What’s Wrong with Ethnocentrism?

To return once more to the topic of ethnocentrism (i.e., seeing and experiencing and interacting with the world from the perspective of your own culture / your own frame of reference, without an understanding of the different cultures of others, or the ability to enter into their frame of reference and experience), I would like to ask whether ethnocentrism is compatible with faith, and if not, what’s wrong with it?

Here are some of the characteristics of ethnocentrism, with reference to the stages of Bennett’s “Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity”*:

(Denial)

• lack of awareness of cultural difference
• lack of interest in cultural difference
• inability to distinguish cultural difference (e.g., thinking of “Africans” or “Asians” or even “foreigners” as a broad category without internal differentiation)
• isolation or intentional separation from different others

(Defense)

• lack of understanding of cultural difference or others who are different
• a negative experience of difference, and reaction against it – feeling threatened by difference
• one’s own culture experienced as the only viable one
• polarization (“us” / “them”)
• generalizing and positively stereotyping one’s own people and culture
• generalizing and negatively stereotyping other peoples and cultures
• prejudice, denigration, possibly animosity, toward those who are different
• in the extreme, dehumanizing and/or demonizing others

(Minimization)

• trivializing difference, acting as if people are basically the same (i.e., as if others are basically the same as ourselves)
• thus, not relating to others as they truly are, in their uniqueness or fullness
• lack of cultural self-awareness
• generalizing from one’s own experience, principles, practices, to others – assuming that what “works for us” is universal, relevant and applicable anywhere and everywhere and to everyone
• those in a dominant or majority group not being aware of how racial minorities experience race relations, men not being aware of how women experience gender issues, etc.
• assuming we have “the answers” for everyone, not being aware that the questions that others are asking, may be different than our questions

In sum, ethnocentrism is a form of self-centeredness, on a group and cultural level. It ranges from ignorance through defensiveness to a somewhat benign assumption of similarity, but in all cases, one cannot know and relate to others as they are, from any point on the spectrum of ethnocentrism.

There are many reasons why someone might decide that it would be best not to stay in an ethnocentric state.

From a faith perspective, I would argue that ethnocentrism, while “natural” to people, is not compatible with living according to the example and teachings of Jesus.

Take Jesus’ central teachings, to “love our neighbor as ourselves,” and to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As a starting point, it would seem that these commands would necessitate having an interest in knowing others and relating to them. And both “loving” and “doing unto others” would seem to clearly imply not looking down on them, negatively stereotyping, being biased against, or despising them. Thus, it seems obvious from the beginning that the “denial” and “defense” stages of ethnocentrism do not square with Jesus’ teaching.

To go deeper, in the broader context of the teachings of the New Testament one might define love as encompassing many other relational teachings, e.g., the exhortations to accept one another and to honor one another. To take just those two, it would seem obvious that a depth of accepting and honoring another person requires knowing that person as they are. The more fully I know someone, the more deeply I will be able to (learn to) accept or honor them. And this would be true of the “do unto others” command, which is really a way of summarizing what it means to love someone – what I want of others is that they understand me as I am, and accept and otherwise relate to me as I am, not according to an inadequate or distorted image of me.

It doesn’t take much empathy to imagine that for a person of color, having a white person treat you as if you are the same as them, without any understanding of your personal or group experience of discrimination, etc., is not loving (or even tolerable); or for a woman, to have men blithely proclaim that “we have no problem with gender issues here,” without ever listening to your experience or perspective on the matter, falls short of a positive or even acceptable relationship (to say the least). And anyone who has been on the receiving end of some other person or group coming in with the (“universal”) answers to what they perceive to be your need or problem, knows how obnoxious that approach is. Therefore, “minimization” also falls short of relating well to other people, and thus, to living according to the teachings and example of Jesus.

Ethnocentrism, in one way or another, in one form or another, is at the heart of many of the problems which exist between groups of people in the world today (and throughout history). It seems clear to me, as a follower of Jesus, that living up to the ideals and standards of our faith should lead us to reject, and seek to identify and grow beyond, ethnocentrism in all of its manifestations.

Coming soon: Beyond Ethnocentrism…

* For more details on each of these stages, see:

http://contextualliving.blogspot.com/2011/02/loving-our-neighbor-insights-from.html

http://contextualliving.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-ethnocentrism-hinders-love-of.html

http://contextualliving.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-ethnocentrism-hinders-love-of.html

For full treatment of Bennett’s model, see

Bennett, Milton J., “Towards Ethnorelativism: A Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity.” In Paige, R.M. (Ed). (1993) Education for the Intercultural Experience (2^nd ed., p. 21-71). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.

Bennett, Milton J., “Becoming Interculturally Competent.”  In Wurzel, Jaime S., ed., Toward multiculturalism: A reader in multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 62-77). Newton, MA: Intercultural Resource Corporation, 2004.

How ethnocentrism hinders love of neighbor (part I) - denial

It is well known that Jesus taught that the two great commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. (And this is not just for Christians – in recent years, several interfaith initiatives between Muslims, Christians and Jews have emphasized that loving God and loving neighbor are common to the three religions.)

The interesting thing about the account in the Gospel of Luke, of course, is that in response to a lawyer’s question, “who is my neighbor?,” Jesus tells the famous “Parable of the Good Samaritan.” The story is scandalous, really, because the Jews despised Samaritans and would have nothing to do with them, seeing them as “half-breeds” who had married pagans and developed a bastardized form of Judaism as their religion (with their own place of sacrifice, their own rituals, their own priests, etc.). Jews would not even travel through Samaria, if it were at all possible to avoid it.

In Jesus’ story, a Jewish traveler is attacked by bandits, beaten, robbed, and left to die. Religious Jews come across the man, but pass by without aiding him. The person who does aid him, as Jesus tells it, is a Samaritan. At the end of the story, when Jesus asks his questioner, “so who was the neighbor to the man that was attacked?,” the Jewish listener did not even say “the Samaritan” – he simply replied, “the one who showed him mercy.”

Jesus is telling us that our neighbor is any human being, regardless of whether s/he is part of our ethnic or religious group, regardless of whether our people have anything to do with his/her people, regardless of how we regard them (e.g., as “unclean” or otherwise offensive in some way, or even as having a false religion). Given that we all today – whoever we are, wherever we are – have people that are not part of our group, and that we consider unclean or wrong in some way (including having a false religion), perhaps even as being the enemy of our people; people that we will not associate with, who we tell jokes about, who we think perhaps ought to “go back where they came from,” etc. – it seems that Jesus’ parable is still relevant to us.

That said, I would like to present and discuss a model from Intercultural Studies, which I have found to be very helpful in considering how to relate, as a person of faith, to the “different other” – in other words, our “neighbor.”

The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS)

One of the most useful intercultural tools that I’ve come across is Milton Bennett’s “Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity” (DMIS), which considers the process of growth that people experience as they encounter cultural difference.

 

In Bennett’s model, people grow from an experience centered in ethnocentrism – seeing and experiencing the world only from the perspective of one’s own people and cultural context – to an experience that he calls ethnorelativism, which involves developing the ability to know one’s own culture and worldview as one among many, and to enter into the world of others, adapt, and live effectively in that other cultural context.

As I consider the challenge of learning to love our neighbor, in a world which increasingly brings all of us into more and more contact with people who are more and more different than our own people, I find myself reflecting on insights from the DMIS to the process of building relationship with the “different other,” i.e., our “neighbor,” whoever that “other” might be.

How Denial hinders loving our neighbor

In Bennett’s model, we must first consider barriers to loving our neighbor. The first phase in the DMIS is denial (ignorance, lack of awareness). We begin by not being aware of (cultural) difference, and avoiding it. The world simply is as we see and experience it. We are “the people” (and any others are beyond our clear vision or understanding). If we are aware of others, they are broadly characterized, e.g., we lump all “Asians” or “Africans” or “Europeans” together, with no real knowledge of any specific characteristics. In other words, we do not know our neighbor.

Denial may be characterized by isolation, simply being out of contact with different others, or by separation, “intentional erection of physical or social barriers to create distance from cultural difference as a means of maintaining a state of denial” (e.g., racial neighborhoods or ghettos). Denial is often accompanied by extreme nationalism (which I would see as a kind of idolatry of one’s own people, as over against the – usually unknown – “other”). The “dangerous underside” of denial, Bennett points out, is the implicit relegation of others to subhuman status (e.g., the Nazi treatment of the Jews).

Good fences do NOT "make good neighbors"

It should be rather obvious that this stage of denial hinders our learning to love our neighbor, because when we live in isolation in our own world, thinking that we are the only real people, and that the world is just as we see it to be, we cannot be living in relationship or harmony with others (at least, not with different others, the “neighbor” of Jesus’ parable). Love involves knowledge. Love involves interaction. Love involves relationship. To love our neighbor, we cannot be content with denial of difference (either isolation or separation).

We cannot stay apart, and follow Jesus’ teaching to love our neighbor. We cannot live as if others do not exist, and love our neighbor. We cannot feed ourselves the myth that we are right, that God is on our side, that we are “the people” and that all others are just vaguely “out there” in the darkness beyond the borders of our world, and love our neighbor.

If we want to follow Jesus’ teaching to love our neighbor, if we as people of (any) faith want to please God in how we relate to others, we must move beyond the ethnocentric stage of denial.

(More to follow…)

* For full treatment of Bennett’s model, see

Bennett, Milton J., “Towards Ethnorelativism: A Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity.” In Paige, R.M. (Ed). (1993) Education for the Intercultural Experience (2^nd ed., p. 21-71). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.

Bennett, Milton J., “Becoming Interculturally Competent.”  In Wurzel, Jaime S., ed., Toward multiculturalism: A reader in multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 62-77). Newton, MA: Intercultural Resource Corporation, 2004.