Summary Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy By Elijah Anderson

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Elijah Anderson is an author of the text that was read of Urban Experience; it’s titled as The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. As I read through the text, it made me wondered if places that I’ve been to is considered as part of cosmopolitanism or ethnocentrism. Elijah stated that cosmopolitanism embrace the individuality and achievement, especially through education and experience (p. 189). On the other hand, ethnocentrism embrace the loyalty to their own ethnic group (p. 189). Both of them typically applied onto non-white people, more specifically African-Americans’ attitude and their cultural assumptions and behaviors that come within. It seems that in order to have the particular location to embrace the cosmopolitan …show more content…

There was a group of African Americans standing outside of the store and all of the sudden, two of the males pulled out their guns and start threatened people in the store. I couldn’t fully pick up what they said, but I knew that it was hostile situation. Fortunately, police officers immediately arrived to the situation, but it escalated to that point because the one of the offenders refused to obey the laws and proceeded to hit the female police officer. All of the police officers grabbed him to the ground and arrested him. This particular incident happened within 10 minutes. Due to my confusion, I asked group of female African Americans that happened to be friends with those two males. I’m African American myself and they were expressing their witness story to me and “dramatized” it. One of my friend who worked on that day asked them to repeat the story and she’s Caucasian. I noticed that the group changed their behavior and became more simple and concise about the incident. Right off the bat, this was a prime example of Ethnocentrism because the female African Americans group that I spoke to displayed different attitude according to race. It doesn’t seems that they were as comfortable when they spoke to my Caucasian friend like did with me. So, it’s interesting to applying the theoretical concepts from Elijah’s text onto my real-life personal experiences. I’m positively sure that I have come across to those scenarios in the past. However, the text opened my eyes and gave me different perspective on those kinds of