It's important to relate to people directly and from your own experience. There are thousands of years of history, and more directly, a very recent family history and first-hand experiences that drive each person to hold the beliefs that they do. It would be blindsided to write those off as wrong or ignorant because you do not agree with them. That's what was said--- well, it would be equally blindsided to accept it as a mark of a culture you simply don't understand. The only jurisdiction we have is over how we live our own lives, and it is equally important to keep in tact the ideas of not treading on the way others live their lives, while simultaneously keeping up the honesty of your opinions and not writing off behavior or giving benefit of the doubt just because of "cultural differences". I think this is difficult for a person who isn't an immigrant to understand, and understandably so. My poor dad hates Borat, only half-jokingly, because it's the popular image floating around lately of Eastern Europeans, and people take comedy more seriously than they sometimes realizes. They see his thick accent and funny similarities and they establish a dynamic immediately which says, this is not a person who's coming from the same place. Their way of relating to him changes. It creates a distance. And so, the way he points to a menu with his middle finger, the way he's terse, the way he's serious and quiet, these become things people attribute to his being Russian. Little by little, with these small moments, we rob people of their individuality this way. I don't think people understand this, having never been truly 'the other' for very long. It's usually extremely subtle, and it certainly isn't malicious or intentional. Imagine everything that makes you unique being reinterpreted as a signifier of your cultural otherness. Imagine that you're no longer just terse because it's how your mind works, because it's how your mom talked, because you got teased at school as a kid... or whatever, but because you're now the unofficial representative of your nation, whether you like it or not. Your habits, your personality, your mannerisms and quirks.... it happens in different ways to every immigrant, I think.

The cure isn't increased education, but rather, increased experience. Spending enough time with people of other cultures might help, but more importantly, being IN other cultures as the outsider for the first time, we start to overcome our tendency to use "cultural differences" as an explanation. Anyway, I doubt my line of reasoning has won any new converts, devoid of supporting examples as it is. But this is what a conversation with dankamongmen has spawned in my mind tonight.