As a European I could say that “all Asians look alike”. This ‘other group’ that I am not familiar with looks like one homogenous group. But if an Asian would say he cannot keep me apart from this other person from my country or continent, I might be surprised. “Don’t you see the differences between us: our accents, our clothes, our social backgrounds, the sports we play, the newspapers we read, our religion, our hobbies, …?”.  All these aspects put together make who I am, in a unique way. There will be probably nobody else who combines all these different identities.

So why do we so often forget that people from the other group are also made of so many different identities, and that if they are from Morocco, they are more than for example their religion. They are a combination of their social background, the sport they practice, the kind of books they like to read, the number of brothers and sisters they have…

If we meet a person from this other rather unfamiliar group, even if they live in the same country as ours, it can help to know something about his culture to grasp the differences between us in a general way. Even if we don’t always like it: we need some kind of framework, boxes, to understand the world. But we should try the framework to be hybrid, so there is space for other aspects and colours … and to be surprised!