I was lucky enough to go to a college which, even in those days, drew its students from many different countries, creeds & colours, for many of whom English was a second (or higher order) language. Any idea that to be white & English meant, ipso facto, intellectual superiority, would not have survived that, even had it been there in the first place
To find one has much in common with people of different backgrounds is not the real surprise. The real problem is to understand how the person next door, or someone in your family, who share your environment can think or feel so differently from you
It took longer to understand that people are people across time as well as space. The past may well be another country, but that does not mean the people were different
There is one small piece of evidence which sums this up for me. I cannot find a note, but I think it must come from A Leo Oppenheim’s (highly recommended) book Letters from Mesopotamia
I paraphrase from memory
Dear Mum,
Thank you for sending me the cloth for a new tunic. It is very nice
I am sorry you did not send enough to make 2 tunics. I know you have plenty of bolts of cloth under the bed, so you could have done easily
My friend John, his Mum sent him 2. And she’s not even his real mother – she only adopted him
The writer (in fact the letter would have been dictated to a scribe who would have impressed it onto a tablet of wet clay) was a boy, probably Phoenician, who had been sent to Egypt for training as a merchant
