt (and maybe skip the chapter on male and female relations as it seems to have a heavy dose of unexamined male privilege.)

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I use insights from this book and this professor's class everyday in my encounter with people.

[Lieva Whitbeck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t speak to the accuracy of what this white professor says about the particular Black culture he's writing about here, but this thirty-year-old book helped me along in my journey of trying to see the white academic culture I've grown up in in all of its particularity, to understand my impact when I relate to those cultural norms as though they are universal when they're not, and to imagine other ways of living.

[Marnie]

I'm not really sure what to say about this book. It was mentioned in a blog post, somewhere. I can't remember where. I added it to my wishlist and bought it several months later. My initial gut reaction is that I'm really uncomfortable with a white person writing about black people and their experience and worldview. He addresses this at the start and to be fair, the book is specifically about the differences between white American culture and African American culture so he is representative of the culture of one group he is discussing.

I also had some issues with the author's views on catcalling. He implies that white women who are bothered by being catcalled (at least when it is done by black men) are simply misinterpreting the situation and that black women have no issues with being catcalled. He suggests white women just come up with insults to lob back at the black men because it's rude if a woman simply ignores the man. You'll have to excuse me if I am unconcerned with the feelings of a person who is harassing me in public.

That aside, I think the author makes some really good points about how the cards are stacked against people of color, in situations where white people predominate in positions of power (e.g. white teachers with black students).

I think there's is an important discussion to be had about the fact that Americans primarily view white+male+middle class as being a default human and everyone else as being a deviation from the normal, and this book uses anecdote to highlight some good examples of how this harms people of color and divides people from different backgrounds. Still, I would have liked to see input from the people who are actually impacted by this. I don't fault the author for wanting a book to be written about the topic, but since he references grad students and colleagues at several points, I'm not really clear why he couldn't have co-authored this book with someone who is actually impacted by this situation.

I'm hoping that in the 30 years since this was written, some better books on the topic have come along. I'm happy for suggestions if anyone has them.

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a worthwhile read. I went in aware of some critiques of this work, but came away having changed my mind about what they should be! For example, reviews I read before I bought this book said that it was not aware of class, or that all the differences it describes could be explained by class. This doesn't seem to me to be a fair critique of the text, which is generally clear in differentiating class as well as race. I had slightly misunderstood the title - I read it as 'how black and white people behave when they are in conflict', but it's actually 'why black and white communication styles bring people into conflict'. The broader focus, describing communication styles generally, made in more interesting in some ways, however. As a white reader (albeit a UK reader when the text is firmly based in the USA), I found the analysis of the underlying rules of white communication often enlightening - there's a very clear section on the way that white scripts for men and women aim to negotiate sexual contact without ever mentioning that explicitly, which also makes it clear why they go wrong so often! Besides some probable US/UK differences, I think language changes since this book was first published in the 1980s also mean the conclusions should now be received with care. That said, some of themes picked up here seem to me to have the potential to explain current patterns in communication - if Kochman is right that black and white cultures respond differently to general accusations ("all men are lazy": black men - silence or "she ain't talking about me" because protesting too hard proves guilt; white men - "not all men! let me tell you how hard I work!" because not protesting hard enough proves guilt), that could explain a lot of talking past each other which happens on Twitter these days.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kochman covered not only communication styles but also such behaviors as to when to applaud during a play, coaching style differences, etc.

He definitely "hit the nail on the head" regarding differences between Black and White coaches, as something he wrote in the book very accurately described "White Univ of KY basketball fans and Coach Orlando "Tubby" Smith.
An article in a local paper conveyed "fans upset with Coach Smith's 'slowness to make line-up changes when the team gets behind.'"
Kochman wrote something to the effect of "White coaches tend to feel the heat, and react quicker than Black coaches to changes in a game. Black coaches don't react so fast to the heat and will wait longer before making substitutions."
I just happened to be reading the book when I read that article!!!

Whether that accurately applies to most coaches, I can't say....but I do know Whites tend to react needlessly in many types of situations, i.e., calling the cops when a driver pulls-over in front of their house. Driver to cop: I pulled over to check my GPS" or "to make ph call."

Overall, I would only recommend this tome as an "exploratory text"....because once you read it, you learn that Kochman only compared the styles of the White middle class to what he terms "community Blacks" (poor Blacks).
His book would have been much richer had he included the styles of poor Whites, middle- & upper-class Blacks, and other People of Color.

Whenever White authors/researchers compare Blacks and Whites...."somehow" poor Whites and the Black middle class are rendered invisible....and thus the result is a racial dichotomy, i.e., White= good, kind, nice and Black = bad, mean, evil.
SMH

[Jaime · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was written 30 years ago but it still has cultural significance. The book focuses on the cultural, sociological and linguistic impact of the African American culture. It is a classic in the field of language and communication studies.

[Dorothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Values and Cultural Conflict

This book is not *just* about white versus black. I wish I had come across it much sooner; this book explains interactions that puzzled me exceedingly for years. This book is all about what happens when two almost diametrically opposed but internally consistent cultural paradigms meet, and what each side of the equation may not realize about the other.

These systemic conflicts would probably occur regardless of racism, but racism and its history absolutely exacerbates these conflicts and stands in the way of compassion. Understanding the thinking process behind the conflict will hopefully help us to figure out how to approach the cultural divide which is so unequal. Best intentions don’t always work out — here you may find some reasons why.

[Miki Conn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have several problems with this book. First, as a black woman with a white boyfriend, I find that we are the reverse of the examples cited by the author. I'm not sure these generalizations work. Secondly, I'm a little uncomfortable with a white person speaking about the meaning and motivation of black styles in conflict. Third, the book feels dated -- that is, the speech patterns he refers to are different from the way young black people speak today. That being said, I found the sections on style of dress and non-verbal interactions as well as sports very interesting with lots of food for thought.

[Rachel Remer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very informative and interesting cultural read.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still don't know how to take this book - is it the shallow musings of a professor who simply watched his students heatedly interact with one another or is it an actual sociological statement? In the end, I wonder how reliable racial generalizations are in this day and age?

[Helene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very different look at racial issues. How misinterpretations cause minor events to escalate to major issues. Still true as I write this in 2015.