Fred, Seth, and Crash

So my friends Fred & Seth are from Ghana. They worked with the stock market in Tokyo when I lived there and were deacons in an international church. There is a lot of racial prejudice in Japan, as there is in the U.S. My Ghanaian friends experienced a lot of hateful treatment while they were there. All of our experiences color our schema and our Pragmatic Expectancy Grammar (Oller 1979)-- when we encounter a sign that looks like one we know, we automatically attribute the meaning that we know to that sign--normalizing in the direction of known schema as Bartlett (1932) says.

There has to be a certain amount of everyday information that has become part of our assumptions so that we don't have to check every chair, for example, to make sure it will hold us, check behind doors to make sure they're real doors and don't just open up to a brick wall, respond to a wave with a wave instead of interpreting it as someone's malicious desire to erase you. :) So we can't dispose with assumptions altogether. But if we had enough schema to anticipate likely or possible divergences from our own, we could recalibrate at potential hot spots and have more control over our interactions and over executing our interactional goals.

The gesture that beckons someone to you in Asia looks kind of like a Western wave, but a lot more like a "shoo, get out of here" gesture with the arm extended the hand facing down and all four fingers moving towards the user and away repetitively. In Ghana it is used only for shooing animals away. So when they approached a little old Japanese lady at her newstand on the street she beckoned to them with this gesture, inviting them to come over, but of course not having schema yet for this gesture, they thought they were being 'shooed' away, like animals.

It's exactly the kind of situation that drives the movie Crash. Misunderstandings caused by years of bad experiences and schema that miscues to the individual that this situation is yet another example of what we have come to expect from 'those people' in this context. And these misunderstandings keep accruing, building more and more ill will. If somehow we could become aware of these hot spots in current inter-group interaction, developing schema for the schema of others, we could start tearing down some of the walls which may have once been the product of true ill will among people before us, but so much of which are now the product of only imagined messages.