Today I want to return to an old rant of mine. I’ve told people before about the cultural oddity that I experience in academia being Cherokee. As a people– a proud people :P– we don’t interrupt people unless we’re supposed to be in charge (the elder, so to speak). It’s disrespectful to cut a person off. This is also true of typical people, but let’s be honest, White America, you only talk a good game on this one (no pun intended) and reward, over and over again, the aggressive person who talks over people. The “go getter.”
There’s this thing that happens when you learn to behave that way, though. I remember studying it in psych classes as an undergrad, but I forget who to credit for it on the psych egghead set. It was a cultural understanding for me, something that was passed down. It’s so simple, but people don’t seem to understand.
You cannot communicate well if you don’t listen and wait your turn because if you’re trying to play “aggressive person who always gets a point in,” you aren’t paying attention. You’re spending your time figuring out what you’re going to say next. Or you’re too busy speaking to actually hear what is happening around you.
Think about being in a class– any class. If you were going to talk, you were focused on figuring out what to say, right? It’s normal.
But I pointed this out to a professor after a class in grad school. The professor stopped me in the hallway and called me out for not doing the reading. This was not accurate. In fact, I was one of the few people in the room who read ALL of the homework and took notes. But the professor took my not fighting to speak over people as a sign that I didn’t do the work. I spent an hour, in the hallway, relating all my thoughts on the books and on what was discussed in class.
The professor acted exasperated, saying “why didn’t you say that in class?” And my answer was “no one left space.”
I was criticized for this, and told to force my way in.
What that really means is that I was being told by a white person to be white.
Two weeks later, I jumped into a hollowed out space and offered my thoughts. A very white, very loud male student cut me off. I said “excuse me, I wasn’t done.” The other student acted astonished. I was sort of sick of it, though, and I didn’t appreciate that the professor of the class had assumed I was a slacker just because his “star” student wouldn’t ever let another person speak.
Then I did something that made me a friend for life.
I said “go ahead. You’re showing off for (professor’s name redacted) and (professor’s gender redacted) is so happy to see how ‘smart’ you are that no one ever tells you to shut up and let the rest of us talk. Do you think we all enjoy listening to you raise your voice to cut people off with your protests for two-and-a-half hours?”
That comment by me was taken well. Only it wasn’t. I actually got dressed down for being disrespectful to another student. <eyeroll>
Later that same semester, a different professor got mad at me when a female student next to me started to speak and was cut off, so she started again. I said, loudly, “you might as well give up, they aren’t listening.” The professor said, angrily, “I can hear you, Phill. What was that?” and I said, again, “I told her to give up, because you’re not listening to her. You [and the two guys] over there haven’t looked this way for about 15 minutes.” That got… uncomfortable.
The TL;DR here is that you learn more, and are a more productive person if you listen. If you’re just worried about talking, you’re not really learning anything other than how to be in your own head. Life isn’t a contest to be as loud as possible. I mean it might be for our President. But we’re better than that. right?
If someone suggests that you talk more, but you aren’t talking because you’re listening attentively, tell them not to assume everyone is the same. Some of us listen-to-learn, and we’ll gladly speak when it’s our turn.