Race, Ethnicity, and Culture

Most of my important lessons about life have come from recognizing how others from a different culture view things.

Understanding across cultural groups requires adopting

To learn from and about communities other than our own, we need to go beyond the ethnocentric assumptions from which we each begin. Often, the first and most difficult step is to recognize that our original views are generally a function of our own cultural experience, rather than the only right or possible way.

The diversity of cultural ways within a nation and around the world is a resource for the creativity and future of humanity. As with the importance of supporting species diversity for the continued adaptation of life to changing circumstances, the diversity of cultural ways is a resource protecting humanity from rigidity of practices that could

People often view the practices of other communities as barbaric. They assume that their community’s perspective on reality is the only proper or sensible or civilized one (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Campbell & LeVine, 1961; Jahoda & Krewer, 1997).

Assumptions are the things you don’t know you’re making, which is why it is so disorienting the first time you take the plug out of a washbasin in Australia and see the water spiraling down the hole the other way around. The very laws of physics are telling you how far you are from home.

Lev Vygotsky, a leader of this approach from early in the twentieth century, pointed out that children in all communities are cultural participants, living in a particular community at a specific time in history. Vygotsky (1987) argued that rather than trying to “reveal the eternal child,” the goal is to discover “the historical child.”

Rosenblum and Travis (2015) argue that, despite the coexistence of both privilege and oppression within any one person, stigma is so pervasive and strong in our society that oppression can often trump privileges that one’s other statuses might offer. They point to health, housing, economic, hiring, and promotion disparities as evidence that

Similarly, the just world hypothesis states that our thoughts about experiences are influenced by our need to believe that the world is a just place in which good people are rewarded for their positive deeds and bad people are punished for their wicked ways (Lerner, 1980).