Ethnicity and Race

From the readings, video, and websites that we researched this week, one thing that stood out to me was how much easier it is for people from any country to discriminate against others based on how they look than for any other reason. In Rwanda, when expatriots from other countries were being evacuated, more than one person commented in the video that all white people were removed, almost without questions, while all black people were left to fend for themselves. During World War II, when Japanese-Americans were rounded up and herded into concentration camps, German-Americans and Italian-Americans were left alone. Black people living in the U.S. have never been able to assimilate into culture the same way that white immigrants have been able to. These differences all seem based on how people look rather than other defining characteristics. Is this just because we are so visually-oriented or maybe just because our first judgements are usually from what we see? I know that discrimination is based on other factors as well, such as if someone has an accent, what cultural clothing someone wears, etc. but these things can be changed and don't seem to matter as much.

As a white person living in America, I had never experienced any type of racial discrimination, but when my husband and I lived in Japan for four years, I was able to see a little of what this could be like. The Americans living in Okinawa are sometimes portrayed badly to the Okinawan public, but not quite to the same extent that black Americans are portrayed in the media in America. I found that this made me and other Americans that I knew in Okinawa want to get past these judgements and try to be the opposite of what was thought of us. We went above and beyond to try to appear polite, quiet, not greedy, etc. but we were only in the country for a short period of time. I think that this forced attitude on our parts might have grown old after awhile, and we might have begun to resent it, but this is hard to say. After all, we were guests in their country, so we didn't expect the Okinawans to treat us as though we were not different at all. If we were in our own country, experiencing these same discriminatory stereotypes, it would have been a very different situation. Also, it was very frustrating to be out in public and see other Americans acting the way that "typical Americans" act, thus furthering the stereotypes to our Okinawan hosts.