As I sat down waiting for the show to begin, they chattered among themselves. It was as if I was surrounded by one personality type, multiplied by 5. They understood each other too well and were so consumed by their conversation that they forgot there was one person there who didn’t belong. A stranger is you may. I’d occasionally nod and smile at some of their comments which were birthed out of ignorance. Other times, I thought to myself, wouldn’t these people consider these same comment offensive if they were uttered by the ‘stereotyped’ people they were talking about? I’ve been among some these stereotyped people who are supposed to be hateful and I guess evil, but these ‘supposed jokes’ did not resonate with me. After all, like someone mentioned once, jokes tend to be funny because they have an iota of truth in them. However, all I could sense was anything but ‘the love’ they seemed to be experts of. It seemed they were describing themselves the whole time! All they had to do was to tweak the examples.
Let’s be real with ourselves. From time immemorial, humans have often despised anything ‘different’. Different hair color or texture, different accent that was maybe too ‘thick’, different fashion style, and the list goes on. If someone was ‘too’….., fill in the blank as you’d like; the person just didn’t belong. We often ‘think it’ when we are new at a place and feel like the odd ones. But once we identify people who think like us, our mutual perceptions of the world become the newly defined standards and so every other person must be wrong!
We’ve often thought of protecting the voices of the ‘minority’. While this is out of good intentions and indeed, there’s been much progress with respect to JUSTICE in certain situations, there comes a time when a minority becomes a majority, by means of association or sometimes a change in demographics! And so my question to you is, when you finally have a voice, what do you use it for? To uplift, or to tear down?
I’ve become rather cautious about getting too comfortable being part of a majority. Majority or popular opinion is not equivalent to TRUTH.
Kukua Anthoynin
A group may be identified by some traits! Let’s call it their identity. But each individual in a group has more to offer than a label! Whether good or bad, you’ll never know till you’re diligent enough to find out.
Hacks of life 