Ethnocentrism/Xenophobia

Ethnocentrism as Denial

The primary mechanism of ethnocentrism is perceptual. The groups in which people are socialized provide a set of figure/ground distinctions that give form to some phenomena and not to others. For instance, American women as a group are taught to make many more distinctions in texture and color than are American men, while generally men are provided with more categories for distinguishing technical objects like automobiles and computers. The result of this socialization is that women tend to treat color and texture as objects of interest, while men tend to treat them as just background. Men, on the other hand, tend to treat cars or computers as important objects of interest, while women tend to see them as just the mechanisms through which transportation or information occurs.

In communication between these two groups, American women may see American men as aesthetically incompetent, while men may lament women's intransigence toward learning basic mechanical skills. However, in both cases, the issue is not really about behavior—it is about perceptual conditioning. If people have not learned [Page 834]to differentiate certain objects, categories cannot be generated that let people talk about or even think about those objects. The others may seem incompetent but really they are simply oblivious.

There are at least two major implications of perceptual conditioning for multicultural group relations. One is that entire groups of people may exist and not be perceived at all by people of other groups. For instance, not so long ago in the United States, many straight people did not have a well-developed perceptual category for gay people. Consequently, straights tended not to perceive the existence of gays as a group; when asked, they greatly underestimated the size of the group, and they reacted to individual gay people who came to their attention as deviants from their own group rather than normal people in a different group. The perceptual category for gays is now much better defined, as evidenced by the recent event of the president of Iran claiming that there were no gay people in Iran—a statement ridiculed by many of the same people who once claimed the same thing in the United States.

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