Chapters 3 & 4

Chapter 3 – Divisions Erected Out of Thin Air:  

In this chapter, Cleveland speaks about categorizing people as helpful. She states, “categorizing helps us all to process information in an energy-efficient way.” As she continues on with this section she discusses how spending time in a different culture can be stressful because we do not know the social cues. I can agree with this, no doubt. An example would be my freshman year, I was rooming with an international student here on campus. This student was from South Korea and as we were roommates, we spent quite a bit of time together, getting to know each other and understanding each-others cultures. While I didn’t necessarily feel stressed, I felt very uncomfortable at times. Two examples for instance; one, she made me some Korean food one day and was very worried that I hated it because I was not making a slurping sound. This made her uncomfortable because the slurping sound is a sign that it tastes good. At the same time it made me uncomfortable because as she slurped away all that ran through my mind was how noisy and annoying the sound was. This is a difference in cultures. The other example would be when I brought both her and another international student home with me over thanksgiving my freshman year. While I was slowly learning their culture, my family knew nothing. We encountered many uncomfortable situations where the girls would want to sleep all the time and made us late to each of the family events. They had it in the back of their mind that being late was a good thing, show up late and leave late, they thought. However, that isn’t how my family goes about things. While this is just some minor examples, I can see where Cleveland is coming from by saying that categorizing helps. It has helped me interact with other international students and have positive outcomes from the experiences and I am much more comfortable now. However, just as Cleveland said that categorizing helps, it can also hurt. Just as well, categorizing the international students has hurt me. I started to assume that all of the Asian students spoke Korean and had the same cultures. That is not true at all, they are all from different places such as the Philippines and Thailand. They do not all speak Korean and they do not all have the same culture. While categorizing these students was helpful in times, it also put me in awkward situations when I assumed they would be like my roommate. If you have ever spoken Korean to a student from the Philippines, you might understand where I am coming from. Taking that one step further, on a larger scale with all students attending Dordt, categorizing them as believers and knowing God can hurt not only us but them as well. I assumed my roommate knew and believed in God, I came to find out that I was wrong. Some students come to Dordt to learn and hear for themselves about God. Assuming everyone believes is cutting those that do not believe short. This is where categorizing hurts. However, this has allowed me to be better about not categorizing based on something such as religion but instead recognizing others as fellow members of the body of Christ. While categorizing seems to come natural at times, I think in the long run it is best not to and to instead get to know people on an individual basis.

Chapter 4 – Beyond Perceptions:

 Getting into this chapter the piece that stood out to me the most was Cleveland’s description of the gold standard. We create perceptions of ourselves and of other groups which affect how we interact with others. We pick out the differences between ourselves and others and tend to exaggerate them. So, why do we do this? Is it because of the familiarity Cleveland discussed in the previous chapters? While I wish I could say I have not done these things before, I know that cannot be said. Creating these perceptions and pinpointing differences has hindered how I interact with others. Leading right back to categorization, I have a tendency to group others together and make assumptions. Just the other day some of my friends and I were having a discussion about religions. I grew up Lutheran and the others in the discussion are all reformed. We talked about the differences between Christian Reformed and Reformed and then moved onto Lutheran. Cleveland mentioned communion in the book and this conversation came to mind. My home church does communion on a weekly basis. This came up in our conversation and they made a comment about my church being closely related to the Catholic’s because of how we do communion. I responded in a bit of a defensive matter as my best friend back home is Catholic and we have picked out differences before but never the way we “do” communion. However, in reading this chapter, Cleveland really made me think about this conversation and how it was natural in a sense for them to set a category or gold standard for themselves based on a practice. I realize that this is done much more often than we may think. So, why do we do it?