The Fear of Intercultural Miscommunication that Leads to Self-Selective Racism

Neither a teacher nor a consultant is supposed to be picky about the clients they interact with. Business logic simply does not allow for it. As long as the client is willing to pay, adhere to legal regulations, and interact respectfully, there is little reason for the client to be refused service. Moreover, it is often not ethical to refuse service for reasons that are not knowledge, law, or business-related. In the case of students seeking knowledge, the refusal to provide can be interpreted as unfair discrimination, withholding of resources that they have the right to access without valid explanations.

Yet, in practice, equal access cannot be perfectly enforced, considering that the teacher, consultant, or their bosses have some say over who handles a particular client. In a line of work that requires regular one-on-one communication between the client and the service provider, the similarity in working style, personality, and culture can all be factors just as important, if not more so, than whether the teacher or the consultant has what the client needs. The "how" of knowledge transfer and dissemination is crucial for the resulting collaboration, just as much as the "what."

Put in the context of college admissions prep, the "how" becomes even more important. The knowledge of what is needed by each student to get into top universities does not have a steep learning curve: the objective requirements are widely publicized, while what is considered "good" to fulfill each of these requirements is often so subjective and nebulous that it is entirely up to the interpretation of the individual. So consultants need to differentiate their services by how they can prod students into fulfilling these subjective and objective requirements.

How to prod effectively, then, becomes a cultural exercise that is often not directly related to the knowledge of universities themselves. Even the most well-traveled and diversity-oriented consultants do not have knowledge of how every culture communicates most effectively. They can only make those assumptions based on their own backgrounds and what limited information they have about the students that they work with. When the limited information does not align with reality, miscommunication occurs, leading to neither party being happy with the results.

Efforts to avoid such miscommunication inadvertently create limits to diversity. My familiarity with students of Chinese and Japanese heritage means that I will have little opportunity to work with students of, say, South American and Middle Eastern backgrounds, even if those students share my personal interests and passions. And quite honestly, even when provided with the opportunity to choose to work with students of non-Asian heritage, I have the tendency to turn down the opportunities, just so that there is less risk of my unfamiliar communication style leading to dissatisfaction.

That "self-selective racism" is on display not in my little corner of the global economy, but in its highest echelons. The recently concluded Oscars ceremony rubbed the Asian community the wrong way when Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh, last year's winners, were seen to be blatantly ignored by their 2024 counterparts Robert Downey Jr. and Emma Stone. While all parties involved have, since the TV footage came out, worked on denying there being any discriminatory intent, Asians on social media, and even mainstream media outlets, have not entirely buried their beliefs of something fishy going on.

But reflecting back on what happened, it might be wise to also consider whether some "self-selective racism" was in order during the fiasco. While Quan and Yeoh are both veterans of (white) American culture, having worked in the US and Hollywood for decades, Downey and Stone may have been cautious as to how they should properly communicate their ecstasy in getting awards that few actors will ever get in their entire careers. Without sounding overly apologetic for their behaviors, I suspect that they deliberately bypassed what they thought of as the need to express their happiness in an "Asian way."

It is unfortunate, then, that what was rational avoidance of social faux pas of unfamiliar cultural contexts was interpreted as a discriminatory display of unequal treatment. Well, it is never 100% possible to deduce an action as black-and-white, perhaps all of us can be slightly more understanding of the fact that, ultimately, everyone gravitates toward interacting with those whom they believe they share cultural similarities with for the sake of ensuring no miscommunication occurs to hurt everyone involved. It is just unfortunate that the visual markers of ethnicity are often the only basis for decision-making.