Change for the Worse

Joanna (above) is a French woman who spent a year teaching French at an American high school. Before arriving, she had positive feelings about the United States in general and about Americans in particular. Yet after a year of interacting with Americans she declares that her opinion of them has changed for the worse. She is not saying that she met Americans that she did not like (she made some American friends and seems to have enjoyed their company). Rather, she has developed negative feelings about Americans as a category of people who share certain qualities of 'Americanness'. She is reacting to cultural difference by condemning Americans in general. This discouraging reaction, an increase in negative judgments based on intercultural experiences, is not rare. Yet little attention seems to be paid to it in the professional literature. While we readily use words such as prejudice or ethnocentrism to describe negative attitudes about cultural groups, these words are often pejorative. Talking with sojourners and travelers, however, shows us that resisting some of the cultural difference that we find seems to be a normal part of intercultural learning.

Educators tend to focus on desired outcomes and the ideals of tolerance increasingly espoused in today's multicultural communities make it difficult to talk about negative reactions to cultural others in neutral terms. But it is necessary to distinguish between learned prejudice and negative reactions to intercultural experiences. Someone who grows up in an environment where a particular group is systematically denigrated can easily develop prejudicial attitudes towards members of that group. Yet, sojourners who do not start with negative stereotypes about another cultural group also sometimes denigrate their cultural hosts.