Hi everyone! This is my first time here, being new to this site. I couldn't help noticing lots of angst, rancour and the like as I read through the posts. I'd like to share a few thoughts with everyone here, being an interested party, in the sense that I, too, am a foreign teacher in China.
Discrimination, unfortunately, exists everywhere though its expression and intensity may vary. Unfortunately, also, discrimination is perhaps, as old as society is. But that does not mean it is right or acceptable or even to be condoned. What bothers is that even those who ought to know better, those who have had the previlege of an education continue to practice it. I suspect, in most such cases it is due to something very basic viz. self-interest. Discrimination in one of its most horrendous forms takes the gender route, especially seen when one views history, and which civilization, generally speaking has not practiced some form of it? Have not women been maltreated by men of all hues for centuries? The other one is racial or national discrimination - another instance of what must rank amongst man's most despicable acts.
A few questions to think over for those who might want to: Are people of any race better than those of another - intellectually or otherwise? Please look into history and think about how different countries or races have dominated at different times and how no one's domination lasted interminably. What that means is no current domination will last too long either.
What are nations or countries? Aren't they merely man-made boundaries that wax and wane like tides? Was ever any man born of the earth? Aren't countries populated by people who migrated from another place or people whose ancestors did?
Aren't those that discriminate victims of a basic instinct, who have evolved neither intellectually nor culturally nor emotionally. Perhaps, those who are still bound to such instincts are little more than monkeys in the cloak of human bodies.