Facing Down Casual Racism in Everyday Speech

People have stereotypes about other countries. These stereotypes help people make sense of countries they have no first experience interacting with. It can be exhausting to navigate the almost endless nuances of sociocultural, political, and economic differences. Shorthand labels, however crude and oversimplifying they may be, provide, at times, practical starting points for people to build knowledge of a topic that they have little background in. For those who are emigrating to another country or coming into contact with people of another nationality for the first time, having a starting point is certainly better than not having one.

But too often, stereotypes, especially at the national level, consist of labels that exaggerate differences negatively. Mainstream media, catering to a domestic audience with little firsthand knowledge of other countries, sensationalize stories of cultural differences to attract audiences. Politicians, keen to showcase how their country is safer than others, portray foreign shores as havens for criminals. The more sinister adds a corollary that allowing immigrants from these crime-ridden foreign nations will surely ruin the peace and prosperity of their homeland.

The high-level talks of negative stereotypes, then, quickly permeate the public psyche, seeping into everyday conversations. Nowhere is this clearer than racial stereotypes in the public imagination. The talks of blacks being good at sports but lacking in intellect, Asians being diligent but lacking masculinity, and Hispanics as a source of drugs and gang violence seem to cross borders as mainstream media and people themselves become more international. For those facing negative stereotypes, everyday life is upended, frequently for the worse.

Within the international education industry, such negative racial stereotypes take on an even more sinister and practical turn. For those whose goal is to study at top English-speaking universities, being good at the English language and familiarity with the local culture where the universities are located are important qualities to have. But the demand to be supported by those with the right English accents and firsthand knowledge, while rational, is expressed in racist terms. People of darker skin color are seen as being less fluent in English and less knowledgeable about top universities around the world.

Cloaking preferences for those familiar with top English-speaking universities in racist terms, however, miss the very essence of what these universities stand for. Harvard, Oxford, and Yale are no longer bastions of Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy. Creating diversity within their student and faculty body trumps consideration for supporting one particular mainstream culture over others. Those who seek "native" (read: white) teachers to help their children get into these schools would be shocked to find that in many communities on campus, the "natives" would be a tiny minority.

And that diversity on campus reflects demographics off-campus as well. The largest English-speaking countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, are all built by immigrants and multicultural in their population makeup. To equate these countries and their universities with whiteness smacks of sheer ignorance of just how these societies work. People of different backgrounds, with different accents, cultures, and skin colors, work together in molding companies, universities, and sociopolitical institutions. To say some of these people are more important than others is preposterous.

Yet, it is also important to recognize that casual racism does exist and it will not be expunged overnight. Indeed, the continuing underrepresentation of minorities in mainstream media, top of corporate hierarchies, as well as the worlds of various fields of celebrity, from the arts to sports, ensure that views on race remain distorted, and people, logically from their personal perspectives, see the need to be whiter to become more successful. Having conversations about race with this cold hard fact in mind would be necessary to be productive and effective, especially when selling products to an international clientele.

Ultimately, tackling casual racism day in and day out requires navigating the delicate balance of a society that contributes greatly to the very upkeep of causal racism, with the increasingly clear reality on the ground that no international organization can operate without inherent and unavoidable diversity. For those who are striving to thrive at top universities and companies in the world, understanding the latter is paramount. But in educating the reality of diversity, it is also essential to not forget that harmful stereotypes are persistent and will not go away tomorrow.