#the fact that it isnt a given in the west is a specific phenomenon

[handweavers]

being born outside of the west the reality that everyone who lives everywhere is a full person in the way that me and my family are people, and that all the names on a globe are all 'real places' where people live always felt like an obvious given to me, to the point where even as a kid going to primary school in canada i remember finding it like profoundly bizarre and alienating that all the kids around me didnt have that understanding already and the way that they would be so cruel and insensitive upon finding out i wasn't born in canada was viscerally upsetting, even teachers would treat me differently and i would get this even from canadian born nonwhite kids which i just couldn't comprehend. a sensation i'll never forget is being in like 2nd grade and being one of the only people to raise their hand when the teacher asked if anyone here was born outside canada and just the way i was treated like an alien and not in a good way, a distinct feeling of everyone in the room thinking there is something fundamentally different about me in a negative sense and i just couldn't understand it. the kind of myopic chauvinism that gets ingrained in people from such a young age by the culture felt upsetting to me, even though i didn't have the words to explain why or what exactly i was experiencing because i was literally 7. like i knew the rest of the world was real and normal because i'm from there. that should be a given, a basic assumption, and it not being one in the west is Not representative of a 'universal' mistake that everyone on earth makes but rather of a jingoistic eurocentric ideology that is taught from an extremely young age