The other day I wrote about how China Miéville’s novel, The City & The City conveys the way that the little affiliative signs we give off are more than just petty posturing. One aspect of this I didn’t address head-on is how this interacts with cultural privilege. Today I read a very well-presented article about how this sort of thing plays out in the context of trying to get more women and minorities into areas traditionally dominated by white men, and it made me regret that I didn’t cover this better in my article on the book.

Zeynep Tufekci addresses her piece on Medium at Nate Silver who recently launched his numbers-oriented news site, FiveThirtyEight.¹ Silver had bristled at the contention that his predominantly white-male outfit was a part of an exclusionary culture, stating, in short, that whatever their racial or gender makeup, they were outsiders. Tufekci goes on to analyze how this psychology works out and can lead to many of the people who (let’s give the benefit of the doubt) unintentionally reinforce cultural barriers to feel that they are above and in fact stand against such exclusion.

What interested me in the wake of writing an article on The City & The City is how the novel can be seen as an allegory of this sort of cultural segregation being taken to an extreme. Being in Beszel or Ul Qoma doesn’t place you on the social strata, though Ul Qoma is presented as ascendant and Beszel in decay. In the book, they are regarded as so separated as to be thought of as different physical locations. But think of the different worlds we do have and how we are consciously and unconsciously sorted into them. We can and do interact across social and class boundaries, but signifiers, whether chosen like clothes or inborn and unalterable like skin tone or something in between like accented speech, influence how much access you will have to them.

A citizen of Beszel capable of being a perfect chameleon has a super power. He might step into a telephone booth in Beszel and emerge in Ul Qoma with a change of clothes. Imagine how much easier it is for this person to get on in Ul Qoma than his countryman who must constantly watch his speech and way of moving to prevent Ul Qomans from unseeing him.

The goal in the real world isn’t assimilation, though. People often act as though the ideal is to be colorblind. But if different cultural backgrounds didn’t matter, it wouldn’t be nearly so big a deal to have diversity in the first place. It’s not that all those cultural signifiers are unimportant trivia elevated above their station. Rather the book drives home how these little arbitrary signs are important.

The goal, struggle sometimes, is to be aware of those signifiers. Both the ones you broadcast and how you react to those you see in others. You aren’t doing anything wrong by embracing your own cultural signifiers,² but you can’t think you’re immune to them, no matter your background or how openminded you are. Noting privilege is not an accusation. It’s when we forget about it that it becomes damning.