Inconveniently Different

My trip this week is in the contentious region of Xinjiang, which you may have heard about in the news.

I live in China, where it’s not possible to have an open public discussion about these things. But here’s what I will say.

I believe to my core that a society should not be judged on how it treats its majority. That’s actually the easy part. A society should be judged on how it treats those who are most ‘inconveniently different’ to the majority.

Maybe that’s the Aboriginals in Australia; the Roma (gypsies) in Eastern Europe; the Rohingya in Myanmar; the Kurds in Turkey; the list goes on and on, and there’s one in your society too. You could even argue that the Trans Rights and the Black Lives Matter movements belong in this same awkwardly named category.

Please take a moment to think about the most ‘inconveniently different’ person near you. And in the meantime, here’s a photo I took today of a cute Uighur boy playing with a bucket. 👦🏻🪣


For the Instagram version, see here.
For the Facebook version, see here.