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Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4.3 (2001) 559-561



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Book Review

The Negotiation of Cultural Identity:
Perceptions of European Americans and African Americans


The Negotiation of Cultural Identity: Perceptions of European Americans and African Americans. By Ronald L. Jackson II. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1999; pp. xii + 123. $49.95.

With this book, Ronald Jackson enters a conversation about the social constructedness of race in America that has been going on, as he points out, at least since W. E. B. Du Bois pondered the dilemmas of double-consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk. Indeed, the questions that guide Jackson's research are very similar to those that Du Bois explored a century ago, and this similarity testifies to Du Bois's prescient prediction that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." However, whereas Du Bois was primarily interested in exploring the contours of the African American experience--in answering, in his words, the question "How does it feel to be a problem?"--Jackson's key contribution to this ongoing conversation about race is to set white and black perceptions of race and culture into dialogue with one another.

Jackson assembled two focus groups, one consisting of white students at a predominantly black university and the other of black students at a predominantly white university, and asked them "one simple question, 'What's the first thing that comes to mind when someone asks you what culture you are?'" (71). The open-ended responses of these six-person groups were transcribed, excerpts were written on coded cards, and the cards were sorted into categories. To round out the study methodologically, Jackson also composed a 14-item questionnaire that was completed by 15 white students at another predominantly black university and 15 black students at a predominantly white university. The results of the survey, as Jackson notes, "revealed a positive verification of the results from the focus group interviews" (86).

The book is at its strongest when the author summarizes, quotes, and discusses the focus-group responses. Not surprisingly, the responses of the white students follow the patterns articulated by Ruth Frankenberg, Richard Dyer, Thomas K. Nakayama, and Robert L. Krizek, and others who have written about the ideology of whiteness; that is, the responses of the white students are characterized by an inability to describe "white culture," a belief that white culture and American culture are synonymous, and faith in a "colorblind" utopia. Setting the responses of the African American students against these predictable articulations, however, helps to bring into relief both their rich and nuanced appreciation of their own culture and their continuing struggle through which that culture is defined and maintained. This is not Jackson's point, but these responses illustrate succinctly that the Du Boisian dilemma with which this book opens continues to resonate strongly among contemporary African American college students.

Jackson's central purpose, as he puts it, is "to gain further insight into the process of cultural identity negotiation" (4). The research is framed as "a test" of a theory of [End Page 559] intercultural communication developed by William Starosta and Anthony Olorunnisola, "by which two interactants become creators of a hybrid 'third culture,' and abandon their primary cultures" (5). "The basic finding" of his study, concludes Jackson, "was that the negotiation of cultural identity was experienced neither by the African American nor European American students. Yet, the reasons for not negotiating differed for each" (101). Jackson offers a detailed exposition of these different reasons, but the gist is that whites do not engage in cultural negotiation because they feel they don't have to, while blacks do not do so because of a desire to retain and nurture their own distinct culture. While, as Jackson points out in his introduction, such conclusions would seem to be true "intuitively"(4), his empirical verification of these hypotheses is an important and provocative contribution.

The potential of this contribution, however, is marred by some of the book's shortcomings. Some are methodological, such as the lack of any...

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