The Incredible Possibilities of Being

The traditional description of people of color in America has emphasized their passive reactivity to their historical social oppression. By contrast the novelist, Ralph Ellison, has attempted to characterize the tendency of African Americans to develop their humanity in spite of the obstacles and meannesses imposed upon them. Such a portrayal is consistent with Joseph Rychlak's developed view of the human psychological capacity for “dialectic” imagination, by which people envision the intrinsic oppositionalities, and hence the possibilities, in a given situation. In this essay I illustrate the usefulness of dialectical thinking for people in different cultural contexts.

Notes

¹There is another aspect of this story which touches on an important aspect of logical learning theory—the emphasis on the “introspective” point of view in Rychlak's perspective. Some mainstream interpretations of Japanese-American behavior have empha-sized their “model” efforts to assimilate into the dominant American society. Haak's analysis suggests that for many Japanese during the war years their seeming compliance did not come from an internalized sense of inferiority or a wish to assimilate as such. Rather for many of them the more the dominant American society treated them like aliens the more they brought forward their intentions of maintaining a sense of personal pride in the context of still vivid ethnic values brought from Japan. Their ethic of hard work, for example, so clearly demonstrated in the Arizona camp may have been parallel to some American values, but it was not simply derived from Western values. Their behavior had deep roots in the culture of the homeland with probably strong Buddhist sources. The point here is that, as with all people, frequently an external or third-person view of behavior, what one might call the “extraspective” view, gives an inaccurate or at best an incomplete picture of what people are trying to do. This was the view that saw assimilative behavior among many of the interned Japanese Americans. Such a view does not reflect the nature of many internees' adaptive struggle. The attitudes and behavior even of internees who accomodated was often much more complex than it appeared to be on the surface; and, of course, as Haak's article points out, many people were openly angry and rebellious. A full conception of human behavior can only come when we take the “introspective” or “first-person” view which includes peoples' goals and ends. This teleologic view emphasized in LLT is especially important with ethnic minority people. That is, we must align ourselves with the inner worlds of people of color to understand their purposes and their experience if we are to fully understand what they do. To return to a previous example, the grandfather character in Ellison's novel had the intent, among other things, of lulling his White bosses into complacency in the hope that they would not see his sabotage. He hoped that his behavior would contribute to the deterioration of the system and to Blacks' freedom. He clearly had a goal in mind, even if expressed metaphorically: “let 'em swoller you,” he said, “till they … bust wide open” (Ellison, 1952, p. 20). His underlying purpose, one which kept him going, was hostile, quite at variance with his superficially obsequious manner. These vignettes suggest that one cannot know the complexity of the possibilities that people conceive for themselves and are trying to bring into being without as clear an understanding as one can get of their world as they see it.