Political Correctness
If someone was to claim that they "don't see color" or "don't see race," would they be considered ethnocentric? Would they be destroying the other person's culture, to overlook the difference of background? Should we then, in turn, take into account a person's ethnicity, in an attempt to treat that individual better?
Comments (10)
How exactly ought I take someone's ethnicity into account in order to "treat them better"?
Why do I have to treat people "better"?
What's wrong with the way I currently treat people? (I treat people equally, as if I don't see color).
Why should it be my place to assume how people want to be treated based on their race?
But is setting aside multiculturalism being insensitive to our differences, as individuals?
I'd consider them to be lying.
But look at how college brand SJWism outright prevents actual multiculturalism with concepts like "cultural appropriation".
There are genuine idiots out there promoting the idea that to wear dreadlocks and not be black is to harm people of color, or to sell food prepared in a traditional style other than one's own heritage is outright theft of cultural intellectual property. It's this kind of overblown sensitivity (which for various reasons is more visible than it should be; see: The rise of social media and the children who operate them) that makes most adults recoil in disgust.
Outrage is the new rage.
Indeed. For example, a talented chef like Rick Bayless is castigated for specializing in (and profiting from) Mexican cuisine...because he's white. Never mind that he has traveled in Mexico, spent years studying regional cuisines and adapting them...ideas are to be hermetically locked up inside of one culture.
(This is not to say that there can't be legitimate concerns along these lines...just that the latest shrill cries of "cultural appropriation" are largely spurious. Black people can wear Dockers, can't they? White people can wear dreadlocks...not that they should wear dreadlocks, mind you. Besides looking unappealing, they also seem impossible to wash. So, get back to your Phish concert, you damn, dirty hippy!)
Race or ethnicity comes to be an issue only if there is a) large racial / ethnic minorities and b) there are tensions between the majority and the minorities.
Without that your whole questioning doesn't even surface.
Here's a thought experiment: If you live in a town where absolutely everybody is from the same race, same ethnicity, same in every way, does that mean your "ethnocentric" then? Does it mean that you are a racist, really? And if one foreigner with a bit of different skin and hair color comes to your town, will you all of a sudden change your behaviour and start judging him or her totally differently than you judge people in your town?
The whole discourse itself is a sign, a symptom of a tension between groups of people in the society. It wouldn't happen if there wouldn't be some ugly memory in the closet.
What you define is good manners in my view.
But then again.... when in Rome, do as the Romans do has also some merit to it.
The question with multiculturalism is really about the dominant culture, how it tolerates other cultures or subcultures and how assimilation happens. The correct way for assimilation to happen is that the prevalent culture is so goddam fascinating and wonderful that people from other cultures decide voluntarily adapt to it. And that doesn't mean one has to forget one's roots.