ABSTRACT
There are…situations in American [and British] life in which the ‘Black mind’ sees it one way and the ‘White mind’ sees it another or does not see it at all.
INTRODUCTION Rosaldo reports: ‘Cities throughout the world today increasingly include minorities defined by race, ethnicity, language, class, religion, and sexual orientation. Encounters with “difference” now pervade modern everyday life in urban settings’ (Rosaldo, 1989:28). This chapter examines some of the factors involved in impression formation from a black perspective. Psychology texts for social workers (for example, Nicolson and Bayne, 1990) fail to address the black perspective in impression formation. Social workers interviewing black clients may make judgements of them unaware that their behaviour has a cultural/racial basis that they are misinterpreting. A good example to consider is cultural differences in eye-contact behaviour. Interactions between members of different cultures may be problematic if the meaning of the behaviour is misinterpreted (Argyle, 1988). Other differences between cultures include factors such as people’s use of personal space (for example, how close it is appropriate to stand in conversation with another person) and touch (for example, when and how often you touch another person), as well as eye-contact behaviour (Argyle, 1988).
