I remember I had a huge ‘aha moment’ when a friend explained to me that the essence of ‘slumming’ is that someone believes that in going into your culture, they are going to a place where the ordinary rules of decent human behavior don’t apply. And therefore they feel totally free to explore their most fucked-up impulses, because they feel like they’ve made it into a place where the rules don’t apply, and/or nobody’s going to judge them, and/or the people they are harming don’t really matter, and etc.
This was after I related a very painful experience I’d kept quiet about for years. In which I’d thought I was sharing my culture with someone, and then all of a sudden they started bringing this horrible racist shit into it with a delight that frightened me. I couldn’t speak up at the time, I was frozen, and I felt horribly guilty for not speaking up, but the overall power situation was one where I didn’t feel remotely comfortable or even safe, saying “Where the fuck are you getting the idea that this is okay with people like me?”
So my introduction to this particular brand of fucked-up behavior was within my own country, but involved the complicated layers of class, ethnicity, and culture that underlie a country as huge and diverse as the USA. People who don’t leave the country to do this, can still do this sort of crap by crossing boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, region, and culture. And you can do all of those – even region, to some extent – without going far from your own backyard, if you know where to look. You can even do them within your own neighborhood if you find the one house populated by Those Other People and start hanging out there. That’s how that one happened to me.
And I can’t describe what it’s like to have who you are used as the dumping ground for other people’s trash like that. Especially when you offer that part of who you are because you trusted them. Because you liked them. Because you cared about them. Because you wanted to share something that really mattered to you. It’s like having people spit in your face.
And realizing that to this person and their family and friends, you and everyone you care about is just a joke and a way of letting their hair down in the worst possible way. Letting the worst of their natures show because to them, you represent the worst of people in general, so what they show in front of you doesn’t matter, because people like you expect that kind of thing, and there are no rules around you.
And that last bit, that last bit was the 'aha moment’. The notion that when someone is slumming – and whether it’s class (the standard definition of slumming) or some other element of culture, or both, it’s all basically slumming. When you go into some other culture that you think is beneath you and hang out there because you think there’s no rules, so all the worst things you ever wanted to do, you can do, because it’s only Those People, and there’s no actual rules for human behavior down there in the moral sludge pit that you imagine they live in.
So being openly and vilely racist with a disturbing sort of glee is okay beause it’s only an Okie you’re hanging out with. Never mind that, while there are plenty of racist Okies, Okie society and history is fundamentally multicultural and multiracial in origin regardless of the race or culture of any individual Okie. Nobody’s going to tell you that, but it’s the truth, so this kind of gleeful overt up-front racism is actually deeply offensive on a personal level to a lot of Okies. But what do you care, you probably learned everything you know about Okies from the Grapes of Wrath or various stereotypes.
At any rate, this felt bad enough at the time. But when I found out the truth, I felt dirty, used, disrespected, spat upon, and most of all, betrayed so deeply I’ve rarely felt betrayal so complete. Because it wasn’t just a betrayal of me personally, it was a betrayal of everyone and everything I come from.
If people are willing to do this with the cultures within their own country, it does not surprise me at all that they do this when they travel to other countries. I doubt it even is limited to Americans, although I imagine that the entitltled attitude so many Americans and people from other current and former colonial powers often have, only adds to the likelihood that someone will behave this way.
I’ve even encountered it in a disability context. I have a developmental disability and for pretty much my entire adult life, I’ve received services from developmental disability agencies to do things to help me survive. People come in every day and help me with stuff. And some of them… I’ve actually had people admit to me, literally, this is a direct quote from one of them: “I took this job because I don’t have to behave like an adult around you guys.” There’s this stereotype, you see, that people with developmental disabilities are eternal children, that we have the “mind of a child” and will never really grow up. And there are people who think that around us, they don’t have to grow up either. Note that most actual people with developmental disabilities will adamantlly oppose any notion that we are anything but adults, because we are exactly that – adults. It doesn’t matter what our IQ looks like on paper, it doesn’t matter what our social skills look like on paper, we are still adults. No qualifications there. No “cognitive functioning of an infant” (something a doctor actually said about me once after spending 5 minutes interacting with me while I was really sick). Just adults.
But some (really, most) people think we’re not adults. Or they think other things that make them assume the normal rules of adult life don’t apply around us. And they take jobs with us so they can let loose and “be themselves” – all the worst parts of themselves, usually – without the usual sense of guilt they’d experience if the we’re dealing with, you know, actual people.
They don’t know that we can see what they’re doing. That it’s, in fact, almost embarrassing to us, to watch the way they behave around us, thinking that it’s okay, thinking that we don’t even notice, let alone give a fuck or feel offended or betrayed by their behavior. They have no idea that we can even formulate the concepts to think about what the’re diong to us. (Half the time they don’t even think we can really think at all.) I think it would scare some people to realize that I know secrets they haven’t even told their closest friends, because they reveal that side of themselves on the job where they think there are no rules and I don’t notice them anyway.
I also did once encounter someone who actually had this weird idea that they literally wouldn’t have to grow up if they could convince everyone they were a person with a developmental disability. Their life’s dream was to be a child forever, and they knew of the eternal child stereotype, so they lied about their IQ and lots of other stuff and did their damndest to not have to take any responsibility for any of their actions ever. (I hesitate to mention this because so many people think that there’s some kind of epidemic of people faking disability. There isn’t. Even most disabled people who look like “obviously fake” to other people, are actually genuine, just non-stereotypical. And even on the rare occasions where people fake it, they’re pretty harmless – far more harmless, certainly, than running around looking for faker everywhere. But on rare occasions someone actually does fake disability for reasons that are entirely offensive and disgusting. (Sometimes they actually are disabled, just not in the way they’re faking. Nobody ever thinks of that, either. Other times they’re nondisabled. Also, all genuine disabled people have to fake something about disability regularly, because of how pressures on disabled people work in most societies.) And this is one of those occasions. Just remember that this sort of thing is rare, as things like this go. And that what’s disgusting is more that they fetishize certain disability stereotypes – it’d be just as disgusting if they were not faking disability at all, but “merely” taking a job working with disabled people so that they could behave in the same totally irresponsible manner and “not have to be an adult” and stuff.
And it’s that sense of freedom that really bothers me. Like, the idea that people feel constrained by their own ordinary surroundings that don’t let them do certain things. Usually because those things are harmful to other human beings and their culture has a handle on that fact. Like even when their culture is fucked up in that area, it still usually has enough of a handle on that fact to inhibit them from acting out these impulses so openly.
So instead of doing what they should do. Which is, they should take that as a hint, recognize those impulses as fucked-up, and do everything they can not to act on those things.
Instead of that, they try to find a place where “the rules don’t apply” and they can treat people however they want, do whatever they want. That place may be a physical place, like another country. It may be a more metaphorical place, like anyplace where they’re around entirely people with developmental disabilities. Or somewhere in between, like that 'dive bar’ down the road, or that neighbor’s house where the neighbors are originally from a different culture, subculture, region, or class background than the rest of the neighborhood.
And of course wherever that place is, the people there aren’t really people in the fullest sense – not to this person. And therefore don’t really matter. Or are too depraved to care. Or both.
Just understand if you’ve done this, you’re stepping all over people who are just as human as you are. That the people in question probably knew exactly what you were up to. If we didn’t stop you, or seemed to approve, there’s a good chance it was because we were too uncomfortable within the situation,, or too aware of your potential power over us, to speak out. Or we may not have even had the words to articulate what was wrong at the time, even if it felt wrong down to our bones. And if we ever do work out the full extent of what you’ve done and why, we will feel horribly betrayed and belittled. Not that something like our feelings probably matter to you, if you were doing this to us to begin with.
What I can’t get over is the contrast between what I got out of this, and what the other person got out of this. And by 'this’ I mean our entire cross-cultural interaction. I thought I was sharing the things that made me feel at home, made me feel comfortable, made me who I am, with someone I cared about enough to open up to them in that way. I felt open and free in certain ways, because that’s how I feel within my own cultural context, as opposed to the way I have to act when constantly crossing into other cultures (which I have to do every day, because while Okies were common where I used to live, we weren’t the majority by any means, and out here where I live now, we’re almost nonexistent). They, on the other hand, felt open and free In a totally different way – because they thought that being around someone like me meant the normal rules of decent human behavior didn’t apply and they could just let out all the most disgusting impulses they ever had. I still feel like I need a shower after talking about this.
So just don’t. Don’t. In any context. Don’t. Don’t feel like there’s some place you can escape to where you will ~feel free~ because you won’t have to be constrained by the guidelines of decent behavior. Understand that every culture, however foreign it is to you, has guidelines on decent behavior, and that you’re undoubtedly breaking them wherever you’ve found to ~feel free~, just as much as you’re breaking them within your own culture. Understand you’re hurting real live human beings who have just as many feelings about this as you would if someone did it to you. And that it doesn’t matter where you’ve chosen to escape into – into another class, another country, another region, another race, another ethnic group, disability, whatever – everyone there deserves better than to be treated like the trash can for your personal garbage. And that it’s much worse, in a way, to have this done to you because of some attribute like your culture, than it is to just have it done to you at random. Because these attributes run deep, and to stomp on them like that hurts a lot more than just the ordinary level of having your feelings stomped on. it’s hard to explain until you’ve had it done to you. I hope you’ll never have it done to you. Because it sucks, in a huge way.
