Who is Responsible for Adapting?
"Outsiders" shoulder a disproportionate burden when it comes to fitting in. Can we demand more from the "insiders?"
This is the 4th installment of This is Not Advice, a not-advice column for paid subscribers of What Works. Already a paid subscriber? Thank you! If you’re not, enjoy the first half of this essay (audio or written) or upgrade your subscription to access the whole thing.
Today's question comes from a Brazilian living in the US, working as a contractor at a tech company. They gave me a bunch of interesting questions to think about, but this one gives me an opportunity to share something I think about quite a bit but haven't gotten the chance to write about much:
As a foreigner, how much should I adapt myself to fit the culture?
It feels like tons of storytelling, not so much story-doing.
I love this question because I am in no way qualified to weigh in on this, being an American who has never lived outside the country. And, at the same time, I am intimately familiar with the contours of figuring out how to exist in a culture that often doesn't make sense to me. So allow me to come at this from a different angle.
“Foreigners” in Any Society
Jim Sinclair, an autism rights activist, penned the deeply moving essay, "Don't Mourn for Us," which I highly recommend everyone reads. There are a couple of lines in it that nail my experience of autistic life:
It takes more work to communicate with someone whose native language isn't the same as yours. And autism goes deeper than language and culture; autistic people are "foreigners" in any society.
Here, Sinclair is not proposing a sort of travel guide for autistic people. They don't present a set of tips for adapting to non-autistic culture. In fact, they're not addressing autistic people at all.
Sinclair is writing for non-autistic people—specifically parents who respond to their child's autism diagnosis with a sense of loss and grief. Instead of "push[ing] for the things your expectations tell you are normal," Sinclair suggests, "approach respectfully, without preconceptions, and with openness to learning new things, and you'll find a world you could never have imagined."
Sinclair concedes that connecting with an autistic person takes more work than connecting with a non-autistic person. But they also point out that they're only asking for the same kind of effort that autistic people put in every day. Non-autistic people can relate and communicate with us—"unless non-autistic people are far more limited than we are in their capacity to relate."
I freaking love that line.
Each of us who does learn to talk to you, each of us who manages to function at all in your society, each of us who manages to reach out and make a connection with you, is operating in alien territory, making contact with alien beings. We spend our entire lives doing this. And then you tell us that we can't relate.
What I'm trying to say is that someone who wasn't born in the United States is already putting in a great deal of work to navigate life here.
On a daily basis, they're filtering the cultural instincts they've picked up over a lifetime through the perception of Americans. Layer in work culture, and there's even more effort required.
It's similar to the kind of work that Black people, people of color, disabled people, queer people, chronically ill people, fat people, and people who belong to all manner of marginalized groups do every day. It's what many people don't get about diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at work. DEI isn't only about making different people feel comfortable and included at work.
DEI work is also about helping people from the dominant culture shoulder a bit more of the cognitive burden.
How can historically underestimated people fully contribute if they're also straining to translate themselves to become legible to the dominant culture?
Philosopher Ellie Anderson offers a term for this kind of work: hermeneutic labor.
The field of hermeneutics originates with the study of religious texts and refers to how the meaning of a text is interpreted. Hermeneutic labor is the work of interpretation. It's related to the concepts of emotional labor and affective labor, but distinct from them. Anderson writes:
...hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of a) understanding one's own feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations, and presenting them in an intelligible fashion to others when deemed appropriate; b) discerning others' feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations by interpreting their verbal and nonverbal cues...; and c) comparing and contrasting these multiple sets of feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations for the purposes of conflict resolution.
Anderson focuses her work on hermeneutic labor in intimate partner relationships between men and women. But this kind of work also happens in the (virtual) office. I am often called on to interpret the behavior or language of someone else in a work setting.
I'm asked to "read between the lines" of an email or conversation to help make sense of another person's communication or behavior. This is not something I'm supposed to be good at as an autistic person, right? And yet, because of my autistic experience, it's something I have a ton of experience and skill with.
In addition to the interpretation I do of others' speech or behavior, I also must translate the feelings, intentions, and motivations of my own autistic experience for non-autistic people in a work setting. And even when I communicate that experience clearly, it’s rarely taken at face value.
Those who don't have to perform hermeneutic labor on a regular basis are able to assume a "shared system, a shared understanding of signals and meanings," to quote Sinclair again. But this is a long-outdated approach to culture (if it was ever appropriate). Today's work environments are full of people who don't share the same understanding of signals and meanings. If someone on the team is unwilling to drop their assumptions about what's "normal," they cause a significant breakdown in communication and demand something of others that they're not willing to do themselves.
I remember a very clarifying moment of television on this point. Years ago, Sean and I were watching a clip from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon where Fallon and three guests played the game Catchphrase. To play Catchphrase, one player gets a common phrase that they have to describe to their team member. You earn points by guessing the phrase correctly in a certain period of time.
In this segment, Marlon Wayans gets his clue and has to describe it to Jason Derulo.
Wayans hesitates, dances around a bit, and then declares, "I don't know what this is." Wayans uses his context clues, though, and guesses, "White people get this... Black people don't get this."
The phrase? Farmer's tan.
Both Wayans and Derulo are Black. No one quality-checking the clues at Catchphrase or at The Tonight Show, for that matter, considered that "farmer's tan" is a term from white people's shared meanings and wouldn't easily translate for non-white players. Granted, this was really funny. Fallon apologizes profusely, and Wayans seems to take it in stride—especially when he's given a do-over, and Derulo nails the answer in one beat. But even that do-over is another task to perform, right?
Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to cancel Catchphrase. It's just a poignant object lesson that Sean and I still reference to this day.
Playing a game like Catchphrase already relies on a certain set of translation skills. You're under pressure! That's what makes it fun. But when you're playing with concepts that you're not fluent in, there's a whole other layer of translation and interpretation that has to happen.
The burden of hermeneutic labor is always disproportionately shouldered by people whose identities don't fit the mold.
And, yes, we can talk about how to manage that, how to make it a little less alienating, how to approach it a little more strategically—that's a good conversation to have.
But I'm really interested in demanding more from the people who don't have to work so hard.
I want to consider what it looks like to stand strong in our differences and ask that others meet us halfway. I don't think it's too much to ask of our co-workers and colleagues what Jim Sinclair asks of the parents of autistic children:
You're going to have to give up your assumptions about shared meanings. You're going to have to learn to back up to levels more basic than you've probably thought about before, to translate, and to check to make sure your translations are understood.
When everyone is responsible for rethinking their assumptions, double-checking meanings, and seeing others for who they are rather than as just another instance of the dominant culture, then we can co-create a shared work culture. We can create a set of shared meanings and symbols as they relate to the work we do, rather than asking everyone to conform to the dominant culture.
This might be a bit of a leap here, but I'm working on a series for the fall on how science fiction can help us imagine the future of work and the economy. So, naturally, I've been devouring science fiction that includes an emphasis on work. Most of what I've read has been set in the far future in space or on distant planets. And that means there are a lot of literal aliens. Specifically, there are a lot of humans working with many different species of aliens.
In these scenarios, everyone is expected to do some hermeneutic labor. Everyone is expected to drop their assumptions about what's "normal" or what particular symbols mean. Groups of people working together maintain their home cultures, but they also develop team cultures that work for everyone involved. They have systems for common needs like sharing pronouns, preparing food, or dealing with biological quirks.
Everyone shares in the work of cultural learning and translation so that everyone can benefit from having a diverse and cohesive team.
So I think I properly avoided the original question. But hopefully, I've left you with some food for thought and, perhaps, a bit of inspiration to ask a little more of the people around you.