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
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
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