No nation in the world is a mono-culture, and often times, people repeat statements they saw specific folk from other cultures make and assume they speak for their entire culture.
This is called a faulty generalization, or over-generalization, and is a logical fallacy.
Every culture has their majorities and minorities - just like neither Trump nor Biden speak for all Americans, the person who educates you about Native American, French, Russian, Indian or Ghanan culture might just happen to be someone with an ideology that their own countrymen would harshly disagree with.
Many people repeat statements that single people on Reddit make such as “actually, we people in Central/South America think the word Latinx is ridiculous and don’t use it” completely uncritically, even though for this example, the word even originated within minority groups within those countries (although Latine is more widely accepted, on a tangent).
Similarly, when I read communities dedicated to learning my native language, German, I find a lot of questions by learners that are like “are there non-binary pronouns in German?” or “how do I use gender-neutral language?” and all of the answers basically being “no, it’s ungrammatical, nobody uses those, you are ridiculing yourself, generic masculine is universally accepted”. As a German, this is just a conservative world view; admittedly, held by a majority, but nonetheless not universal across Germans.
It’s a similar problem to the “n-word pass” - just because some Black person told you they’re not offended, it does not mean that other Black people agree with them or that they are even right. Just because some trans people tell you that they don’t believe in gender does not mean that gender abolitionism is a central tenet of “transgenderism”. Just because a bunch of Native Americans came together and say that “Redskins” is actually an inoffensive name that they’re proud of, does not mean they speak for all Native Americans and can be used as a token - or vice versa.
Make sure that you always realize that all countries have progressives and conservatives, old and young people, people of fringe ideologies, queer people, people who disagree on social issues, and so on. Not all Muslims are homophobic or transphobic. Not all French people are stuck up about their language. Not all Americans are gun-toting rifle nuts; and even among those, not all of them are conservatives.
The world is infinitely complex. Don’t give in to overgeneralization.
I feel like a lot of Americans get some odd sense about how shitty the rest of the world is, based on the self selection bias of those who immigrate here. That’s something I have noticed.
Yeah, that’s another thing. Especially common among “exiled Cubans”/Cuban immigrants, who all seem to talk shit about Cuba and support conservative anti-Cuba organizations - well duh, if they had liked it in their home country, they would not be in the US today.
It’s a selection bias. It reminds me of the times transphobes started picking apart transfeminine subreddits detailing how much misogyny, hentai, sexualization and typically male socialization things like hardcore gaming, programming, fringe ideologies and “edgy dank memes” were common there and that it supposedly shows that trans women are only really men. Well, duh, you’re on Reddit! Probably the most male dominated mainstream social media site! It’s not a trans thing, it’s a Reddit thing, and by just looking at Reddit, you are just looking at a subset of people who were socialized male and stay in those socialization spots. If they went looking for transfeminine people on more traditionally feminine-dominated social media sites like Tumblr or Instagram, they would find a completely different group of people who might look at the Reddit community with animosity. It’s like looking at women on 4chan for women’s issues.
There’s a 4chan für Frauenprobleme?