Daily Inspiration Quote by Iris Chang

“Whatever is not commonly seen is condemned as alien” is a scalpel of a sentence: it diagnoses prejudice as a habit of perception before it becomes a policy of exclusion. Iris Chang, writing as a historian attuned to how ordinary people get recruited into extraordinary cruelties, strips xenophobia of its grand excuses. The engine isn’t deep ideology at first; it’s familiarity. What isn’t part of the daily visual and social landscape gets tagged as suspect, and that suspicion is treated as common sense.

The phrasing does quiet work. “Commonly seen” points to the banal mechanics of belonging: who is in your neighborhood, your textbooks, your films, your office. It’s not “understood” or “known,” but “seen” - a reminder that bias often precedes thought. Then comes the passive “is condemned,” which widens culpability. No single villain is required; condemnation can be crowd-sourced, institutionalized, normalized. “Alien” lands with deliberate harshness, echoing both the legal term (alien as noncitizen) and the dehumanizing metaphor (alien as not-quite-human). Chang collapses those meanings to show how the bureaucratic and the emotional feed each other.

Context matters: Chang’s work on atrocity and historical denial tracks how societies rationalize violence by first narrating certain bodies as out of place. Her line is less a plea for abstract tolerance than a warning about the first step in the staircase: when unfamiliarity becomes moral judgment. If you want to predict where scapegoating will flare, watch what a culture refuses to look at until it can only look with contempt.