Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Embarrassing relations

In a recent post on his blog So, are we all racists? Let’s play a little game and find out Tim Harford discusses the findings of Macartan Humphreys, an Irish political scientist at Columbia University and three co-authors in a new book, Coethnicity, & concludes that if we struggle to do business with people who look different, that may not be because we dislike them, but because we simply don’t know quite how to begin.

Sounds a lot like Zadie Smith’s obsertvation about embarrassment:'It is amazing how many of our cross cultural encounters are limited not by hate or pride or shame, but by another especially insidious, less-discussed emotion, embarrassment.'