Examples Of Ethnocentrism In America

Cole Martin
23 January 2013
Ethnocentrism in America “Race” to me is essentially a classification method that everyone uses to sort humans into large, distinct groups based upon an excess of different affiliations, such as nationality, ethnicity, culture, and class. “Race” is totally just a myth and is no way something that is real or genuine. It has absolutely nothing to do with genetics. The view that reflects the conviction that civilization is divided into these distinct groups called “races” is called racism, and the members of each “race” share certain attributes that make the group either low-class or high-class. The process of racialism can verify the belief in racial differences, but not the absolute hierarchy between different
“races.” Racialism is something that occurs on an everyday basis, whether we believe it or not. From your facial expressions to your decision on who to trust can be referred to as racialism. Everyone has a different view on “race”, racism, and racialism and it is essential to keep this in mind whenever talking about experiences that shape ones definition of it. Everyone has this dissimilar view due to the fact that each person is involved in a different experience that allows him or her to take a different outlook based upon every experience they are personally involved in. This simply means that family, residential communities, schooling, work, friendships, sporting events, and movies all must be taken into account when looking at each person’s definition of “race”, racialism, and racism.
When I think about family, nothing really sticks out to me when I think about dealing with “race”, racism, or racialism.
Although, I can recall a time when attending church when I was about 15 years old where “race” played an important role in what happened. Since I am Catholic, we are typically associated with being anti-Jewish. We went out to eat after church and made small talk with our waitress, who happened to be Jewish. We talked about church with her and it somehow came out that we were Catholic. The next thing we know, we were given a new waitress and told the other waitress wasn’t comfortable serving us anymore and asked for the rest of the day off. This led me to believe that she used “race” to put us into a group where she thought of us as bad people just due to the fact that we were Catholics. I have never felt so judged off of something in my entire life. This shows that the relationship between “race” and religion is simply thriving and that this waitress linked racial prejudice to racial beliefs wrongly, which is a very common occurrence
nowadays.
Thinking about my past residential communities, I typically used to live with all White families until my parents divorced and were forced to move into two separate houses. I never typically had grouped people due to their “race,” but when my mother moved to her residential community, I admit I grouped people based on their “race.” It was hard for me to do this at first, but it just kind of felt like something that I needed to do. I never had really experienced some of the things that I had experienced when I first moved into this semi-African American residential community. I saw things out of the ordinary that I thought was only in movies: cooking out on the driveway, raising a batch of baby pit bulls, or just blaring music as loud as they could when driving around everywhere. I am not a racist human being by any means, but these were things I associated with African Americans and they all were coming true in front of my eyes right when I moved residential communities about 4 years ago.
When high school rolled around, I attended a lower-tier high school that was predominantly African Americans, where White people were the minority. “Race” played a huge role in my high school, whether anyone would admit it. It was very obvious the teachers sorted kids by “race” when creating classroom discussions and groups for group projects. Whenever we had to get together for these group projects, you could tell the teachers had some motives behind how they chose the groups because the African Americas were all grouped up together and the White students were all grouped up together. This showed that the teachers in my high school very much believed in the fact of racialism and utilized it everyday. The teachers were definitely the worst when it came to utilizing “race,” racism, and racialism. I believe that the upbringing that African Americans that went to my high school had to experience compared to mine are what allow for such a different outlook on life. I was expected to attend college and graduate when I was first born and from what my African American friends have always told me, they were just expected to graduate from high school and that was the ceiling for them since their parents normally never even received their GED’s. In every working environment, it is fairly obvious that bosses choose to utilize the “race” factor when they need to get some type of project done. I can recall an experience one time where my boss had previously tried to get one of my coworkers to complete a simple errand for him, but he had failed due to his laziness. I walked into work one day and my boss pulled me aside and told me that he didn’t trust my coworker simply because he was lazy and African American. This shows me that it is absolutely ridiculous to think of this coworker as lazy due simply to the fact that he is African American. I think this is a type of racism that shaped my definition of racism. Not all African Americans are lazy at all; just look at all the African American athletes in the world. One could even argue that White people are just as lazy as African Americans because there are just as many homeless and jobless White people as there are African Americans. This type of racism is what is wrong with American today and I would love if there were a way to try and get rid of it.
Throughout my schooling experiences, I always was in class with some African Americans so naturally I became friends with them. We would hang out outside of school all the time and go to parties together. I was in no way one of those racist, White, stuck-up children. I used to always think that all White kids had African American best friends. I believe that due to the “race” relations cycle discussed in chapter 6, my friendships grew with African Americans due to this cycle. Generally, you fight with your best friends because you always but heads but in the end it always brings you closer together. The stages of the “race” relations cycle just build upon this thought process, which eventually ends up with integration. As our two “races” came together and assimilated, our class became more noticeable than the racial heritage that we each had. When doing the required readings, this stuck out to me and led me to believe this concept is very much real and still alive.
I have always been one of the more active ones out of all of my friends ever since elementary school. I was year-round always doing some type of sport. Typically, when one thinks about baseball, which was my best and favorite sport, you think of it as a stereotypically White sport with not many African Americans. When you think of basketball, you categorize this as characteristically an African American sport with not many White athletes. Growing up and always playing with African Americans on my team, I never really thought of basketball as an African American sport or baseball as a White sport. One of my best friends in elementary school wanted to play a new sport in the summer, so I tried to get him to be on my summer baseball travel team. He told me that he had never really played baseball and didn’t want to play on my team because “baseball is a sport for the White people and I’m better at basketball anyways cause its what we’re good at.” I had never been on a team with all White people before until that summer. I always asked my dad why there were no African Americans on our team and he just kept telling me “this isn’t their sport and they should just stick to basketball.” I was never more confused in my life and I believe this occurrence was one of the main factors in helping me outline my own definition of racism.
In just about every movie, there are people of just about every “race,” color, gender, nationality, class, and culture in every movie that you watch.
Whenever there is an African American in any horror movie, everyone always says that he or she is the first to die. Commonly, this is never the case and the African American is one of the last people to live. There are a lot of people that think this and I think it is best summed up when I think about watching Halloween Resurrection with all my friends when it first came out in the movie theaters about 10 years ago. Even though I was younger, I still knew what was going on and was really into the Halloween franchise. It came to the first scene and there was an African American about to die, when all of a sudden my friend screams out, “Run! He’s going to kill you first! The Black guy always dies first!” in front of everyone in the movie theater. The guy ended up getting away and not dying at all the entire movie, but it still baffled me that my friend thought this. I asked him what movie he had ever seen where the African American guy died first and he couldn’t even think of one. I think he just thought African Americans were dumb and therefore he’d be the first one to die. When I take in this type of experience, it allows me to imagine certain circumstances and come to a conclusion as to what I believe “race” to actually be through my eyes and based on certain incidents like
this.
Overall, I believe “race,” racism, and racialism are three of the most important concepts in the history of America. Without these three concepts, America wouldn’t be the country that it is today and life would be totally different and dissimilar to what it is now. “Race” is discussed with hesitancy because of the fact that no one wants to be the one that says the wrong thing to someone about it. The social knowledge that plays a factor now is more important than ever. Everyone has a different perception of these concepts based upon their own experiences with their family, residential communities, schooling, work, friendships, sporting events, and movies which is what allows “race,” racism, and racialism to be so powerful in the minds of Americans.