When I was doing my course on postmodernism at an honors level, I stated that my background and early culture had nothing in common with Western culture, particularly urbanized Western culture. The lecturer moved instantly to misinterpret and obfuscate what I’d said by informing me that there was no need to feel left out, as he had himself been brought up in rural Western culture.
This reaction, which is the rule, suggests that even very educated people have an enormous degree of difficulty processing the fact that others may simply think differently from them, due to cultural factors. And, no, it’s not that we “want to”, or that we “need to feel we are special” or that we have “made choices” — all fundamentally Western tropes. It’s not an issue of hidden motivations. We’re not deciding not to belong in order to become the new form of revolutionary soap powder on the market. It’s not a strategy or a means to vie for power. And, furthermore, just because we have to repeat that we don’t have a strategy because the fact that we are different is denied, doesn’t mean we are “protesting too much” and therefore do have a strategy.
It’s just the simple sense of being different that is an unacceptable fact to Western ears.
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