Two epiphanies I had today

[sqbr]

First, a rant:
I came across a post today with white americans whining about having no culture, because they're a bunch of immigrants with mixed backgrounds, a dark history they feel ambivalent about, and an emphasis on both conformity and individuality and consumerism. Other cultures, on the other hand, are distinct and uniform and well defined and have a wholly positive effect on people's lives.

Now as someone from a culture with similar issues who finds american culture distinct and rather alien (in an interesting, sometimes cool sort of way) I find this annoying (Australians may whine about not having any culture too, but we don't tend to act like it's a Special Unique Pain Noone Else Understands)
It's like the question of "How do non-white/non-American people feel about their cultures, and what does it have in common with how we feel?" doesn't even register.

For a start, afaict pretty much every non-American in the world has angst about the difficulty of being "modern" without becoming American, of defining ourselves without relying on rigid outdated jingoism. And no culture is an unchanging monolith, everyone has to balance tradition and change, personal preferences with accepted social mores, multiculturalism with flattening and uniformity. Every choice along those continuums has both benefits and costs. And pretty much every culture has dark patches in their past, unethical social practices(*), and just plain unappealing expectations that make it difficult for a lot of people to embrace their "people" unselfconsciously and without caveats. Afaict being a POC makes this more complicated, not less, since you have external and internalised racism to contend with telling you your culture is worthless.

The second is a bit advanced, and is only really annoying (to me!) when I see it from, say, feminist bloggers who should know better. Or myself :)
Hopefully a lot of people have gotten their head around the fact that only people who experience Xism are qualified to say if something is Xist or not. But a lot of people who get that have trouble understanding that even if you do notice something someone did is Xist all by yourself that doesn't mean you get to judge whether or not they apologised well enough for it. On seeing an apology for Xism of a sort you don't experience but still found personally offensive, your first priority should not be "Do I think this is good enough given how offensive I found their behaviour?" but "What do the people who experience Xism and were hurt in the first place think?".

And now I feel better :)

(*)According to ones own personal ethics, whatever they may be

Comments

[melberon.livejournal.com]

I believe that "have a nice cup of toughen the fuck up" should be considered an adequate apology for any form of offensive speech.

[distantcam.livejournal.com]

That has got to be the stupidest thing I've ever seen on the internet. You need to shut the hell up and go back to fucking your mother.

Don't like what I have to say, then have a nice cup of toughen the fuck up.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

Aside from probably slightly overkilling it, IAWTC

[alias_sqbr]

I understand what you're doing and acknowledge your point, but there is seriously no reason to bring his mother into this. (To be honest I'm not sure how you would make this point without crossing my personal line of what level of hurtful behaviour is appropriate on my lj but eh, I guess it's done now)

[alias_sqbr]

First off, sorry distantcam crossed the line, he has been told off. (Not that your feelings could have been hurt of course becuase it was just words, but standards are standards)

Anyway: no it shouldn't, that's...stupid is the nicest word I can think of right now. (I was going to explain but..really, c'mon. Noone can ever complain about anything anyone says ever?) And whatever you think, the people doing this were feminist activists who do believe, very strongly, in the importance of words, so by any measure they were being hypocritical.

And as it happens? I wasn't talking about just speech, or at least not "just" slurs or whatever. Two of the examples which inspired me involved plagiarism and discriminatory legislation.