Clinical Methods in Interracial and Intercultural Relations

Abstract

In a war-surviving world, dazed and groggy from lightning-jet fighter planes, superfortresses, radar, and atomic bombs, it is difficult for most of us to take a balanced, dispassionate view of racial and cultural relations. But, since modern means of communication have made our world a narrow neighborhood, civilization can only survive by placing the contacts of races, classes, and nations upon a reasonable, brotherly basis. These contacts are grounded in everyday relations. Race relations are everyday contacts of people of different physical and social inheritance in their places of work, their churches, synagogues, mosques, schools, homes, on the street, and in their social and civic organizations. Intercultural relations are everyday contacts of people whose attitudes and behavior patterns have been conditioned by different religious beliefs, by family habits, by various ways of doing things. Problems of major adjustment between individuals and groups are created by these contacts. Jews and Gentiles misunderstand because of different religious beliefs. Negro and white Americans have problems out of past attitudes and practices. Chinese eating rice with chopsticks and Americans or Britishers eating beef with knives and forks display habits which necessitate more understanding and good will on the part of the community which eats with some other device-or cultural disharmony exists. Dominant forces in our civilized society, if not in the so-called uncivilized societies, are the beliefs, the attitudes, the mores that control behavior. These are mental forces; they are moral; they are religious. They apply to people-individuals and groups. People who have failed to achieve certain desires or goals become frustrated. Instead of accepting their failure or discovering some weakness or mistake in their own effort they seek scapegoats to