On hybrid culture

This is a piece on culture and identity - hopefully, my final synthetic discourse on that topic - but let me first draw out a long metaphor to frame my thoughts.  For this metaphor I'll use my chosen métier - technology.  As a technology strategy consultant in 2017, one of the most pervasive trends impacting my corporate clients is the wave of "hybrid IT" or "hybrid cloud."  If you've recently watched a cable news channel such as Bloomberg or CNN during daytime hours, you've likely seen a commercial for a company like HP Enterprise touting its hybrid technology wares.  In terms of information technology, hybrid is a remarkably common-sense idea.  You see, with the exception of "greenfield" firms founded in the last 20 years like Amazon and Uber, most large corporations are forced to deal with an incredibly diverse technology infrastructure - everything from mainframes to Lotus Notes to Novell NetWare to Linux to Windows 10.  As you might imagine, this is a rather complex and costly jumble of stuff to maintain.  At some points in the late 1980's and early 1990's, emerging technologies such as enterprise resource planning ("ERP") promised these firms a future where their hardware and software platforms were largely homogenized:  one piece of technology to rule it all - with greatly lower cost and increased simplicity.

Needless to say, ERP and other technologies did not live up to their full initial promise.  Many of the first attempts to replace decades worth of so-called "legacy" technology with shiny new ERP platforms resulted in gargantuan corporate clusterfucks and, collectively, many millions of dollars of destroyed shareholder value.  Essentially, companies realized that many of those ancient technology platforms - despite their difficulty to maintain - conveyed some significant competitive advantages; perhaps the mainframes at the core of Delta's operations allowed booking tickets in a more seamless manner than comparable modern systems, or American Express's legacy systems could process credit card transactions more rapidly and accurately than any recently introduced products.

Hybrid IT became the practical result of this reality.  Companies came to recognize that a more practical route for sustainable value creation through IT consisted of leveraging the individual IT systems in their enterprises which were "best in breed" and using various intermediary technologies, such as cloud brokerage and orchestration, to facilitate the seamless data exchange, automation, and general co-existence of these many diverse systems.  I started my career in technology consulting on the far tail end of the ERP boom, and I'm now living through the hybrid IT boom; there is not a doubt in my mind that the more recent revolution has progressed far more seamlessly.

This hybrid IT revolution - and particularly its contrast with the earlier homogeneous ERP trend - serves as an accurate metaphor for how people like me frame our own cultural identity.  These days - living as we are in the West through an era of ethnic nationalism, blind patriotism, and political tribalism - those of us who consider ourselves proud cultural hybrids increasingly feel like a poorly understood and frequently besieged minority.

How do I define "cultural hybrid?"  Simply put, like corporations who build their IT footprint around many disparate best in class technology systems, we cultural hybrids have taken chunks of our core social DNA from a wide array of diverse geographies and social structures, far more so than most individuals.  We generally embrace a type of pragmatic empirical analysis of the pro's and con's of these different cultural systems in which we have lived and emphatically reject the notion that any one culture, subculture, or society has figured out all of the right answers to life's challenges.  Instead, just as President Obama framed his economic policy as one focusing on "what works", we identify which particular elements of various cultures we find to be particularly efficacious or in alignment with our deeply-held personal values.  Out of these many different cultural systems, we form our identity just as a professional quilt artist assembles a rich tapestry from many discordant pieces of cloth.

What exactly does this look like in real life?  I can give a few examples from my own lived experiences, with aspects of the cultures that I have both embraced and rejected:

• Florida - The state where I was born and spent most of my first 20 years certainly plays a significant role in my identity.  I love hot weather and hate nearly everything about winter, although a decade in the Northeast has tempered my tolerance for extreme humidity somewhat.  To this day, I am a proud beach bum and my vacations tend to center on destinations such as Bali, Brazil, or the French Riviera.  I can mix a mean mojito without thinking about it - a copious amount of good quality mint is key - and my fondness for mimosas as a poil de chien has as much to do with my affinity for champagne as with fresh Florida orange juice.  And as long as the weather is over 60 degrees, you're highly likely to find me sporting a pair of flip-flops - a highly practical and extremely comfortable type of footwear - anywhere I go, fashion snobs and those who insist men should never wear open-toed shoes be damned.  But I have rejected just as much of Florida culture as I have embraced.  Florida's small-government, low tax, right-wing conservative politics - particularly since the rise of Jeb Bush - is downright anathema to me and in fact is the single biggest reason why I left the state nearly a decade ago.  While Florida itself is only marginally Southern at best south of Ocala, the part of the state in which I was raised most assuredly is the Deep South - and I have always found very few redeeming qualities in Southern culture overall.  I worked hard as a kid to avoid picking up the accent of the Florida Panhandle, I am not fond of most of the staples of Southern cuisine, and I am embarrassed to share American citizenship with people who find it appropriate to still fly the Confederate flag in 2017.  I love my urban life in a dense city core - fully liberated from the automobile - a lifestyle embraced by only a negligible percentage of Floridians, most of whom practically worship their cars.  And I detest, profoundly, the culture of bland, idiotic, cheap entertainment-focused American tourism that Florida's theme parks have helped spawn.  
• Rural America - While I rejected virtually all cultural norms from life in the small town South and Midwest - the religion, the faux politeness, the focus on sports, the obsession with big families and children, etc. - my many years in small town America did give me a level-headed grounding in how the real world operates for most people.  I have seen some of my income bracket peers thrown into apoplexy over minor inconveniences, things such as the wait staff making a minor error in a restaurant order, a package arriving from Amazon slightly damaged, or the neighborhood organic foods market being out of a certain ingredient.  No matter how high I climb in income or number of rungs on the corporate ladder, the down-to-earth, humble experiences of my early years will almost certainly prevent me from ever adopting that type of a spoiled brat, out-of-touch mindset.  I have high standards, but I also know how to keep life in perspective.
• Mainstream African-American Culture - Always a bit of a delicate topic for me, suffice it to say that my "black card" must have been returned to sender for insufficient postage when I was child.  One of the most grating, irritating phrases of my childhood was "why are you [insert verb here] so white?"  Talking white, eating white, listening to white music, dressing like a white boy - the list of my mayonnaise behavior seemed endless.  As I've written before in this blog, like most kids I hardly had some overarching opinion of the culture of the American black diaspora; little children don't think about those things.  But as I became an adolescent and the products of mainstream African-American culture continued to treat me as a freak worthy of constant derision, I said "enough" to it all; my modern behavior is largely a downstream result.  Though of course, even if you will never find me watching BET or listening to hardcore rap or hanging out at predominately black social venues, the reality is that I am a black male - and a young black male at that.  Having voted in every single election at every level of government since I turned 18, I can still count on one hand the number of times I've checked the box next to a Republican.  While I may disagree with many of their policy positions, I have come to support - and donate money to - Black Lives Matter.  My love for spicy cuisine is famous; to this day, I still carry a small bottle of Tabasco sauce in my Coach bag (when I was a grad student at Carnegie Mellon, my Indian friends quickly learned that I really could take my Indian food at the "real Indian level of spicy.")  And while I generally can't stand most modern rap, many of my musical tastes - new jack swing, quiet storm, smooth jazz, R&B - don't resonate at all with most of my majority white circle of friends; they didn't grow up with that type of music playing on their car radios, while I can still easily sing along to Ralph Tresvant, Troop, and Portrait songs from the early 1990's.
• LGBT Culture - Coming out as gay in 2007 was a transformational moment in my life for numerous reasons, but one of the most significant was that gay culture has since served as the strongest communal bond in my life.  Indeed, generally speaking, I am most comfortable when I am with a group of well-educated, professional gay men; in my entire life I have never found a community with which I tend to share so many similarities, undoubtedly forged by our universally shared experience of life in the closet and the mental fortitude required to shatter that oppressive burden.  The dress, the witty attitudes, the music, the partying, the cuisine, the liberal political values, the openness to globalism - all make me a fairly mainstream gay.  Yet even here, there are things I reject:  the excesses of drug use in certain quarters; the infatuation with a few divas; the insane amount of time in the gym; and the crazy "Oppression Olympics", intersectional leftism espoused by many.
• Europe - My brief time living in Europe, and my many subsequent trips there - particularly France - have altered many aspects of my behavior.  As anybody who knows me will mention right away, I drink champagne like most Americans drink cheap beer; indeed, my time in France gave me this taste which seems somewhat "exotic" in most of North America (i.e., champagne is a common drink there, not reserved for special occasions as it generally is here.)  I uphold the European notion of "working to live, and not living to work" in my own life; I feel no shame in taking vacation and decompressing.   There are many aspects of the European social democratic model that I adore - namely, universal healthcare - but I also do believe the continent's relative distaste for wealth creation and private business have created unnecessarily sclerotic economic growth and perennially high unemployment.  I also abhor the hostility many European societies express towards immigration.
• New York City - And of course, there is New York - my adopted hometown.  Like so many millions before me who have arrived in this overbearing city looking to achieve their dreams, I am quite typical of a Manhattanite in my globalist mindset and worldliness, my focus on career and wealth creation, my party schedule and social habits, my unwillingness to turn on an oven, and - in many aspects - my impatience for things that get in my way, whether it be a slow tourist walking down 8th Avenue or corporate political nonsense.  And yet, as much as I consider New York my adopted hometown and indeed a reflection of my own ability to craft a hybrid cultural identity, there are many aspects of life here, too, that I will always strongly reject:  among those rejections, the ridiculous focus on high fashion over comfort in apparel choice (read:  wearing boots on a hot July day to "look fancy" is absolutely deranged behavior); the pretentious, obnoxious attitudes; the pervasive lack of fiscal discipline of many individuals; and most of all, the manic, "always on", Type A personalities who drive me absolutely insane.

Confused yet as to what I "am" culturally or in terms of personality?  So was I for a good chunk of my teens and early 20's.  Indeed, much of the earlier writing in this blog focused on that exact topic, as I realized that my own personality and identity could not be easily placed into any one box.

As I see it, hybrid identity presents several large scale benefits.  I could travel to almost any country in the world tomorrow and, with a bit of preparation, make myself perfectly at home with relative ease.  Even if my social circle is not terribly diverse in terms of skin color, in most other ways it is a true rainbow of domestic and international characters.  And particularly valuable given my career as a consultant, I have found that having a rich, multi-faceted identity gives me a fresh, unique perspective on issues that my more monochromatic peers often lack.

At the same time, there is little doubt that folks in my position face some unique challenges.  For starters, even in the "melting pot" of America we represent a tiny minority.  Most Americans live within 50 miles of their place of birth for virtually all of their lives, identifying strongly with the cultural mores and traditions of that region; in fact, recent studies have shown that Americans' geographic mobility has actually declined in recent decades as our economy has stratified class divisions.  Those of us with complex hybrid identities - with our often bland accents, predilection for exotic cuisine, peculiar manners of dress, and leisure activities either out of the popular mainstream or simply out of financial reach for most - can come across as nothing less than intimidating foreign agents.  As I have experienced myself throughout my life, this can make it quite difficult to bond with so-called "normal folks", particularly those citizens who have spent their entire lives in one place.  Indeed, much of the current political turmoil in America - driven by a rebellion against the perceived "elites" on the coasts - can be summarized as a rebellion against people exactly like me, no matter how humble and unremarkable our origins may have been.  It is, after all, quite easy to despise and scapegoat people with life experiences you cannot understand.

To be sure, my hybrid identity certainly does not make my life easier or less complicated.  And there were plenty of times, as a teen in particular, when I wondered what might be had my life had turned out differently; I would think of the incredible simplicity of having been born into a hypothetical white middle-class family in some bland suburb or small town, ascending to become the star quarterback in high school, never going to college, and spending my entire life in the town where I was born after marrying my high school sweetheart.  But of course, those thoughts were always purely contemplative.  Despite the seemingly interminable navel-gazing and occasional heartburn they have caused, I would not trade my life experiences for anything in the world.  And in fact, I believe there is something uniquely American about journeys like mine.

The photo at the beginning of this post is the cover art for one of the singles (my favorite one) from Miami Sound Machine's breakthrough 1985 album Primitive Love.  With the release of this album - best known for "Conga" - Gloria Estefan became the first Latina artist to effectively crossover into mainstream American pop music, launching her rapid ascension to international superstardom.  And while many people love her music and her gracious, relaxed personality, relatively few folks appreciate how her own personal story is one which exemplifies the power of the American engine of cultural assimilation.  Formed in the 1970's (as Miami Latin Boys), a period when South Florida was rapidly transforming from a sleepy majority-Anglo region into a cosmopolitan metropolis, Miami Sound Machine initially catered to local Hispanic audiences and produced music in Spanish.  Only after the arrival of Gloria to the group in 1977 did something much more profound slowly start to become realizable.  The trajectory of the group's transformation from a generally unknown Spanish-speaking band to an international phenom - with a bilingual repertoire - is a classic one of bridging the divides and seizing the opportunities of a hybrid cultural identity; as Gloria recounts, early on in the band's attempt to cross over they faced outright rejection from English radio stations for sounding "too Latin" while simultaneously being rejected from Latino stations in South Florida for being "too Anglo."  The music producers who thought that millions of Americans would never dance in a Cuban conga line displayed a fundamental ignorance of our nation's DNA, as well as of the powerful cultural artifacts humans can create when they draw on their unique life experiences in the pursuit of beauty and meaning.

It is worth repeating:  hybrid culture is never easy to manage, particularly in today's increasingly nationalistic atmosphere.  But the benefits are immense, and I've come to realize that those benefits only increase with accumulated age and wisdom.  It is a nice way to close all of my writings in this blog on the topic of "home" and "identity" to think back to the core impetus for those articles in the first place: namely, how terrifying it felt to be culturally unmoored back in those uncertain days in 2008 when my entire life was in such a terrible, seemingly endless flux.

Where is home, and who are you?  I asked myself that question so many times back then.  As I've come to discover, the choice of both is always yours.