The Experience of Being Different

Abstract

There are certain people who, by virtue of their physical appearance, behavior, or life circumstance, feel consistently different. The purpose of this article is to understand the experience of being different from the point of view of those who feel different. For this purpose, we selected race as the master status (Frable, 1993a, 1993b) designation, because race causes the greatest divisions among different peoples of the world. The study population is composed of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, as they are Black and different in a country that is predominantly White. The study participants were interviewed to explore whether they feel different, how the experience is realized, and if this topic of inquiry is a sensitive one. The subjective experience of people has not been adequately researched in the past, especially with regard to sensitive topics. Israeli research, in particular, is prone to deny and minimize social problems that pertain to the realm of racism and differentness for both political and historical reasons (Jaffe, 1995). From this perspective, the research described here is the first of its kind to take on such a sensitive issue and treat it within a qualitative paradigm.