Your Culture Is Not the Default Setting for Everyone Else’s

Most cultural arrogance doesn’t come from hatred. It comes from never having had to think about your own culture as one option among many, because it was always treated as the neutral background everything else gets measured against. That’s a comfortable position, and comfortable positions are hard to notice from inside them.

It shows up in specific, repeated patterns: asking someone “where are you really from” because their answer the first time didn’t match your assumptions, treating one person as a representative of their entire ethnicity, mistaking unfamiliar directness or silence or eye contact for rudeness instead of a different communication style, wearing something sacred to another culture as a costume because it looked interesting, and judging how another country runs itself entirely by your own country’s standards, with no interest in the history that got them there.

Even the small, seemingly nice comments carry it — complimenting someone’s English when it’s their first language, being surprised someone from a place you’ve stereotyped is well-spoken or well-traveled. The compliment and the insult come from the same assumption. That’s what makes it hard to see from the inside: it doesn’t feel like arrogance. It feels like observation.

Noticing that a custom is different from yours is fine, and normal, and not the problem. Deciding that different therefore means wrong, or lesser, or something to correct — that’s the part that’s actually arrogance, and it’s worth catching before it turns into a comment out loud.

This is one of several areas like this one. Head back to see the rest.