Maha, I am glad you can own your anger and I have learned from reading your post. It made me return to something that has occupied my thoughts much over the last couple of years – how can we engage in dialogue with people who are different from us when we can’t even know the ways on which we are different and similar? How can we appreciate their experience of this dialogue? I can still recall the shock I got when I read Watching the English by Kate Fox where she introduced the concept (in a very non-academic way) of ethnographic dazzle. By that I understand the ways in which we are so precoccupied by our differences from other people that we fail to acknowledge the common unwritten rules that guide our behaviours that can confound those who operate by different unwritten rules. I was born in Scotland, conscious of my Scottish and Irish ancestry, the religion of my birth and didn’t really think of myself as very ‘English’ until I read that book that brought the truth home to me – I am very English.
A challenge for apparently diverse online networks and gatherings can be to treat diversity as a flat thing, an attribute of the group/network, instead of helping it to surface in unexpected ways.The discomfort of others can be troubling in social settings and groups can respond defensively, citing diversity as a defence, unaware of the commonalities and unwritten rules.
BTW, I am not defending white or male fragility that seeks for reasons of self-preservation to minimise differences – I just think that we need to be able to express our feelings of lonely only and discomfort, and , here’s the tricky bit, to give people permission to express theirs and listen when they do.