#USAmericans from an outsider perspective

[fuckwhoeverpickedallthefunnyurls]

Anyway if you’re from the US and you ever wanted to know what tumblr feels like from a non-USAmerican perspective (please note that the rest of the world is not a monolith either and none of these apply without exception):

Everybody’s talking about brands and stores you’ve never seen in real life. You generally assume they exist, but they might as well be one giant prank the rest of the internet is in on.

You find a post that just sounds wrong. It makes no sense. It’s like OP lives in a weird alternate reality. 9/10 times, it’s just some USAmerican Thing.

You’re still not entirely sure how much an inch is. Or a foot. Or even how many of the former there are in the latter. You maybe know your height in feet and inches.

You have no idea how much a pound is. You’d also like to know how the fuck pound shortens to lbs.

What the fuck is “military time”

Somebody talks about some legal process or something similar. They don’t mention which country’s legal system this pertains to. You know anyway.

People talk about politics. None of it pertains to you. Many posts contain guilt tripping. “How can you not care about this?? Why won’t you reblog this?? People need to know this about x candidate for y position!” You’re busy trying to stay on top of the political landscape in your own country.

You pick up some random slang from the internet. Monkey see monkey do. You’re called racist. You didn’t know it was AAVE. You learnt it from black letters on white background, not from the mouths of people whose faces you could see. How would you have known? You try to unlearn it.

People tell you that you must publicly denounce Chick-fil-A or you’re homophobic. You don’t even know what a Chick-fil-A is.

People say you don’t know LGBTQ+ history. What they mean is you don’t know USAmerican LGBTQ+ history. Nobody cares about your country’s history.

You’re “called out” on using an “offensive” term. It’s (a direct translation of) a completely harmless word where you live.

People expect you to have an idea of how far apart 2 USAmerican states are. You barely know geography past your country’s immediate neighbors.

You randomly switch between British and American spellings. Nothing’s real and there are no rules.

People talk about multiple hour car rides and you get twitchy just thinking about it. You suddenly understand why USAmerican cars are so big.

Somebody talks about school shooting drills. You only ever had fire alarm drills.

You see a cool statistic. The study’s only about the US. It’s unfortunately of no use to you.

People misuse/misspell words and names from your native language. It’s tiring.

(You feel sorry for the French. Nobody should be allowed to mangle the word déjà vu like that.)

You’re still not over the fact that USAmerican school children are supposed to say that pledge thing every morning. You’re never getting over that.

You still don’t know why the men are fresh or what the fuck a sophomore is.

Who the fuck pays up first and then fills up gas??? That’s made up, right??

Everybody has a weird obsession with some comfort food you’d never even heard of before you signed up here.

Fellow non-USAmericans, please add anything else you can think of.

[drdemonprince]

This is kind of late re: the culture conversation but I feel like I have a kind of weird perspective on this general idea of cultural appropriation re:embodiment. I’m Italian American, and indigenous South American but I was born in the US and when we immigrated to the US my South American ethnic group is so small and my parents were in Japan so long they culturally assimilated and I was raised in the Japanese immigrant community and literally went to Japanese day school.

This tension between who is “allowed” to participate in a culture or identity has always been deeply fraught for me in a way that has kind of bulldozed my understanding of cultural ownership. Not being “ethnically” Japanese has led to many people deciding for me what the appropriateness of my cultural participation is. And being indigenous South American complicates my relationship to standard cultural alignment with latinidad more broadly.

I have a lot of friends who are white USAmericans who are progressive but also deeply concerned about the boundaries between themselves and the cultures they studied in college and the countries they taught English in as migrant workers. I had a conversation with one of my friends who worked in China and he was talking about how he didn’t mind being legally disenfranchised because he was a white American migrant and didn’t feel it was necessary for him to have the same legal rights as Chinese citizens. And I had to point out that he was living in the same disenfranchised conditions as any other immigrant and there was no reason for him to downplay it. I don’t think it’s disingenuous or appropriative for him to have Chinese art in his house or cook Chinese food or participate in Chinese culture. Not because he lived there or had a complicated legal status in the country or somehow crossed some imaginary threshold of true and genuine cultural appreciation but just because culture is what you do its not a given fact of who you are. It’s a seamless part of his life and just because he sought it out doesn’t make it less genuine to me.

I think because of my complicated upbringing I have spent a lot of time with people between cultures, reconnecting, adopting new ones and feel very strongly that if there is no biological tie to culture people can incorporate whatever they want into their lives and it’s a VERY US American perspective to be so self critical and political about it.

And this isn’t to say cultural exploitation doesn’t exist but when it does happen it’s usually underpinned by a capital motivation to sell an idea of a culture and not a weird white guy who got really into Buddhism or a several generations totally removed Italian American incorporating Panettone into their Christmas celebrations. When people cross the line it’s cringe and inauthentic but it rarely goes beyond that.

When I was in college I had a professor who studied my indigenous ethnic group and I took a couple of his classes. Once I brought my grandmother and mom to campus to speak with him in our indigenous language, and my grandmother spoke to him for three hours straight. He was a white man from Michigan but also one of my only connections to my culture, a person to practice and share my language with, to connect with my family. And all because he thought South American indigenous groups were interesting and got a job with Amnesty International to investigate the dictatorship to get down there. He is the kind of man people wag their finger at and he was one of the most important cultural elders I had.

This is a long way to say basically I just really believe we are allowed to make our lives whatever we want and make ourselves whatever we want. The phenomenon of white Americans in search of culture exists for the reasons you listed below and outside of these political discussions about its appropriateness and its moral boundaries there are just people doing and embodying that cultural fluidity and exchange for a million different reasons that aren’t worth litigating. The small town gay kids who move to big cities and hang out in the leather scene, getting into punk or hardcore or goth scenes, even converting to a new religion function under the same mechanism of the kind of cultural immersion that gives you access to the community and membership in the culture that weebs who immigrate to Japan to teach English, or international students coming to America, or inter cultural or inter faith partnerships undergo.

Anyways thanks for listening to my treatise. So to whoever’s reading this take the dance class or the traditional craft class or learn a new language or learn to cook new kinds of food make all different types of friends and make new traditions out of old ones or old traditions out of new perspectives. Culture isn’t a sacred part of who we are it’s a sacred form of the things we do and embody and connect with others through :-) <3

this is an incredible, wise, compassionate message. Thank you so much for sending it. You've said so much here about the problems of tying cultural identity to a race, ethnicity, or blood, or to regard it as static or isolated. And how much the standard racist American conceptions of racial and ethnic identity make structural discussions about disenfranchisement worldwide hard to have. Said so so much far better than I could, thank you!!

[strangesmallbard]

breaking my personal embargo on i/p posting again but i’m sincerely urging every non-jewish, non-palestinian who supports palestine—especially usamericans—to learn about antisemitism and zionism. you fundamentally cannot understand the i/p conflict without understanding how antisemitism works or its history across the world. you cannot be an antizionist without first understanding what zionism is and why it exists. this involves learning about antisemitism alongside the many types of zionism. you cannot be an effective pro-palestinian activist without critically examining these histories and developing your own perspective.

this is by no means an easy research journey. bias exists in most academic sources from every possible perspective. but it’s still necessary if you mean to 1) engage in online or offline activism, 2) share new information about the ongoing war, and 3) educate others about netanyahu’s war crimes. it’s dreadfully easy to spread misinformation about a developing situation, especially one this politically fraught on all levels.

it’s also dreadfully easy to spread antisemitic rhetoric in your antizionism efforts. antisemitism is a pernicious form of bigotry by design. it’s possible to be an antizionist without reinforcing antisemitism, but the crossover in leftist circles is unfortunately very real. lotta folks assuming jew = zionist = Evil Suspect Person, even without realizing that’s the assumption.

and hey, if you’re staring suspiciously at this post going “wait is tumblr user strangesmallbard a secret zionist who supports the war in gaza?” because i’m asking you to care about antisemitism, i’d really encourage you to reflect on that knee-jerk response. i’m not even asking you to care about antisemitism outside of i/p—i’m inviting you to learn important information about a human rights crisis you care about. and i’m asking you to avoid spreading rhetoric that gets us killed around the world, no matter our political stances or relationships to israel. i’m asking you to care about that.

[elbiotipo]

I am not in a position to tell Usamericans who to vote for, not only because both options are terrible for me in the Third World, but because after years of hearing about US political stuff I've realized just how WEIRD their political system is.

Out of all representative democracies (as a system of government, not an ideal) I know of, the United States really is the strangest to me. Two parties that are practically state institutions, a supreme court that basically operates as an all-powerful council without any oversight, the sharp divisions between Republican and Democrat states (which I think is mostly artificial), the general apathy (with exceptions) towards protest and mobilization that I don't see in any other country, and more importantly, the absence of any powerful socialist movements...

It's a really strange system of goverment, which only seems normal because of their status as a superpower, but if you examine it closer as I've done from years of getting news and talking with people from there, it's not what you would see in any other country. By this I'm not saying other countries are better (I think burgeois liberal democracy is flawed and unfit for representing the working people or facing the challenges of this century), just that the United States is strange, and things I'm familiar with in my own representative republic, like powerful union movements and popular mobilization, are not found there.

I would call it some kind of "Two-Party Capitalist State", where the official ideology is capitalism liberal-conservatism and nothing outside that is admitted at all. There is no perspective of socialist change in the United States because it's not a position that is represented either on goverment or society, it simply doesn't exist, it's not allowed to exist.

If I lived in the United States, I wouldn't know who to vote for because not only none of the candidates or parties are good or represent me, but also because the whole system simply doesn't work like it supposedly does. I have to say it's a problem they need to fix themselves somehow, but I don't think "GO OUT THERE AND VOTE" is good enough.

[yourlocal-lichen]

okay now I'm curious.

context: (white) USAmericans have this tendency to take a DNA test to better understand their cultural heritage. then they make whatever result they got (50% Scots-Irish, 25% German, 12.5% French, as a common example) and say that they "are" those things. this is a common topic of conversation, sometimes people will even say something like "are there any Germans here" and they don't mean people who were born and raised German, they mean people who were told they were German by a DNA test.

now, I see this a bit from an outside perspective (my family is culturally French-American because my mother is a French immigrant), but it seems to me like they take this to a cultural level. I've heard people say things like "my family's Irish so St. Patrick's Day is very special to me" without it seeming like they know anything about the day they are celebrating. it's a cultural identity, but their familial culture is no different from their neighbors with a completely different genetic makeup.

for anyone who wants to participate, here's a poll and please please PLEASE reblog and tell me your deeper feelings about this this is something I feel strongly about for no particular reason. please say where you are from (to your comfort level) and why you chose what option, at least.

I think this is a deeply interesting conversation with many different avenues of thought (immigrants trying to hide otherness with descendents regretting that, what does cultural identity mean if not your blood and how does that intersect with this idea, the general concept of the "great American melting pot"; to name a few)!! I'm even doing a teacher thing and giving you examples PLEAAASE circulate this and tell me your thoughts no matter where in the world you come from

[lenasai]

a lil confession from a guy who used to like blaseball. going to preface with i absolutely loved it, the culture, the community, the characters and setting and all. i made art, wrote fics, bought the albums. but as someone who wasnt usamerican, who lived on the opposite side of the world in fact, i always felt a little left behind. joining late contributed to the feeling of lockout, timezone mismatch meant that i slept through events like voting, and the finale.

and… the communal character building. sometimes i felt like i had to force myself to use a usa-centric lens to see what everyone else saw. the deicide jokes were funny, but not when my actual rl faith started being teased and challenged as well.

i think i'll still always keep a shard of blaseball near and dear to my heart. the good parts of it really were amazing. but sometimes when i see people say they miss it, i think, i wish i could miss it as fiercely as you guys do too.

hey, i wanna say thank you for sharing this with me. i think it's an important perspective to put out there. i debated on whether i wanted to maintag it since i don't have a way to reach out and ask if it's okay to do so, but i really think other people should see it. (you can always send me another message if you want me to delete it and i will do so asap)

blaseball, as a game and as a community, was wonderful and overall a net positive, but it was by no means perfect. it had its flaws like any other community, in this case driven by the fact that its active fanbase was largely white and centered in the united states. there were a lot of people who felt ostracized by a community that was supposed to be welcoming to everyone - and whether it was people not knowing how to keep a bit contained to the circumstances of its universe or shutting down discussions about problems in character writing, there were people who got hurt. we cannot and should not pretend that never happened.

and of course, as you mentioned, the game was designed in a way that mostly centered the united states. i think there were attempts to fix this during coronation with planned events at different times, but we never got to see that play out. hell, you could even see it in which locations got to be represented by teams. i'm not personally sure how i feel about the fact that a lot of the teams that were represented outside of the us were prehistory teams. it feels like they took a step in trying, but those are all teams that wouldn't ever see active play, so it rang a little hollow to me.

at least from my perspective, it seemed like there were dialogues happening about this and that there was progress being made to fix those issues, but then the game ended and we didn't get to see anything come out of it. i really don't want to see that all be for nothing. i hope that everyone who learned something from this community will take those lessons and apply them to how they interact with other communities.

thank you again. i am truly sorry we didn't get to have the same experience.

[dindjarindiaries]

I do give Omera benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think him not pushing her away immediately is an indication he was questioning anything. I don’t think he’s shown as the most confrontational person and immediately swatting her hands away may come off aggressive coming from him (he seems generally aware of how he visibly comes off) especially in a new place, where he is the outsider, and dare I say a refugee.

My perspective is tainted on this interaction bc of my own life experience living as the person with… cultural customs that USamericans label as “regressive” or “oppressive” (keeping it generalized here lol) And with that perspective, tbh, Omera just gave off the vibes, to quote frank ocean “those poor unamerican girls”

I think they wanted it to read as him questioning things, but you’re of course 100% right and valid in this perspective—and I’m very sorry you have to live with people labeling parts of your culture like that. Thank you for trusting me enough to share that with us!

[chuunijianghuyuri]

You know what's real interesting? The reason why the democrats became what is generally conceived as the "more progressive" party in the first place, aka what dragged them to do so ain't got shit to do with what a lot of these "vote blue no matter who" useless idiot democrat liberals are doing right now. Like I know most of this country seems to systematically forget anything and everything that has happened in history beyond 5-10 years from current year, but you think these grown ass niggas would know this by now and take a fucking hint.

The democrats didn't become the "progressive" option by dumbasses voting for them no matter what the fuck they did. You wanna know why they changed and started bothering to pretend to give a fuck about what black people and other minorities think? On a wider level it was the Cold War and making the politics of the USSR less appealing to usamericans including of course the racially disenfranchised and those upset by the discrimination going on at the time such as apartheid in the South and the reactionary violence to maintain it for starters, but let's focus on what people actually did within the country to make them change for the sake of argument. The more internal thing that made them change, not forgetting the larger influence from outside forces for policy change was the national liberation struggles going all over the country, including but not limited to the black civil rights movement, the black national liberation movement, the american indian movement, the gay liberation movement, and so on. To keep it short, it was fucking activism and organized efforts to materially benefit sectors of the working class and the working class as a whole, not no damn unconditional dick sucking that "vote blue no matter who" democrats do knowadays who don't know this basic ass fact.

The democrats didn't appeal to black people and their civil rights movement because they were fucking nice you dumb motherfuckers, and black people wouldn't be nowhere we are now if the black people all went yap yap yap "we gotta vote all, we're powerless to do anything else and it's literally all we can do :(((((". If black people managed to fucking end Jim Crow than the least you motherfuckers can do is pretend to be capable of more than a goddamn ballot box and have higher standards of solidarity than conceding to an administration that is actively participating in genocide. People back then, black people, socialists in general, etc had so much solidarity for colonized peoples it's so heartening to know that people can be so not fucking useless like "vote blue no matter who" niggas. Maybe get some historical perspective maybe.

[shin-meddlesome-hero]

Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance. Very short spoiler-free review.

I had my doubts about this series because it looked like a Generic Usamerican War Story at first and to be honest it has its typical set of stock characters and underdog squad story tropes. I was also afraid that the series would end up glorifying Zeon and the One Year War. However, once I watched the final episode, the series reminded me of those one-shot episodes from the early UC Gundam shows where both sides of the war were humanized. (Like some episodes from the middle part of 0079 or the Africa Arc from ZZ). Somehow it has the essence of those melancholic short stories that helped with the world building and contributed to the overall antiwar theme of the shows. I think that the series works when you watch it with those lens, which explains why the characters aren’t super developed and why there aren’t major changes to the UC canon.

Overall, I would say that it’s skippable but it isn’t bad either. Viewers don’t need too much context to understand the story and it’s also a decent complement to Gundam.

The pacing is dynamic and entertaining. The battles are easy to understand among all the chaos and also all the scenes with the Gundam are fantastic. It’s always cool to watch the monstrosity of the Gundam from an outsider’s perspective.

Visually, the backgrounds and the Mobile Suits are pretty good; but we can’t say the same about the humans, though. As for the voice acting, I can’t really say much because I decided to watch it with the Spanish dub (it was good).

I would give it a 7 out of 10. It was ok, but it needed more interesting characters. Also there was no Char and that always means less points from me. So yeah, give it a try if you're curious about it or if you have nothing else to watch.

[campgender]

ID: a reply by @queer-chnospinci to this ask (link) which reads: Thank you so much for the in depth recommendations they sound great!! 💜 i am interested in it from a VERY outsiders perspective, having never been very christian nor american (i was raised in a culturally christian context but it is incredibly different to what americans seem to have going on) i have been falling down a rabbit hole recently. Thank you again for your recommendations (and reading all this) end ID

oh that’s super interesting!! feel free to hmu if you have questions or want to chat about anything, i always find talking to folks with an outside perspective to be helpful bc in the best scenario i help them understand some of the motivations of usamerican politics + theological justifications for imperialism & they make me feel validated for how fucked up it all was + that there are genuinely alternatives. plus it’s just a special interest of mine lol

[hawkzeyes]

hope you and your family are doing well man!! i dont live in the areas where most of the storms have hit but i do live in the south so i definitely get what you mean. its utterly upsetting and horrifying to see (usually white) northerners and non usamericans act like those of us who are in the oppressed classes and groups in the south are like, that at fault for whats happening here or anywhere else. especially when it comes to infrastructure and natural disasters, in this case. i know for a lot of us we have been voting to help these things, but it doesnt always help. for myself, i couldnt vote until this year, so it especially sucks.

anyway . longwinded way to say

i get it, to a large degree. and i hope yall are okay mentally and physicallt, or at least have the ability to recover. (feel free to rant or wtv in response to this ask idm)

It's very frustrating. I really try to be patient as I get older. I try to hear each perspective even though I have a very firmly set belief point. Trying to explain the concept of gerrymandering and voter suppression and what it does for the south and the infrastructure and prepping for disasters to anyone who has not actually seen it feels little slamming my head against a brick wall.

I've had multiple conversations with folks from blue states or folks who mock Americans outside of America recently and they really truly will not grasp it if they don't want to and they wont because these specific liberals want to be better than them, have some morality high point to an entire group. (obviously it's not everyone. Everyone is their own case) News flash, you are not better than someone because you got lucky and were born in a different state or a different country.

It was just announced Hurricane Helene survivors who need help get $750. That's it. Sure it's for necessities which you think "Hey that's great" but lets be realistic some are still stranded and can't get to the internet to request this. What good is that money if the grocery stores are being guarded so you can't get in. There isn't any new grocery deliveries coming in either cause that grocery store is just as stranded as you are. The gas is no longer good cause it sat underground with flooded waters so you can't leave in your car if you're even lucky enough to still have your car. What do you do then? Gather your family and walk?

Okay so now you and your loved ones have walked miles and miles to get somewhere you can get food. How long will it take for the government to give you those funds? How long will that last? You just lost your home. You walked out of your home town. You can afford a hotel for you and your family for maybe two days with food. Then what. What now.

and I'm supposed to be understanding that liberals are frustrated with conservatives (which isn't even the entire south) so it's okay to say the things they're saying about us?

[snovyda]

it's more desensitization from all the Fucking Shit TM that's been going on, y'know.

+ george bush milked the hell out of that to instate the 'war on terror', killing thousands times more than what happened on 9/11 and not even targetting the right people. like it's blunt he didn't care

td;lr: it's making fun of usamericans going all nationalism that's going overboard

I understand all that, and I'm not arguing or denying any of these points. My bewilderment still stands. I have seen a lot of usamericans joking about that.

Thousands of civilians were killed. The fact that these people feel no empathy for their own fellow countrymen very easily explains why they didn't give a shit about all those thousands of people that were/are being killed elsewhere after that.

It's this lack of empathy towards anyone.

I feel that that awful wave of extreme nationalism was at least in large part born not out of empathy to all those people who died, but out of maybe hurt pride? And maybe fear, too, I suppose. As in, the illusion of this "greatness" of the US got shaken, and so they responded with this horrible racism, etc.

It's just my outsider perspective, of course.

[straightlightyagami]

re: your post about humanities

i think the reason a lot of usamericans are in favor of mandatory humanities classes at universities is that our education system is pretty bad and most people are ignorant as hell getting out of highschool. even outside of that, 17-18 year olds know jack squat about anything and perspective is important to have. regardless, i think viewing an educational institution as a "white collar trade school" as it were is a pretty poor way to view things. i don't even mean this as "those OTHER ignorant losers need to be EDUCATED". i mean it for myself, knowing how capable of failure my own brain and body are.

I get where you’re coming from but idk to me the issue with this is not everyone is going to go to university, even if it is free/cheap and not sell-your-kidney expensive like in the US. You cannot have basic knowledge that you need to not be completely ignorant of the world taught at the post-secondary level because by definition a large segment of the population is not attending these institutions, so if not knowing it will make you ignorant, it should be taught in compulsory schooling. Also, doing a post-secondary degree is a major time (and in the US especially monetary) investment that people presumably undertake with a goal in mind, so while you should be able to take classes outside your major if you want, it should not be required in place of learning things that are relevant.

[televisionenjoyer]

Hi Ron! I’ve only watched like an episode n a half of Turkish house and some clips of American (?) house so not enough to cast judgement but… are both house and hekimoglu the same level of rudeness or is one nicer than the other ?

No Hekimoğlu is DEFINITELY nicer than House but that's because in my opinion USAmerican culture is just rudder and less personal in general and as a consequence House can get away with things that (from my perspective as a total outsider to both cultures whose only exposition is media) Turkish House could never. There's also the fact that they dialed back on the drugs a little thus far probably for cultural and legal reasons as well

[quetzalpapalotl]

can you elaborate on “quote unquote poc artist”? im glad you’re sharing with people that kahlo wasn’t a good person, just got curious about that phrasing

I made that post in a moment of frustration because I saw something about how Frida hated white people and I'm just tired of the way foreigners (and even Mexicans) talk about her. I'm not trying to say Frida was the worst person to ever live or that you can't enjoy her as an artist and relate to her struggles, because there are far more deplorable artists hailed in the canon of art history. But just... you know, she's not a perfect feminist progressive icon and you shouldn't treat her as such if you don't understand the context she hails from. But really this is just more than just her. I will try t explain but keep in mind that I'm trying to summarize very complex matters that I'm not even used to talk about it in English and I'm only just one Mexican.

I feel like the term POC should not be aplied outside of the US. I mean, I'm not a Usamerican, I don't wanna say what terms minorities there should or shouldn't use. But from my perspective, the way gringos talk about this sort of stuff is oddly fixated on skin color and blood percentages which doesn't realli make sense to me and is a poor framework to speak about ethnical and racial issues here.

But people still apply them and that's US-centrism, generally, Usamericans are very bad at recognizing their own US-centrism or that in an international conext they do have privilege, or that being Usamerican is in itself an ethnic identity, but people treat it like it isn't and the US is devoid of culture because they think of US culture as default.

So, English colonizers in what's now the US didn't exactly mix with the Natives. "White people" in the US are descendants from those colonizers or immigrants from other European countries, there was always a clear distinction between them and Native Americans. Spanish colonies worked differently, pure-blood Spaniars were at the top, but eveyone was having children with everyone and that was a part of society to the point they had this whole system to name every combination of whether you come from a mix of Spaniard, Indigenous people, Black slaves or a mix of a mix. So nowadays, most of us have indigenous ancestry. Some have light skin, some have dark skin, colorism is still very much present. Frida's skin was on the lighter side and her dad was a German, is she a POC???

So the fact that most of us do have Indigenous Ancestry makes us feel uh, entitled to prehispanic culture, but really, blood doesn't make us Original People, that's more of an Ethnic matter, because there are still Original People that maintain their culture, or a version of it that has changed over the years since the Colonization. There are many groups with different names and traditions that are supposedly legally protected and are also heavily discriminated against. When someone like Frida dresses with a tehuana, she gets praised for "connecting with her roots", when a Zapoteca woman does it, she's mocked,

Mexicans are children of rape, as Octavio Paz desribed us, which is a complicated baseline to create a cultural idetintity. Our culture is a mix of what was here and what was imposed by the Spaniards, there's the tokenization of prehispanic cultures with a sense of entitlement, the fact that the Mexican identity is in large part a post-revolutionary manufacturation, there is the hatred and idolization of Europeans, the heavy colorism, the classism, the struggles of globalization, the neo-colonialims with the intervention of foreign capitalists, the gentrification due to foreigners coming here, and, of course, the Anglo/US cultural imperialism that erodes the culture inherinted from both the Indigenous and Spanish people.

There is a whole lot going on that I have neither the words or time to unpack, but I hope it makes you understand why it bothers me so much when Usamericans try to apply their frameworks here. I really don't have a point, I just want gringos to understand that they don't understand and that blood doesn't magically make you understand. I don't even know if this makes any sense.

Anyway, uh, please don't dress up as Frida Kahlo and her clothes are a marginalized culture's regular clothes and not a costume. If you wear traditional Mexican clothing make sure you're buying them from proper artisans and try to at least learn what culture they belong to.

[aromantisk-fagforening]

ok, can I get some thoughts on this?

thinking about celebrating one's own country. nationalism, or patriotism as you might call it. Because it's like. as a Norwegian, is all of that bad? cause yk. you know. yeah.

I remember around 4th of July seeing usamericans say they didn't celebrate it cause [they're] "not a fuckings Republican".

and as a Norwegian I'm very used to celebrating the national day. it's massive. it's fun. it's a lot of culture all at once.

But is it good?

I haven't questioned it much before because well, it's normal. it's very normal. it happens every year (even to a smaller extent at the height of covid regulations). there's not much debate (around whether or not to have it) afaik.

it's kinda like, I know people are divided on the clothes thing. and I am somewhat aware of how that ties in to like xenophobia/racism/classism and that. (most people, especially women, wear a national suit, which is from where you live or somewhere your family has lived, these are ridiculously expensive and really only worn once or twice a year). also it's a bit of an "idolizing the 1800s" thing, which is kinda questionable.

this is kinda an open question so like if people have any thoughts please spill them. they don't have to be perfect, I just want some outside perspectives here.

[as always you can send an anon if you want to keep your identity private. or you can send a DM if you don't want the world to see it. or you can send a reply if you want others to know it has been a response to this. any way works, I don't really care which.]