ASS4, US culture

When someone asks me what I think about US culture I personally do not have an answer. For me as a foreigner it is incredibly hard to see a homogenous US culture with typical US customs, rituals, ways of thinking etc. That’s not only because the US consists of so many different countries but rather because the US is in comparison to the rest of the world very young and mainly consists of people from different cultural backgrounds. The immigrants were mainly from Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Germany. That is also the reason why the phrase Melting Pot is well-known by almost all Americans. Melting Pot describes the multi-cultural society of America and how all those different cultural influences have formed a new culture – the American culture.

As I already said, I am unable to think of THE American culture. This has also to do with the fact that I have never been to America. I know of course that stereotypes and prejudice are most of the time untrue but I would like to mention some of them here in my blog. Prejudice and stereotypes play an important role in people’s minds and opinions about something, independent if they are true or false.

So here’s a list of the most common prejudice against Americans and the American culture:

·         All Americans are fat.

·         Americans do not cook at all – they always have fast food.

·         Americans do not speak any other language than English, because they are either too lazy or too arrogant to learn a new language.

·         All Americans are superficial – they judge people by the way they are looking.

·         Americans want to befriend with everybody – but when it comes to helping eachother it is all fake.

·         Americans are very patriotic.

·         Americans are not frankly interested in any other culture of the world.

I belief that there might always be a true aspect about a prejudice. For example, it is a fact that there are more obese people living in America than in Europe. But nobody ever considers that the average of obese people in Nauru or New Zealand is incomparable higher than in the US. So you can clearly see, that people in Europe have a fixed impression of America without checking if it is true or not. I don’t know why people do not ever talk about New Zealand’s or Kuwait’s problem with obesity.

Another typical prejudice is that foreigners often think that you could never have a deep and honest friendship with an American. Americans are thought to be always friendly and polite as long as they do not have to do anything FOR somebody else or have to help somebody else. They want to get on well with everybody but do not want to have anything to do with someone else’s problems. This is again something that I consider to be untrue. It doesn’t matter where a person is from – it is just human to have deep friendships. Everybody needs friends with who one can talk about his/her problems, worries, feelings etc. Why should Americans be excepted from this rule? I think Americans just want to be friendly and Europeans often interpret this incorrectly as a sign for friendship whereas for Americans this is just a social etiquette.

All in all it is clear for me that prejudice and stereotypes are only a grave consequence of misunderstandings between different cultures. It is hard to break these prejudices and make people understanding that people from other cultures behave, react and think differently.