Ethnocentrism In Adoption

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Prior to the age of nine, my understanding of the world, and more specifically adoption, was very limited. As a nine year old, I lacked knowledge and maturity in many realms, but specifically in regards to my cultural awareness and the understanding of how my race and privileged background contributed to my ethnocentrism and even how this affected my understanding of other cultures. However, once my family collectively decided to start the process of adoption, my emotional and global awareness expanded tremendously. After becoming part of a multi-cultural family, I became increasingly aware of the beauty as well as the difficulties associated with adoption and cultural integration. Adoption is a beautiful process, but it also a complex and …show more content…
Ethnocentrism, according to Milton J. Bennett, is the “experience of one’s own culture as ‘central to reality’” and therefore can very easily lead to a denial of cultural differences or thinking of one’s culture as superior or dominant. I personally had accumulated my own form of ethnocentrism and personal biases due to my lack of exposure and global awareness and as a result, very quickly had to challenge my preconceived notions and biases of the other cultures in comparison to my own. Through Lydia’s adoption, I took part in my own “experience of self” where I learned to accept a stranger from another country into my own family. In order to do this, we as a family needed to learn how to integrate Lydia’s culture into our own culture and grow our awareness of the cultural differences that came along with adopting a Chinese baby girl. However, this is not specific to my own family. From my own experience as well as the discussions and readings from this class, I believe that all adoptive families must actively take part in the “pre-adoption” process where they must acknowledge the own personal elements of ethnocentrism. As a result, I believe that it is absolutely crucial for prospective parents to ensure that they are capable of handling the challenges and differences associated with becoming a multicultural family. Before …show more content…
Despire cultural appropriation being well intentioned in trying to incorporate one culture into another, prospective and current adoptive families must be careful of influencing or mitigating the significance of one culture over the other through their or even becoming overly confident in regards to the cultural knowledge that they have obtained. According to Spradley’s article on “Ethnography and Culture,” there is a difference between explicit culture and its associated knowledge and tacit cultural and its associated knowledge in interpreting cultural experiences and cultural knowledge. Explicit culture includes knowledge about cultures that can be easily related to, however, tacit culture deals with cultural knowledge that is outside of our awareness (Spradley
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