This Labor Day weekend, I was out celebrating the end of summer at a friend’s block party. It was a hot afternoon with a live band playing covers of 70s pop music and a somewhat diverse group of 200 people dancing, talking, and drinking.
At one point, I was sitting in the shade trying to stay cool when a bohemian-styled woman sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. We chatted politely for a few minutes, then the conversation turned inevitably to COVID.
“Were you able to enjoy your summer,” she asks.
“Yeah! It’s been wonderful to be around people again, and I feel pretty safe since I got vaccinated,” I reply.
“It’s so sad that the Delta wave is hitting us. I just wish that people of certain ethnicities would quit having parties,” says this white woman to me (another white woman).
Annoyed but unsurprised, I reply neutrally, “Huh. We’re at a party. I don’t think it’s ‘specific ethnicities having parties’ that is the problem.”
Discomfited, she makes up an excuse and leaves.
Normal is What You Make It
One of the most important lessons from anthropology is that “normal” is not universal.
The field of anthropology was founded during the late 1800s by British noblemen obsessed with finding scientific proof of white supremacy.
Paradoxically, German Anthropologist Franz Boas systematically proved that there is no biological proof of race, let alone racial superiority.
Boas is called the father of modern anthropology because he provided its foundation: Cultural Relativism.
It simply means that cultures are different, neither better nor worse than any other.
Why am I talking about culture and anthropology when this is supposed to be about what’s normal? Because normal is culturally defined.
Breakfast foods, greetings, conversation etiquette, and wedding attire vary across cultures, and I don’t just mean nationality.
Take conversation etiquette, for example. You may speak to your customers differently than how you speak to your work friends, or your company culture may encourage an informal tone, so your etiquette may be similar. Your company has its own culture.
We each operate in multiple cultures, which often overlap without our explicit awareness. Your neighborhood has a culture, your temple/mosque/church has a culture, your office has a culture, and your close friends also have a culture.
Who Defines our Culture?
You do.
To be more specific, you and everyone in your community/organization/generation/family culture define it. Every time you do/say the appropriate thing, every time you expect others to act appropriately, every time you punish inappropriate behavior, you’re enforcing what your culture considers to be normal.
Let me be clear: the function of “normal” is most often good for you and society! Without a shared sense of normal, societies couldn’t function. Imagine if no one agreed on normal driving behavior…chaos.
However, when we bump up against a misalignment with our cultural values, normal needs to change.
Re-Norming Normal
Another nugget of inspiration from anthropology: culture is fluid.
It is constantly adapting to current circumstances adjusting based on the ideas of its members. Archaeology shows that human cultures have been trading both goods and ideas from the beginning.
One person shares a new perspective with others. When it influences someone to change, they share the new perspective with people they know. Over time, that new perspective becomes normal.
And yet, this is not universal. The estimated 44% of Americans that do eat breakfast do not mainly eat the same thing; it varies wildly across the country but is common within each region. In other words, our friends and neighbors share and reinforce ideas of what is normal.
We change what’s normal by sharing our new perspectives with those we know best.
Sociologist Damon Centola’s research on societal change found that when 25% of the people within a culture agree with this new perspective, it rapidly becomes the new normal. His research also concluded that new perspectives are most often adopted from people we know well, not from celebrities or politicians or strangers we meet at a party.
The bottom line: when normal is hurting people, bridge builders will change it. Bridge builders connect with people that are unlike themselves and actively cultivate empathy to create a new normal. Learn more here.
