This general lack of knowledge about the world could be attributed to
the gap in the curriculum, but then we must ask ourselves how this gap
came to be. In times of budgetary shortfalls, the programs that get cut are
the ones we feel we can do without. While talk of diversity and a wider
world, global perspective is popular, in practice, ethnocentrism is well
established on the individual and institutional level (Kinder and Kam
2009). Language plays a central role in the structuring of these
hierarchies:
Underlying the intersection of language and race is a language
ideology that we call the ideology of nativeness, an Us-versus-Them
division of the linguistic world in which native and nonnative
speakers of a language are thought to be mutually exclusive,
uncontested, identifiable groups. At the core of this ideological model
is a view of the world’s speech communities as naturally monolingual
and monocultural, whereby one language is semiotically associated
with one nation.
(Shuck 2006)More specifically, Devos and Banaji (2005) conducted a series of six
quantitative studies to answer a straightforward question: “Do people
differentiate between ethnic groups within the concept of ‘American’?”
The data gave them a simple answer: “To be American is to be White”
(ibid.: 463). The college students who participated in the study were
unambiguous in their view of the relationship between race and belonging.
Even when an individual subscribes to the belief that all races and
ethnicities are entitled to equal human rights and liberties, there is still “an
exceptionally large effect demonstrating, at least among White American
students, a strong automatic association between American and White
compared with American and Asian” (ibid.: 452–453).
There is a large body of scholarly work that has examined the
complicated way Asians are perceived – and how they perceive themselves
as residents and citizens of the U.S. Some of the findings include: