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Running head: Cultural Analysis & Identity Development

Cultural Analysis & Identity Development

Charles Gentzel

Wake Forest University

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Cultural Analysis & Identity Development

I first came to understand that race created differences in the first grade. It was 1983 and

the town I lived in, Bowie, may or may not have been racially segregated, but my neighborhood

certainly was. The vast majority of the neighborhood was, like me, Caucasian. It wasn’t

completely homogenous. There was a Vietnamese doctor across the street who regularly

sponsored and supported refugees from Southeast Asia (which provided me we regular

playmates) and a few Hispanic families. What my early childhood completely lacked was any

contact with African Americans except on TV. That changed in first grade. My class at the

Montessori school I attended had one African American girl (and later added a boy, Jerry, half-

way through the year). I remember this because she came over to join myself and another boy

while we played with toy animals and a barn (for the life of me, I cannot remember either of their

names). The boy looked worried and told me his dad said he wasn’t allowed to play with black

people. The three of us didn’t know what to do. Kids are supposed to listen to their parents and

parents told us to do things we didn’t understand all the time. I went and got the teacher who

told us everybody was allowed to play with everybody at school. The girl joined in our game,

but both she and the boy seemed uncomfortable. I know I brought the incident up to my parents

because I remember a very confusing explanation about different races that didn’t clear up

anything except that, for some reason, some people really didn’t like black people. This would

be the start of my Contact phase (Helms 1984). I became aware that black people existed. I’m

honestly not sure how I processed it, but I do remember that Jerry and I became friends and

played together often.

The next year, we moved to Montgomery County, Maryland. This was a fast-growing

and affluent suburb of DC. It was also incredibly diverse. In the block and two cul-de-sacs that
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made up my immediate neighborhood, I had kids my age that were white, black, Hispanic or of

Pakistani, Hindi, Jewish, Chinese, or Korean descent. Everyone played with everyone and it

wasn’t a big deal. I learned a great deal about other cultures, mostly through invitations to

celebrate holidays. I did notice [eventually] that, despite all of the kids getting along, the adults

didn’t intermingle much. My parents were only friends with the other Christian Caucasian

family on our street. The Hindi parents socialized with the other Hindi parents. The Jews with

the Jews, and so on. Dr. Lee, the patriarch of the sole Korean family, was very affable and

outgoing, but didn’t get invited to cookouts very often, despite running free Tang So Do lessons

every Thursday evening for all of the neighborhood kids on his patio. This ethnic grouping

really became evident when they built the townhouses.

The townhouse expansion was an addition much maligned by the adults in my

neighborhood. I think it was part of something political that mandated “affordable” housing be

included in housing developments. That meant, to my parents, that “the bad kind of blacks”

would be moving in. I was told not to go up the street to the townhouses to play. That was

impossible advice to follow, as kids will find other kids to play with. All of the community

amenities were shared between the single family homes and the townhouses. I vividly remember

many arguments with my mother about how hanging around with too many black friends

“looked bad.”

My parents will adamantly insist they are not racist. My mom will even present her best

friend of many decades, Carol Hall who married a black man in the early 70s, as evidence of

this, despite saying very little to Richard whenever we visit. Her racism (and it is racism) is very

passive-aggressive. Her manners are impeccable and she treats everyone with courtesy and

respect, but she divides the world into White people like her and “others.” She will always
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mention the race of someone if they are not White, regardless of its relevancy to whatever it is

she is discussing.. “…the author is a Chinese woman and she writes about…” “I met a very nice

Cuban lady at church the other day…” “He married a lovely Indian gal.” White is most

definitively her default for everything and all other races are outliers that need to be explained.

Her concerns about the townhouses were as much about class as race. Less concern was

expressed about members of other ethnicities if they lived in our part of the neighborhood. She

also very much buys into the 1980s Ronald Reagan Welfare Queen myth and sees the urban poor

as shiftless lay-abouts that leech taxpayer money. Rural white poor, though, are hardworking

victims of unfortunate economic conditions. I’m not entirely certain of this, but I feel like when

she was younger she was like the people I saw in Civil Rights documentaries that said things like

“I think Blacks should have rights, but things are just moving too quickly.” In her later years, she

has taken to keeping Fox News on in the background. The views presented by pundits on that

network reinforce her prejudices and fears. She fears we are losing our culture as evidenced by

“the war on Christmas” and rails against “PC culture.”

My dad is a little more open-minded. He served in WW2, Korea and Vietnam, as well as

working for the Department of Defense as a civilian from the end of Vietnam through the late

1990s and has been across the globe and worked alongside people of numerous cultures. He is a

big proponent on judging people on their merit. My father grew up during the Great Depression

and leans heavily into individualistic values such as “independence and self-responsibility” (p

110 McCarthy 2005). This leads him to oppose things like affirmative action, as he sees it is

people being chosen for their race and not their competence. I have made some headway in

getting him to understand the historic and systemic inequalities that lead to the necessity of

affirmative action, but any gain is undone by the perpetual messaging of Fox News pundits. His
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use of terminology leaves much to be desired, though. The terms that were acceptable during his

formative years (he was born in 1926), Colored and Oriental for example, are not acceptable now

and it is difficult to make him understand why. It is also uncomfortable when he is shouting

these terms in restaurants and other places.

They later moved from our neighborhood in Montgomery County to a series of gated

communities until finally settling in the affluent Florida town of Naples. They have a second-

floor condo with a ground floor entrance because “it gives them more time if someone breaks

in.” They associate minorities with criminals and have little interaction with anyone who isn’t

also rich, white and retired. I would put my parents in the Reintegration stage of Helms’ model.

They have chosen to “withdraw… to conduct [their] cross-racial interactions from a safe

distance” (pp 156 Helms 1984). They make no effort to understand the implications of being

white. They read books were racism is wrapped in pseudo-science, like Hernstein and Murray’s

The Bell Curve (1996) in order to reinforce their beliefs and they mourn the greatness of

America.

My own views would likely mirror those of my family if were not for my love of comic

books and specifically, the Uncanny X-Men. The best-selling Marvel comic of the 1980s

featured mutants or Homo Superior, people born with altered DNA that often granted them

superpowers. Facing a humanity threatened by their power, mutants faced discrimination and

violence, often from the legal system backed by the military. Conceived in the 1960s as a loose

analogy for the Civil Rights movement, the X-Men vowed to fight the prejudice they faced by

using their powers to defend the world that hated and feared them (Daniels 1991). As clumsy as

the metaphor often was (as well as melodramatic), the X-Men taught me that institutional power

was only as moral as the individuals who wielded it, and individuals were often ruled by petty
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fears that caused them to hate anyone different from them. Prejudice became, in my mind, the

purview of villains and bullies. These comic books helped usher in my Disintegration stage

(Helms 1984). In Junior High I associated almost exclusively with the kids from the

townhouses. I mirrored their clothing and slang, though I’m not sure how much of that was a

subconscious rejection of white culture instead of just an impressionable preteen copying his

friends. It was the early 90s and hip-hop had replaced rock and roll as the music of rebellion

(Hughes 2017). I remember a few uncomfortable conversations about race. I think my friends

were at the Immersion Stage (Helms 1984), as I was often asked if I felt being white was better

than being black. I remember being uncomfortable and not really answering, except to say that I

couldn’t really say as I didn’t know how to be anything else. My relationship with them

dissolved around the time we entered High School. The very pretty (white) neighbor girls who

were the center of gravity for our groups were swept into older social circles and we all spent

less time together. But I “retreated back into the predictability of the White culture” (p 156

Helms 1984) after the incident on the basketball court.

It occurred between me and Reggie, who was very charismatic and the unofficial leader

of our group of friends. We collided on the court and I said “damn boy, chill.” Reggie became

very angry, got in my face and began shouting “see a boy, smack a boy!” At the time, I did not

realize that boy was a loaded term to the African-American community. I was very confused

and my feelings were hurt that my friend was reacting so angrily. I went home and never really

hung out with them again. I dropped all of the hip-hop clothes (though I didn’t put my rap tapes

away). I knew I wanted to rebel and fight oppression, so I adopted the style of historic white

angst: punk rock. I entered the Reintegration stage, and while I didn’t become hostile to other
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races and I still thought of myself as someone who would fight against prejudice, I did so at a

very safe distance.

My simplistic comic book ideas of prejudice combined with my teenage desire to rebel

against anything and everything. I read anything that seemed seditious of modern American

culture and became engrossed with concepts like Marxism and Anarchism. I rejected religion

and became an Atheist. I ranted against materialism and conformity without really having a

solid point of contention, except that I was opposed to anything mainstream. I recognize now

that my comfortable upper-middle class existence afforded me the comfort and freedom to reject

society. I even dropped out of college and bummed around for a year before becoming bored

and enlisting in the Army in 1999.

The military is not exactly the egalitarian meritocracy it purports to be, but it does a fair

job. I not only regularly interact with members of other ethnic, socioeconomic and religious

groups, I count on them for everything from food and shelter, safety and security, and friendship

and mentorship often in stressful, austere and hazardous environments. The military is a diverse

group where an individual’s background is, for the most part, irrelevant when compared to their

competence and capabilities.

My career field is Psychological Operations. Our job is to influence the behaviors of

foreign target audiences in line with US objectives. It’s basically propaganda. We are (in

theory) trained to be cultural experts in the regions we operate in. I received an intensive six

month Arabic language course, though my fluency has long since lapsed. I have conducted

operations in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Southeast Asia, but the bulk of my experiences

overseas come from the Middle East and Central Asia. I did two tours in Afghanistan and, if you

add up all my deployments, have spent over four years in Iraq (I often joke that I should be
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allowed to vote there). It was during my first tour in Iraq that I really began to enter into the

Psuedo-independent stage.

9-11 happened and analysis of Middle Eastern culture was everywhere. Arab, Muslim,

and Terrorist all became synonyms and it was us against them and bought into it. I was part of a

three-man tactical loudspeaker team attached to the main effort of the Army’s push from the

Kuwait border to Baghdad. We were going to liberate Iraq from the savage grip of a dictator and

enlighten them with democracy. That illusion was shattered for me almost immediately.

I won’t recount all of the carnage I witnessed, but I will say that the majority of it was

aimed at the civilian population and occurred because we were convinced that within every Iraqi

harbored the heart of a terrorist. It wasn’t hate that drove a lot of it, but fear. This was before

the insurgency when we were fighting the uniformed Iraqi Army, but every brown person was

treated as a threat. It was very ugly and most definitely racist. My fellow soldiers and I were no

doubt in danger, but the casual violence visited upon civilians who were just trying to get out of

the way was appalling.

The loudspeaker team I was a part of had two main jobs: surrender appeals to hostile

enemy forces and clearing civilians off of the battlefield. The former was simple. The latter was

extremely difficult as there was no safe place to tell people to go. We would direct vehicles

away from the path of our convoy, only to find them further up the road, destroyed by another

unit for “getting to close”. If we encountered entrenched resistance in an area, we would level

the buildings from the air. It was ugly, but such is war. All of my heroic notions were gone.

I left the service after the invasion only to return two years later. I was married now,

without much in the way of marketable skills. I came back just in time to do a 15 month tour as

part of the surge. By this time and the subsequent tours, I understood what we were: occupiers.
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We would never be accepted or appreciated for overthrowing Sadam. Every soldier taking his

bad day out on the vehicles passing through his checkpoint made sure the hearts and minds of the

Iraqis and Afghans could never be won. We could never be viewed positively while routinely

dragging people out into the street in the middle of the night, weapons pointed at their families,

so we could ransack their homes in the search for terrorist cells. Now, I don’t agree with the

insurgent groups’ methods, but I understand why they fight. This doesn’t stop me from doing

my job, but I don’t think I am defending anyone’s freedom. I also understand why soldiers

dehumanized the Iraqis and Afghans. It made it easier for us to do our job and sleep at night if

they were “others” that didn’t qualify for the same respect and dignity that we did. It allowed us

to turn off our empathy and focus on our own safety and objectives. Prejudice wasn’t born out

of fear or a lack of understanding, as the X-Men taught me, but of convenience. It is easier to

fight someone that you demonize or, in the case of our own country, to exploit the labor of

people you don’t see as human because of the color of their skin.

Once I could see things from this perspective, I started seeking out more detailed

information. I devoured The New Jim Crow and other books about race in America (Alexander

2010). I began to see race as the root of many of the problems in our country. For example, the

reason we are the only developed Western country with a deep-rooted gun culture is because

white slave owners needed guns to maintain control of the slaves who outnumbered them. The

places where guns are most popular are in former slave states or frontier territories where white

settlers clashed with darker skinned natives. I came to realize that America had the myth of

white supremacy baked into its foundation. The thesis for the capstone paper for my Bachelor’s

degree was how race-based voting laws were a way to keep poor whites and blacks from uniting

to overthrow the entrenched oligarchy.

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I would like to think that I have entered the Autonomy stage (Helms 1984), but I’m not

really sure. I interact regularly with people of all races and I feel comfortable with my own

identity. I also have become very angry at the current political state of our country and I feel I

may have reverted back to the Disintegration stage where I “become paternalistic toward

particular blacks as a means of protecting them from further potential abuse” (p. 156 Helms

1984), though I would change “blacks” to “minorities.” I feel that white society has become

fearful that it is losing its majority status and is becoming more hostile to minorities in general.

My reaction to the Trump presidency has been to become more aggressive in my opposition to

certain points of view. It was so bad that I deleted all of my social media accounts.

My newest challenge isn’t just about black and white, but liberal and conservative.

Making assumptions about others and possibly alienating or dehumanizing them for their

political beliefs is just as shortsighted as doing based on ethnicity. Just like narrative therapy has

clients name their problems (Murdock 2016), I have named my issues “Trump.” I am learning to

cope with the current state of discourse in our society. I see it not as something new that sprung

into being through the lunacy of Trump, but as something that has always been there, waiting for

its moment. I am will still challenge views I disagree with, but I want to do it in a constructive

way. I really have no other choice. My parents, who I love dearly, are part of Trump. Many of

my coworkers, some of who outrank me and have a tremendous amount of power over my life,

have Trump’s picture taped above their desks. I tell myself that it is not my place or purpose to

change their politics.

I think I will need to keep this in mind to be an effective counselor. I am less concerned with

treating clients of other racial or ethnic groups, as I am of treating clients from my own group

who are in a different place when it comes to the Helms’ model (Helms 1984), but where I am in
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the process doesn’t really matter to my clients unless I force it on them. Clients need to be met

where they are, not where I think they ought to be. Once something is put in a model, it becomes

easy to see it as evolution or progress. A desire to want to help people along, to improve

themselves if you will, is natural. But just because I see it that way, doesn’t mean a client will.

I need to remember that that reducing anyone down to race, gender, political belief or any single

aspect of their being at the expense of the others is done out of convenience. If I catch myself

doing it, I will need to explore what challenge dehumanizing them is making easier. I still have a

lot to learn.
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References

Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New

York: New Press.

Daniels, L. (1991). Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics. Marvel

Entertainment Group, New York, NY. ISBN 0-8109-3821-9

Helms, J. E. (1984). Toward a theoretical explanation of the effects of race on counseling: A

Black and White model. The Counseling Psychologist, 12, 153-165.

Hernstein, J., & Murray, C. (1996) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American

Life Free Press Paperback 978-0684824291

Hughes, A. (Director). (2017). The Defiant Ones HBO

McCarthy, J. (2005). Individualism and collectivism: What do they have to do with counseling?

Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 33, 108-117.

Murdock, N. (2016). Theories of counseling and psychotherapy: A case approach.

(4th ed.) Pearson.