It really is a tricky subject, is it not? All humans are logically and normally ethnocentric. I said before that I have met folks all over the world, and they were all ethnocentric. But it is not just that!
Many of them, especially in the 3rd World, are not only ethnocentric in that they love their race, ethnicity, tribe, nation, etc. but they really do think that their they are better than everybody else!
This often takes the form that they are center of something or other. Hindu nationalists think that much of world civilization started with them. Chinese nationalists say that all four winds start in China, the Middle Kingdom, meaning it is the center of the world. Japan was the Land of the Rising Sun, the place where the sun itself actually came up and warmed the world.
I talked to a Moroccan once who informed me that first of all, he was a Berber, not a Moroccan, but also that the Berbers had started all of modern man’s civilization. Vietnamese nationalists say that they are center of East Asia. It’s almost as if the ethnic nationalist sees themselves as like the Sun in the solar system, and other nations as revolving around them.
I used to work with American Indians. There is no Amerindian solidarity, not even in the US. They dislike each other too much for that, and they care nothing about the Indians across the border. Dislike is too strong of a word. Indifference is better. The others are like they are almost not really there. Or if they are, they are not on the same level. It’s almost as if they are like those deer out in the fields, nice to look at, but not on the same level as fellow humans.
They only cared about their own tribe! They were indifferent to the other tribes around them, and they were overtly hostile to some of them. I talked to some folks in the surrounding tribes and they were the same way. Now and again I would mention something about some other Indian tribe. The tribal members I was working with would act kind of bored, like this was not important. “Yeah,” they would say. “But that’s not us. They’re not us.”
On the other hand, ethnocentrism can and does lead to supremacism, but most of the naturally ethnocentric folks I have met from other places were not all that racist. If they were, they would not have even been talking to me.
One may logically ask what is wrong with supremacism.
If you think about it logically, ethnic or racial supremacism taken to its logical end can lead only to expulsion, apartheid or separation of the outgroups or Other. Apartheid meaning any kind of ethnically restrictive legislation or practice including Jim Crow.
Much of the polemic against the Jews is that they are some sort of supremacists. It’s true, but more for the less assimilated. The less assimilated the Jew, the more tribal, supremacist and bigoted they are. Anti-Semites act like this is something special about Jews, a uniquely evil fact. Yet when you spend time with other ethnic supremacists you realize how much their supremacism is simply a mirror of that of the Jews. So Jewish chauvinism, supremacism and racism is simply the human variety.
What’s interesting is this statement: If you think about it logically, ethnic or racial supremacism taken to its logical end can lead only to expulsion, apartheid or separation of the outgroups or Other.
And what exactly has happened in Israel? Precisely this, no? Israel is the racial ethnocentrism and supremacism of the Jews, codified into a political movement (Zionism) and taken to its logical and probably unavoidable conclusion.
Things are not as hard to figure out as they seem sometimes.
3
20
20
20
Ethnic pride, or “ethnic supremacy” – as you call it when applying it to someone you don’t like – is like a gun. Maybe the world would be a better place if there were no guns. But Pandora’s Box has a “no returns” policy; there will always be guns. If someone has to have a gun, I’d rather it be me.
What we’ve done in America and Western Europe is disarmed ourselves of ethnic pride. Now some white people are acting surprised that other ethnic groups are treating us like a doormat.
Great comment. That sums things up so well.