Yesterday the LA Times wrote about "cultural orientation" for Somalian refugees on their way to the US. The lesson plan included a primer on gender in the US:
Immigrants also heard about U.S. laws. Beating your wife and children is illegal, they were told, and so is chewing khat, the leafy amphetamine-like stimulant popular in Somalia. Performing genital excision on young girls is prohibited."If I can't beat my wife, how will she know that I love her?" Abrone asked, seated next to his silent teenage bride.
I was really curious to read how and whether the "instructor" addressed these issues, but the article only quotes the immigrants.
The second day of class began with an exercise in equality. Students broke into teams and were asked to identify which potential U.S. jobs — taxi driver, hairdresser or doctor, for example — were held exclusively by men and which were held by women. It was a trick question, designed to spark a discussion about gender equality.In one group, Abdi Ahmed Mohammed, 56, a former Mogadishu shopkeeper, grabbed the worksheet and began dividing the occupations by gender.
"Wait," Yussuf complained. "Why is 'housekeeper' female?"
"It's woman's work," Mohammed snapped, checking the box for "female."
As the instructor began calling on students to defend their answers, it became clear that, at least in the U.S., the correct answer for all jobs was "both." Mohammed began discreetly erasing his worksheet, and when the instructor asked for his answer for "baby-sitter," he covered the paper with an arm and answered confidently, "Both."
It's an interesting idea. Sure, it's easy to check the correct box in a classroom setting. But it's a lot harder to come to terms with a foreign culture's ideas about gender. I mean, I suppose they can teach the "ideal" gender situation (like it being perfectly socially acceptable-- and equally common-- for both genders to work as fulltime babysitters and housekeepers), but all too often that isn't the reality. There are lots of people born and raised in the US who would say unequivocally that some occupations are for men and others are the domain of women. Whether they need it or not, they're not made to go through a cultural reorientation course.
I'm also left wondering about Abrone's "silent teenage bride." Was she given the pop quiz on gender roles, too? Or was she completely disengaged from the whole process?
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For the past year or so, I worked with political or ethnic refugees in Kentucky. Some of them described the kinds of orientation classes that they faced before coming to the U.S. I have mixed feelings about the 'cultural reorientation' of immigrants. From reading the article, you can't tell much about how prescriptive vs. how descriptive the course was, but I just want to talk about the idea of a 'cultural reorientation' course.
On one hand, immigrants should be taught HOW things are done in the United States. They should be taught the laws and public customs, most definitely. And viewing American women in action (jobs, in public, in conversation) will likely create a situation where immigrants DO have to re-evaluate their ideas about gender roles. But trying to 'culturally reorient' them to think this or that is the wrong way to go about it, I think. While it is important to talk about how people in the U.S. (attempt to) create gender equality, it's up to individual families to negotiate how they adapt to these cultural pressures. I think a prescriptive culture class is a bit imperialist, even if it is about something as important as gender equality. We in the U.S. should provide resources for immigrants (esp. women immigrants) to access if they want regarding all types of U.S. culture, but a 'cultural reorientation' course sounds like cultural imperialism to me. Don't get me wrong -- it's SO important for women to know their options in the U.S. -- and their rights. But it's also important for immigrants to navigate these pathways themselves in order to find a balance between their own culture and their new home's. Especially in the case of refugees -- keep in mind, they don't necessarily want to come to the U.S. and they don't necessarily want to be integrated into mainstream U.S. culture. Yes, often it's true. But sometimes it isn't -- which is why a required cultural 'reorientation' course is bad news.
Additionally, the sponsorship office that I worked with in Kentucky was culturally prescriptive as well. For one, in Kentucky, all refugees (most of whom, in my experience, were Muslim) are forced to be adopted by a 'host parish,' a Presbyterian church that oversees their integration into the U.S. and tries to welcome them into the (religious) community. Think of having to go through a 'religious reorientation' course -- offensive, right? -- well, it exists, if not by that name.
When it comes to jobs, the settlement office usually found jobs for the males in families first and the women later -- months later -- if at all. So there we are again paying lip service to gender equality and then our own institutions meant to reach out to immigrants model gender inequality. I can't speak for anywhere but the office I worked with, but it was definitely there.
So, what I should have said in two sentences: Living here should be the cultural class that lets people re-evaluate their values -- not some lecturer. As long as people are aware of their options, a kind of prescriptive 'reorientation' model for creating a cultural identity is the wrong model to follow when introducing immigrants to the dominant way of life in the U.S.