Cautioning against American Arrogance

Our return to campus this Fall has been accompanied by multiple emails from the college administration about the need to maintain Wooster’s inclusive environment, as more and more hate groups gain traction around the country. Here, I use “hate groups” very broadly to refer to groups promoting white supremacy, xenophobia, islamophobia, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Over and over again, President Sarah Bolton has emphasized that there will be no tolerance for any of these beliefs on campus.

I would like to caution American students at the College of a mistake many of us are prone to committing — of assuming under the guise of nationalism and patriotism that America is and truly is superior to other countries in this world.

This phenomenon that I’ve learned to call “American arrogance” gives rise to patterns of thinking and behavior that are dangerously parallel to those emanating from xenophobia. American arrogance and xenophobia both assume and generalize that one’s own country is superior to others while also maintaining a certain level of ignorance about other cultures, ultimately creating isolation and hatred towards people of foreign origins.

For those of us who were present at Convocation last week, the aforementioned American arrogance was exemplified when one of the speeches relied on degrading the culture and political climate of a different country to prove the superiority of our institution here.

While I understand that sometimes you need to distance yourself from the privilege of having to internalize how lucky you are to begin with, I think it is very disrespectful to be a guest in a foreign country and publicly criticize their government and their people in front of a large group of your own people. This becomes especially inappropriate when the guest is an American, criticizing an Asian country, in front of a Western audience (keep in mind the context of being a white American in a postcolonial world, or someone from the Global North criticizing a country in the Global South).

To add further perspective to the number of people that speech affected, I would like to highlight how many students at this very college have had close ties with China. Chinese students dominate the international student population here at the College, about 70 of whom are part of the freshman class alone. Numerous student leaders, including the President and Vice President of the International Student Association (ISA) this year are both Chinese. Additionally, I myself have lived in China for about four years of my life and personally was never mocked by a single Chinese person for not being a native Mandarin speaker.

Rather, I was very much encouraged to practice with them despite my horrendous pronunciations as a beginner. “Making fun of people learning Chinese is not part of our culture,” commented a student from Beijing. “Was talking badly about China really necessary to make Wooster look good?” commented another Chinese student, asking a question I would like us all to reflect upon.

Being in a foreign country is never easy, but it is always a learning experience. Do we not all realize that international students are often made fun of on this very campus for not speaking “good English” although for many of us, it is not even our first language? What we need to do is put things into perspective and be very careful while speaking about our experiences abroad.

What you may personally feel is quite often not a reflection of that entire nation. We need to be extremely cautious of not isolating other people that we also go to college with — people that, as student leaders and the “global citizens” we claim to be, we are supposed to represent and support, not enrage and isolate.

Maansi Kumar, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at MKumar18@wooster.edu.