Knowing Ourselves So We May Know Others: Reflections for a White Facilitator of Multicultural Learning

When Billy boy was one, he learned to suck his thumb. Tapioca, tapioca, half past one, cross down When Billy boy was two, he learned to tie his shoe, Tapioca, tapioca, half past two, cross down ... I loved hand jives. I still do. I remember learning them as a kid from my sisters or friends on the playground: "Miss Mary Mack," "Down Down Baby," "Say Say My Playmate," and "When Billy Boy Was One." I can remember all of the words and hand rhythms. When I was five, my parents bought a family campground, and we spent the next 11 summers living on the premises and renting out camp sites to families from all over New England. The camping families were from a similar socioeconomic background as my own--white, lower-middle and middle-class families. I was too young to work on the campground, so I spent the entirety of my joyful summers exploring the outdoors with my campground friends. Inevitably, one of our favorite things to do was hand jive. It was common for all of us to know the same songs and rhythm patterns, and when we did not, we taught each other our favorites. As we got older, the clapping patterns became more complicated, and we adapted the words to fit our liking. These hand jives and chants, along with jump rope songs and circle games like "London Bridge," are examples of cultural expression (Carawan & Carawan, 1989). What makes them extraordinary is that the cultural leaders and teachers in this example are children. Children learn the songs and rhythms from each other and pass them on. Children adapt them to the current times. And they do an exhaustive job of it; I rarely met a peer who could not hold her own at "Miss Mary Mack." As a young adult, I worked at a summer academic program for children in Springfield, MA. At lunch time, I enjoyed watching the girls, most of them Black, Latino, or Vietnamese, doing hand jives. I was amazed their games were unfamiliar to me. Of course, I asked the girls to teach me all they knew, and I reveled in learning their favorite, "Slides," a speed hand jive with no words and a complicated rhythm. Another popular one, "East West," involved four people, rather than my traditional two. When I returned to college, I found that a friend of mine (also a small town middle-class white girl), who had worked at a Fresh Air Camp for children from New York City that summer, had learned the same hand jives. I hypothesized that these were the current hand jives; the ones we knew as children must have been retired. But that theory was soon put to rest. While teaching "Slides" to my basketball teammates on a long ride to an away game that year, I found out Kabilla, a girl from Lawrence, MA, already knew it. She was the only Black working-class city girl on the team. She knew "East West" too. Incredible as it is, children from Lawrence, Springfield, and New York knew the same hand jives, and my peers from small towns in New England knew a whole different set. They were clearly part of our respective cultures. And furthermore, they were in our hands: ours to play, and transform, and pass on. Exposing the Myth: "I Don't Have a Culture" I was originally inspired to seek my culture while studying the methods of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, TN. The Highlander Center has a 73-year history of including cultural programming (singing, music, stories, poems, writing, and theatre) in their educational content. The importance of cultural expression at Highlander does not hang on museum walls or sell a record number of recordings; rather, it comes from the people who gather to learn there and the communities from which they journey. Encouraged by the Highlander staff's insistence upon identifying and incorporating cultural traditions passed from person to person, rather than from TV screens, I began to wonder about my own culture. At first, I found little that was not either the product of a major record label or a unique family tradition not common to some larger community:. …