#anyway yeah that was a digression. USA centrism. it's a thing

[virtualcarrot]

@dirt-nerd I feel like when we point out USA-centrism on anglophone social media, people hear a blanket condemnation of the USA as a whole. They end up too defensive to bother actually thinking about what it is we mean by it.

It's really something that should be worked on, especially with the expectation that non-USA people learn these USA codes to avoid any faux pas.

Like, I remember a conversation when I was a college student somewhere pre metoo era, going through my baby's-first-progressive-steps phase by virtue of a mostly tumblr influence. I was talking about anti-black racism with W, a black classmate, and mentioned X, a third classmate of ours.

W frowned, and said "Wait, for you, X is black?"

And in my mind it was yeah, he's black, tumblr says he's black, he's the kind of brown that means he's a social target of anti-black racism, so he's black, that's how it works

Whereas to W, X was "métis" (mixed-race). Which absolutely didn't preclude him from anti-black racism, but I was ignoring this nuance in his identity because of how (colonized) conditioned I had been to see it through this USA-centric frame of view.

Similarly, USA-centric racial discourse treats South Americans as uniformly racialized, and it blows my mind. I'm part Brazilian, I have a white, bourgeois family in Brasil. With some black ancestry from a great grandparent--which a pseudo liberal uncle loves to tout about--but come on. We're so white.

It's about context. I am begging USA people to remember to factor in context.

In France, I am sometimes (very rarely) (usually by POCs) (never in a way that exposes me to racism) identified as nebulously "other". Otherwise, I get some silly "jokes" about my being brazilian (that lean more on a casually xenophobic than racist influence). But in Brasil? In Brasil I am lady ultra-privilege when it comes to my racialization. So White.

Brasil, should I remind, which is in South America. Latin America babeh!

Anyway I have tons of other such experiences, of being struck by how inapplicable the USA centric lense that's imposed by social media, is to my daily life.

And it's actually A Problem that goes beyond just me. And you. Us individuals.

Because you have generations of new, extremely politicized young (and less young) people that learned it all through USA-centric social media* and are unable to nuance and repurpose it to the actual cultures they live in.

*the commodification of surface level progressivism for online clout is a whole other rant

Always sparring a thought for how essentialist racism discourse has become, but especially today as I think of this guy that I met two days ago, whom I sincerely believed had origins from the Maghreb/Middle East, and who it turns out is merely part Spanish--with all that entails of historical intermingling, sure, but far away enough that he didn't have anyone to point to as a reference of racialization

Anyway, that "white" dude keeps getting stopped and frisked whenever he's in an airport