In a recent assignment for a class I facilitate, one of the students posed the question (which I’m paraphrasing) of whether it was ok for people from subordinate or target racial groups to be ethnocentric. The question came after reading an article by Milton Bennett describing the DMIS (note: ours was different, but this is a good article available for free courtesy of Google Scholar).
The question is important. Ethnocentrism is often conflated with racial in-group price. Ethnocentrism, as Bennett describes it, is different. It’s a developmental stage wherein individuals lack sophisticated cognitive structures to understand, and meaningfully make sense of, difference. As a result, people in this stage tend to experience difference as bad and undesirable. Similar is good, different is bad, and when we apply this to racial thinking, those whose epidermal variation is significantly different from our own become the “bad” ones, people we oppose, and we get to be good, overlooking and justifying bad things that are done to those different as things that need to be done in the name of, well, all that is good. You know, God, country, flag and all.
When the dominant racial group is ethnocentric, the impact on subordinate racial groups is devastating. US culture provides many examples of the impact of ethnocentrism on People of Color, and I’m not just talking history.
That said, it is important to differentiate between ethnocentrism, which is poorly developed categories for understanding difference – racial difference in this example, and racial group pride – pride based on the positive contributions of one’s racial group(s) based on an understanding of the contributions of individuals and groups who share a common trait – epidermal variation – that does not rely on a negative experience of those who are different in skin color.
In the end, ethnocentrism isn’t necessarily bad, it is a developmental stage one goes through. A step, if you will, towards a greater understanding of difference. Much like we crawl before we walk, as we develop ways to understand and experience difference, we move from less sophisticated ways of understanding difference to more sophisticated ways of understanding difference.
