Allophilia

We've inadvertently been practising allophilia at my company, Japan Intercultural Consulting, it would seem.   We usually kick off our seminars by asking the participants what they find positive about working with Japanese people (if they are European) or Europeans (if they are Japanese).  When we've forced them to be positive, we then let them get stuck into the 'challenges', because there are no negatives, just challenges, in the modern corporate world...  This approach could also be said to be in line with what is known as "Appreciative Inquiry", which means to start with what is right (about an organisation, for example) rather than what is wrong, which is the usual consulting approach.

More often than not, the European participants say what they like about working in a Japanese company or with Japanese people is the pure and simple fact that it is 'different', alongside predictable aspects like polite, long term planners, loyalty, calm, quick to help, stick to promises etc. 

I wonder what kind of results this sort of approach would yield if applied nationwide.  Whereas I can imagine getting some positive answers, based on actual experience of interacting with Hispanics from non-HIspanic Americans, I fear what kind of response one might get from asking somebody in the UK what they liked about Bengali British, or the "invisible minority" British Born Chinese.  Many probably would not have any experience on which they could base their opinions?  Or else they would find the question troubling in its implication that it is OK to generalise about groups of people based on their ethnic backgrounds.  Allophilia theorists say in response to this that:

efforts to fight racism often err in trying to abolish or minimise the difference between groups—telling people that “we and they are really the same” or “we all belong to a bigger group, and that matters more than any slight difference.”

The experience of Bosnia and Rwanda, where murderous hatreds resurfaced after decades of apparent symbiosis, shows that categories are resilient. That is one reason why Mr Pittinsky thinks that “mere tolerance is inherently unstable.”