I had a conversation with a European today about America and so-called “Americanisms”. And as I have had this conversation before, numerous times with various Europeans, it quickly became a conversation about collective identities versus individual identities, or in other words, generalizations versus what is actually there. It seems to be easier for people to glance at a thing, group of people, or nation; and call it a name rather than finding out about the individual people within each group or nation.
Obviously you cannot look at each individual person and examine them or get to know them individually. But we can pay attention to the individual people we do know that may be a part of the group we are so ready to generalize.
I have spent a lot of time reading the internet, mostly forums and comments on various articles. There is one site that I frequent, The Local Sweden, where seemingly every article-no matter the topic-becomes a debate about Islam, non-Swedes, people from Africa, multiculturalism and inevitably racism. Some commenters think that non-white Swedes or Europeans, primarily from the Middle East or Africa, should not live in Western culture because they do not or cannot assimilate. Those people, along with the whole of Sweden, are somehow called racists. So goes the debate. Here is one such article with over 300 comments: We Never Had a Single Conversation. And here is another, Asylum Agreement to Reunite Thousands. You don’t even really have to read the article. The real information is in the comments.
And of course there is the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, and the various other attacks carried out by extremist Muslims or fundamentalist Christians. There is also the Norway terrorist attack by Anders Behring Breivik. History is filled with attacks on blacks, whites, gays, Jews, Muslims, Americans, Europeans, and religion. Then there is this: Jamey Rodemeyer committed suicide after being bullied. And there are many stories like his.
All these things have something very significant in common: they all involve an implicit denial of humanity. They group people together, code and tag them a certain way, then process them as collectives as opposed to individuals within a group. A group with one mentality is usually a mob. But a group with differing mentalities is the world we live in. There is no one Muslim, American, a gay person that can fit every single stereotype out there about them.
I know that it is easier to generalize someone that is different and project your ideas of who they are onto them. But that does not make it right. And it certainly does not make it true. But it does make it easier to hate, enslave, murder, or cause someone to commit suicide. Because it seems that the more that we learn about humanity through science and philosophy, through social communications through the internet (Facebook, Twitter, and various forums), or through travel, we still are really not seeing anything at all.
Kea Worth