Blog Post 3: Cultural Intelligence

Howdy y'all, I hope you guys are going good! I feel surprisingly spry going into these finals, though I could be delusional.

Anyways, today we've been asked to discuss cultural intelligence; how we understand it, and how our lecture with Dr. Renee Bhatti-Klug enriched our understanding. For me, I've been fortunate enough to be in diverse communities, rationalized my own experiences as someone from a marginalized group, and have had educators that regularly affirm what cultural intelligence is. In my mind, I think there should be two things to consider, and that's the general and the specific. General in the sense that we should be empathetic and always seek to learn from other people as a general rule of thumb. The specific is understanding the context of why a person is feeling what they're feeling and how that is emblematic of something greater or disconnected from a cultural monolith. That last part sounds scary, having to make that judgment call, but it's really just one more step up. In practice, I might understand that someone is upset, which would lead me to consider why their upset, and eventually if it is or is not part of something that is reflective of a greater societal or systemic issue. 

All that said, where I had that understanding Dr. Bhatti-Klug really pushed for cultural responsiveness, which I thought was very positive. In this context, responsiveness refers to how the actions we take reflect our values. I think the question in one of our exercises that really made me consider my responsiveness was a prompt that asked something to the effect of "Out of these 4, which are you least likely to engage with" to which I said a project out of my scope. On paper, I considered my skillset, and I also considered the cultural precedent set in such a project, wondering if I would even be a good fit. What Dr. Bhatti-Klug noted was that even if we were aware of systemic issues, not engaging does not move anything forward, advocating for being a little out of place if it meant broadening our lived experiences. Dr. Bhatti-Klug also noted that we should not be doing this in any way to have a "token" friend but to simply be with people. I thought that was really beautiful.