March Blog Post

March Blog Post

By Corey Youngblood

In chapter 10 of our textbook we are introduced to the idea that quote, “We cannot ever fully know the world of the other, that person who belongs to (and creates) different cultures and stands in tensive relation to us”. I think this statement is incredibly important in its relation to cross cultural communication because it is incredibly easy to adapt an ethnocentric world view, and judge people from other cultures based on our own culture, beliefs and values, which is inherently unfair and discriminatory.

I believe it is important to understand the idea that you will never fully “know the world of the other” because that means you cannot make rash judgements based on your own observations and biases, rather the best course of action would be to use communication as tool to learn about them and their culture and in the process expanding your perspective and world view. This is reinforced by the idea that it is a fact that when people, or groups of people discriminate, it is against a group they are not familiar with, or never really come in contact with. It is also known that when someone gets to know someone from a group that they had previously had bigoted views towards, these feelings are resolved when they actually get to know someone from that group.