Difference

Today I want to focus my post on a question that Professor Garcia posed in class:

When do we embrace difference as the standard, and when do we mark it as difference?

This question fascinates me. All humans are different - that is the standard. It is impossible to have someone exactly like you, even if you are twins, because you have had slightly different experiences. Humans embrace those differences. We rejoice in our individuality because it makes us who we are.

Contrarily, we historically have also scorned difference. Wars are all about difference - difference about ideas, culture, identities, traditions, etc. I would argue that genocides are the main example of scorning difference. Jewish people during the Holocaust were killed because they were different - they were Jewish. Tutsis and Hutus committed mass slaughter towards one another in the Rwandan Genocide - the root of the problem is that they are different.

As humans we have this paradox of difference - differences are what compose our identity, and they are also what cause us to hate or scorn the identity of another being.

So when is difference embraced and when is it not?

When I think of this question, I think of immigration. The United States is a country of immigrants - that is the nature of our country. Today, there are so many negative connotations with immigration in which people label the immigrants as "different" in a bad way. I do not want to over-simplify the issue of immigration because it is incredibly complex, but I want to focus on the idea of immigrants being different. Our differences in the United States are embraced because they make us who we are. The US is a melting pot - that connotes difference in its definition. Yet some are so resistant to accepting people of other ethnicities into our melting pot.

What is the big deal with difference? Why are people scared of it and why does it make some people uncomfortable? Why do we persecute people with difference?

I believe that it comes down to power. If a group can band together because they have similarities - i.e. live in the same area, practice the same religion, work in the same business, have the same gender - they automatically have power because there is inherently power in numbers. When there is an outsider, someone that is different, someone that is unknown, that inspires fear in the group. There is always fear in the unknown. Therefore, that group of people with various similarities bands together to have some kind of control over the unknown, the being that is different, in order to ease those fears.

Regarding animals, I believe that we all have a certain amount of fear of animals because there is always a little bit of unknown. We never fully know what they are thinking, what they are going to do next - there is no way to get around it, animals ARE different than us. But we are also different from each other. We exercise an enormous amount of power over animals, probably more than we should. I think that we do that because we are always slightly afraid.

And isn't that how humans have historically acted towards each other as well? When someone is different, we are naturally slightly afraid and uncomfortable at first. However, the fact still remains - we are ALL different.

So where do we draw the line? When do we stop exercising power over smaller groups of beings that are different? The majority usually (with some exceptions) rules. I think that the way that we treat difference is inherent in humans - it is a survival mechanism. If we want to survive, we will be cautious around difference. Therefore the way that we go about being cautious around difference has got to change. Instead of controlling difference and exploiting difference, learn from difference. For we are all different - explore the question of why are we different? What can we learn from each other?