The Ugliness inside: Ethnocentrism and Racism

People around me know that I was never confident that Hillary Clinton was going to win against Donald Trump.  In the days leading up to the 2016 election, I took comfort in all the polls that said he wasn’t going to win.  In retrospect,  I’m grateful for those polls because they helped me sleep more peacefully for a few weeks.  I would use those polls to reassure myself that I was wrong in my conviction that the ugliness of ethnocentrism and racism that hide deep  inside every human, was going to erupt within enough individuals at the last moment in the privacy of a voting booth.  And I believe it did.  For some, that ugliness was exposed during Trump rallies, but for those who aspire to be better and to do better, they had to fight these impulses every time Donald Trump highlighted how “They” were not “Us” during his campaign.  Some of his supporters were in fact racist, but most were ethnocentric. Dictionary.com defines ethnocentrism as “the belief in the inherent superiority of one’s own ethnic group or culture.”

I’ve always been a people watcher.  Since childhood, I’ve been passionate about understanding what makes people tick.  In truth, this propensity to learn to anticipant how people are going to behave is a survival mechanism.  I grew up in a home, community, and family where I had to be on guard all the time to survive.  My father, although a genius in the true sense of the word, was a man who loved his family and could provide.  But he was also a violent alcoholic who on occasion terrorized his family.  One day, I’ll likely say more about that.  But more about people I watched closely.  My teachers who were always white and although educated, overtly “nice”, and well-meaning, often harbored and inadvertently expressed their destructive notions about the black children in their classrooms.  I also grew up black in multiple American neighborhoods or schools where I was often one of only a handful of blacks.  Making friends meant overcoming their initial base instinct to exclude me.  That took a kind of learning to survive called acculturation. Dictionary.com defines acculturation as “the process of adopting the cultural traits or social patterns of another group.” I became pretty good at this because of an interesting thing I noticed about human beings.  They weren’t against me personally, they were wary of the unfamiliar.  And so I took it upon myself, to make them comfortable.  This gave me entrance into the group and taught me a lot more about human nature.

By high school, I surmised that people are a mixture of both strengths and weaknesses.  The nicest, most generous white friends who gave me entrance into their circle of friends, could spew some of the most ethnocentric and sometimes racist beliefs.  Early on, I made it my mission to challenge those beliefs, mostly through my own behavior to disabuse their ideas about blacks and sometimes through activism.  I thought I had proven something to them when my graduating class of 625, with only 5 black students, voted me “Best Personality” and “Most Outgoing”.  I was also one of the valedictorians. In truth, sometimes it was emotionally better to be alone than to endure the constant onslaught of ethnocentric remarks.  I got tired of hearing, “…..but we don’t consider you to be black.”  But the cruel reality was that I was seen as the exception to the rule.  The negative views about blacks (and other non-whites) are deeply rooted in the white American psyche (and even in the psyche of some people of color-about themselves).  The battle to purge these erroneous views is going to be long and hard.

At USC, my white and very wealthy roommate, a nice girl from what I could see, never bothered to get to know me before moving out within the first week. Sure,  I had acculturated to white people to make them comfortable around me, but not to “rich” white people–an entirely different cultural group. USC was filled with them in those early days of Affirmative Action when I was enrolled.   Needless to say, that roommate wasn’t going to stick around long enough for me to win her over.  There was no question that she even considered “lowering” herself to my apparent level.  At 18, I was  battered and bruised by enough ethnocentric whites who held all the power.  I was convinced that there was little I could do to change their perceptions about my people and my culture.

Growing up in America, I was never allowed to view black culture as superior, in fact every societal message tried to sell my culture as inferior.  But what I  saw was our dignity in the face of the discrimination that perpetuated our poverty.  I enjoyed our food, our beauty, our creativity, our music, dances, our athleticism, our resilience, our respect for our elders, our expressions of faith, athleticism, and our sense of style.  Are we a perfect people? By no means.  Like all human groups, each individual among us is flawed, some far worse than others.  The problem is that this country chooses to take the worst actors in non-white groups and hold them up as representative of the entire group.  This is especially true among African Americans who were uniquely considered sub-human (only two-thirds) during slavery.  These perceptions of a people of an inferior intelligence, talent, and moral compass have proven difficult to overcome.  These misconceptions coupled with the power of the white majority to unwittingly perpetuate them is not only immoral (and self-defeating as a nation), but leads to continued discrimination that one could easily argue has been in their collective self-interest.

It became crystal clear to me that I was only going to survive being a black women in this world by spending more time with other like-minded black women for a few hours here and there.   While at USC, I joined the first Greek organization established by and for college educated black women in 1908 at Howard University, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.  Today, I remain an active member of Xi Kappa Omega chapter.   Alpha Kappa Alpha members are a sisterhood, representing some of the most educated and prominent women in the world such as Coretta Scott King and the astronaut, Mae Jemison (read her autobiography)   , and the newly revealed Katherine Johnson (a mathematician), Dorothy Vaughan (a computer scientist) and Mary Jackson (an engineer), all three NASA women featured in the book and movie,  “Hidden Figures“.   There are other black Greek sisterhoods who represent the African American community well, such as Delta Sigma Theta, Zeta Phi Beta and Sigma Gamma Rho.  Loretta Lynch, the last attorney general is a Delta.  These are not ethnocentric groups who believe themselves superior to anyone, but groups who are committed to serving  all mankind while appreciating our rich cultural heritage and supporting each other.  This sisterhood has been an emotional refuge for me.  Thank you sisters for your unconditional, unwavering, and strong love and support.

So, I was among only a few who was not surprised on November 9 to learn that Donald Trump had won the election to be our next president.  My life experience has taught me that humans are both tribal and self-preserving.  We are biological organisms, hell bent on personal survival.  As social beings, we are also determined to preserve our collective groups.  Our human history has shown that our group survival instincts demand that we prefer those who are most closely related to us culturally, and often racially, over outsiders. When convinced that our group is under threat through increased competition for scarce resources (like jobs or college admissions) or fear of terrorism, or outrage over changing social-cultural values, then we will fight for survival.  Donald Trump was able to tap into this base human instinct and convince a lot of people that a vote for him was a vote for the survival of their culture and at a sub-conscience level, a fight for their race.

I don’t believe humans have to give into this impulse.  But it takes a conscience effort not to.  Our first step in overcoming ethnocentrism and racism is to recognize its existence within us and to use our power of reason to overcome it.  We must see our black, brown, white and yellow neighbors as just as fully human as we are, with both strengths and weaknesses.  We must deny our impulse to allow one individual from any group to represent that entire group.  Can you even imagine suggesting that white American people are all like the cold-blooded murderer of nine black church members in South Carolina?  Sounds ridiculous right?  But the same is true of Muslims, and all people of color.  The worst actors represent only themselves.

In closing this week, let me say this:  We must continually remind ourselves that every human being, regardless of the cultural group, has varying levels of intelligence, energy, and talent based on their DNA as a human being.  We must remind ourselves and our friends that our society has a role to play in building each other’s capacity to love or hate, to be courageous or fearful, to protect or hurt, to build or destroy, to be educated or kept ignorant.  But most of all, to change and to see each other as fully human and fully deserving of respect and opportunity.  If each of us can take this reality to heart, then together we can all rise.