Human Behavior: Seeing minorities as Foreigners

Washington Post, Oct. 13, 2008 on page A1,A10:

"Does Your Subconscious Think Obama Is Foreign?" I wish to cite US Constitution,the Supreme Law of the Land. 14th Amendment,Section 1:

All persons born OR naturalized in the United States are citizens of the USA. Needless to say,Obama is NOT foreign at all unless some Americans are biased. He may be the next President of the USA after Nov.4, 2008. That remains to be seen apropos of the majority of the voters as empirical evidence of fairness and justice.

The psychologists found that the participants, who were asked to answer quickly, were dramatically quicker to associate the American symbols with the British actors, and the foreign symbols with the Asian Americans(the minority of minorities). The results suggest that on a subconscious level people were using ethnicity as a proxy(dailiren) for American identity and equating whites even white foreigners - with things American.

However, Americans have the rights to keep the culture of the original nation as a part of freedom for all Americans. Here is a joke: It is not UNAMERICAN to love Chinese food. However again,William Buffet loves Hambergers and French Fries as a genuine American loving McDonald. But the folks in China would go to McDonald too. Any comments? I remember years ago,some Americans resent the word French for French fries during a strain of US-France relations. That is another funny joke.

Francis Shieh a.k.a. Xie Shihao,a citizen of the USA since 1954 but I used the original Chinese name to mean: "Thanks from the hero of poetry" when I taught the Chinese language but I am not a poet at all. My parents expected me to be a person with poetic flair and I try to be a student with "shi ren de tianfu."

Columbus Day,Monday, October 13, 2008 at 10.45 a.m.