The Cross-Cultural American is a book to help Americans deal professionally and competently with a multicultural society. It views this challenge not as a "problem," but as necessary to move America toward a "more perfect union." Recognizing our society as a cultural mosaic reminds us of an American immigrant tradition which has contributed to the greatness of the United States as a democratic nation among the world of nations. While the book focuses on coming to grips with America's diversity, it also focuses on two contemporary American dilemmas in her journey toward a "more perfect union: " extreme violence in the inner cities and Islamic extremist terrorism. Their solution emerges as we consider both as cross-cultural challenges. The Cross-Cultural American was written when "underclass" communities of America's inner cities began to explode in unprecedented street gang violence, until they became America's "killing fields." Today extreme violence is also taking place in Europe's major cities where underclass communities of immigrants are unemployed, fail to assimilate into society and they become locked in poverty. Disaffected Islamic youth then become prime targets for radicalization by Islamic extremist terrorists who recruit them into a life of violence. Recently the American news media has shown a short historical memory when they do not connect America's inner city violence to where these "terror crimes" actually take place-underclass communities. They wrongly attribute American inner city violence to "racist police" and then wrongly attribute Islamic extremist violence to "religion" in Europe, ignoring the impact of the underclass in both cases. In the American case, there is no excuse for this lack of historical perspective because underclass conditions have been persistent in America's inner cities for the last three decades with terrifying results, the city of Chicago today being a prime example. These two popular façades (racist police/Islam) hide the true cause of both kinds of terrorist violence-underclass conditions both at home and abroad. To attribute the cause of these terror crimes wrongly makes an effective strategy to combat them elusive. In reality, both crimes of terror have one defining context in common-the underclass. The Cross-Cultural American helps readers face America's foremost challenges today by putting them in their proper cultural context and helping them make the necessary shift from racism to culture for understanding a major violent global subculture and its dangers-the underclass.
About the Author: Former police officer and professor of cross-cultural communications Paul Pomerville served in the Seattle Police Department for seventeen years, the last five years as a detective in the Gang Unit, qualifying as an expert witness in gang cases in municipal, state and federal courts. After leaving the Seattle Police Department, for seven years Paul trained police agencies across the United States with his seminar "A Professional Police Response to Cultural Diversity." As a member of the International Police Task Force, he trained police in Bosnia-Herzegovina for a year and then with the United Nations police served as an Assistant Police Commissioner developing national police in the new nation of East Timor for two years; he also trained the Indonesian National Police for three years under the auspices of the U.S Department of State.