Gifts that minorities bring: a sampler

By Kathryn Foxhall
Monitor staff

Several APA members spoke eloquently about the contribu- tions their ethnic cultures have made to the United States in an Aug. 20 session on "Gifts that minorities bring." The session was the opening program of the Presidential Miniconvention on Ethnic Minorities, a part of the APA's Annual Convention, Aug. 20 - 24.

Below are just a few examples of those contributions.

Asian-American gifts

JEAN LAU CHIN, EdD, President, CEO Services, Newton, Mass.

"The Asian influences on Western culture have now become pervasive. They include the principles of feng sui, which studies how people experience their physical environment--a philosophy that has now become popular in the West, and influenced architecture in the structure of our homes and our offices, our well-being and our minds for healthier, happier, prosperous surrounding.

"We have meditation, Tai Chi and martial arts, as forms of exercise and mental states to promote discipline and rigor for mental alertness and physical well-being. And we have philosophies of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, which have emphasized the principles of harmony and balance of natural elements, the wholistic view of our environment, both psychological and physical."

African-American gifts

THOMAS A. PARHAM, PhD, assistant vice-chancellor, University of California-Irvine.

"One of the most important pieces that [African-Americans] have given is the notion of spirituality. Because what is true is that while you can chain a person's body, [and] you can shackle their ankles and their arms, it is often times more difficult to shackle the spirit.

"We gave this nation it's model for resistance to oppression....and for maintaining sanity in the process. We were doing psychology long before APA even existed."

Jewish gifts

KAREN J.GREENE, PhD, associate psychologist, Rockland Psychiatric Center, Orangeburg, N.Y.

"We Jews have brought the focus of law, the focus of education and on learning for its own sake, [and] the focus on family and spirituality and mysticism....And we have supported education and medical institutions, social welfare agencies, museums and cultural institutions for the use of the community at large.

"And I think our final gift, has been the art of surviving. How, despite great historical adversity, including the holocaust, which threatened our continued physical, psychological and cultural existence, we survived. We survived by humor, by continuity of tradition and by always remembering who we are and from where we came."

Biracial gifts

KAREN J. GREENE, PhD, (Dr. Greene, who has both African-American and Jewish heritage, gave both the Jewish and biracial presentations.)

"The issue of bi-raciality in America has always been very difficult. Because I think American society needs to categorize people....We don't look at how many African-Americans are married to Native Americans. Or how many Korean-Americans are married to African-Americans--the whole gamut of other types of possible blends that there are.

"You think of the migration process. How when a family migrates from one country to another, they tend to pull in, they tend to want to hang out with their own, have their children play with children who are the same ethnic group, to keep the language, to keep the customs.

"So what does it means for a child from one of these families to want to marry some body different? How does a family deal with that issue? So it is an active assertion for the children who do, for the people who do. A tremendous psychological assertiveness."

Native American gifts

JOSEPH E. TRIMBLE, PhD, professor of psychology, Western Washington University.

"The way the Iroquois confederacy--the people of the long house--organized themselves was the foundation of the Constitution of the United States. [Their system was] strongly and heavily advocated by both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who actually assigned one of [Jefferson's] staff members to study the organizational, democratic processes that existed within the people of the long house. And that became the model for the way we govern our country...."

Hispanic gifts

OLIVA M. ESPIN, PhD, professor, San Diego State University.

"As with all others who are 'other' in any sense of the word, Latinos bring to U.S. society and to psychology the gift of asking pertinent questions about psychological truths and about the nature of life in the U.S. in a different way. The questions asked, the nature of research...the nature of political truths to be dealt with, change when outsiders start becoming insiders....

"The struggles to preserve identity, the need to assist each other in these struggles have served us. They also can develop into healthy gifts to other minorities, such as white gays and lesbians for example, and to U.S. society in general."

Challenges for everyone

JANIS V. SANCHEZ, PhD, professor, Old Dominion University, Virginia Beach, Va.

"Trying to build a multiethnic society, we have to, as ethnic minorities, learn white culture and white ways of speaking and white values because to not do so means that we are going to be judged deficient or inferior.

"So we are schooled in that one, plus we are going to be schooled in the ethnic background, the racial background, the religious background of our families....

"If we get through our own and we get through white culture, most of us don't take the time for the third level, which is to find out about other ethnic minorities....

"If you are going to be teachers, educators, healers, activists, preachers, all these roles that psychologists have to be: I would like to challenge, with this panel, to continue to study and to learn, not just about your own group or about white culture, but about all the groups, all the diversity in this country, in this world."Y



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