Competing for cred – it’s damn irritating to be around people who do it, and I can claim my share of guilt. What does competing for cred mean? For me, it means doing and learning little things that make me come off as deeply knowledgable about a community of people of color to white people like me. Think Save the Last Dance – the white girl goes to the majority-black school, learns how to dance over the course of several months from her black boyfriend, and then uses that new learning to impress the white judges of a highly competitive arts academy. She hasn’t actually done anything to benefit the community where she learned all of those funky dance moves. She just accumulated them, repeated them, and allowed them to pave her way to bigger and better things.
Here’s some examples from my world:
I do a lot of spoken translation, mostly because there are not that many very bilingual people in the organization I work with, and I end up thinking a lot about the often undeserved cred I get in that context. I learned most of my spoken Spanish from being around people who speak it, and from listening, and from being very generously instructed by friends, co-workers and clients at the community social service/organizing agency where I used to work.
As a result, my accent is great, at least to the untrained ear. People who don’t speak Spanish who hear me speaking are frequently impressed. And I definitely have tried hard to learn, to improve my grammar, to get better at doing spoken interpretation quickly while conveying meaning as accurately as possible. But I’m still learning. I screw up tenses all the time – so someone might say, “I would have really liked to get on that train” and I turn it into “I had gotten on that train”. That’s quite a difference, especially when you take into account the part where the translation is happening so people can make some pretty major decisions about exploitative and dangerous situations they find themselves in.
I don’t screw up all the time – but enough so that my translation can be confusing, and be a roadblock to people’s decision-making. Here’s the thing – if you only speak English, you a) don’t know that I mistranslated and b) blame the Spanish speakers in the meeting for being confused. You also assume that I just magically learned that Spanish because I am terribly smart, which (while I’d like to assume this is true) is less important than the part where many, many native speakers generously invested their time and energy in teaching me. And unlike H2B visa workers or day laborers, who work 8-18 hours a day, struggle to make ends meet while holding multiple jobs and send most of their scant earnings back home, I have had the time to make a serious investment in learning Spanish. By contrast, many of the Spanish-speaking immigrants I have known would absolutely love to learn English, but they don’t have any time to learn, any money to pay for expensive language courses, or any English speakers waiting eagerly to practice with them. It’s a one-way learning flow for the most part.
But English speakers – other people like me – assume that I’m damn fabulous and have a deep understanding of Spanish. And I’ve accumulated enough specialized vocabulary in Spanish to sound like I know a bunch about people from Latin America. For example, I know that a chilango is a person from Mexico City, and a salvatrucho is a younger – or more gangsta-identified – person from El Salvador. So I can get jobs at social services agencies, even gigs advising organizations about how to better meet the needs or reach or educate Spanish-speaking immigrants.
But really – the only people who really know about their community, how to reach each other, how to educate each other – are the Spanish-speaking immigrants themselves, who happen to not be a monolithic group. My cred shouldn’t give me such undeserved assumed expertise. And any organization that’s driven by its base (sorry for the organizing jargon) would be checking in with the Spanish speakers as much as the English speakers, to see what’s actually being transmitted and what is being lost in translation.
So how do I learn about a community that I’m not a part of? One way – and one I’m frequently guilty of – is to accumulate little pieces of information and then throw them around. I know Tupac’s songs, and Mercedes Sosa, and I can talk about police profiling. And those are important things to know – each of these items like one word in a larger vocabulary. But it doesn’t mean that I understand that community deeply, doesn’t mean I am trustworthy, doesn’t mean I am going to be around for the long haul. That’s the cred-accumulating way to learn.
So what’s the principled way to learn and talk about a community that’s not my own? I’m still working on this, but here are some ideas:
1) When someone tells me about an issue or dynamic in a different community, ask whether that’s something they’d like repeated, or something they prefer to only share themselves. It’s beyond wrong to repeat information that was shared with me in confidence, as a trusted ally, just so I can get white kids who are my age to think I’m extra cool.
2) Speak up as much about the rights and needs of that community with people like me who aren’t supportive as with people like me who are. I know that’s confusing – here’s what it means: I need to be as willing to talk to my grandma about the myriad reasons “those Mexicans” (her term for anyone from Latin America) come to the U.S. as I am to talk to other cool progressive people my age about my work with immigrant communities. If I’m not willing to speak up strongly about that community in all settings, especially settings where I don’t benefit from speaking up, I need to shut up.
3) Deep learning. In learning Spanish, it was great that I picked up all those little snippets of slang and street culture that came from living in California. But now I have to focus on learning the less-sexy stuff – the preterite, for example, and the false cognates that have snuck insidiously into my Spanish vocab. In the same way, that deep learning about communities other than my own happens not through being present for a couple of hours, days, months in order to learn little snippets of info about this community, but through the less-sexy work of being in contact, regular, supportive, solidarity-type contact for a lifetime. That’s not always fun, or entertaining, or exciting. And yet – if I claim solidarity, it’s my job.
Stumbling towards a movement 