I heard this story on NPR about a young woman who created what can be best described as a virtual tour guide business during the pandemic. Seems like it started out as a business to actually guide people on tours but she adapted. Good for her. What wasn’t good was a snippet from her vlog where she obviously doesn’t understand how time differences work and thinks that wherever she lives in the U.S is ahead in time when the reality is the east coast is eight hours behind. Then she added the comment, “but it’s really Saturday in the U.S.” It seems innocuous, but it’s typical of Americans who travel. No matter where they go, reality only exists back home in the U.S. of A.
I only bring this up to show the unconscious bias of ethnocentrism that many Americans exhibit. Many are hard-pressed to name more than a few other countries besides Canada, Mexico, or West European countries. I suppose everyone knows China now, but that’s another example of the problem. Americans generally only pay attention to other countries when events force them to.
Geography is only part of the problem and I’m the first to admit to being bad at it. Knowing all the world capitals is nice to know, but not so useful unless you memorize the size, population, relative position, and other details. Americans can’t be bothered with details even when they travel. This is especially true when it comes to language where college enrollment in language classes is nearly half of what it was in 1960. Yes, English is the lingua franca of lingua but learning a language opens a whole world and provides a lot of insight into a culture. Too many are deluded with the concept of American Exceptionalism, some consciously and some not.
It’s a big world out there and just because we have the biggest military on the planet doesn’t change the fact that there are a lot more of them than there are of us. The U.S. has been wrong about a lot of things like colonialism and propping up dictators over the history of our country. There are also a lot of other smart people out there who have different perspectives that we should respect. It seems small, but maybe we could start by being better tourists and knowing more about the places we visit and the people who live there.
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