#hyphenated Americans

[isaacsapphire]

Ok, so people who’s approach to race is “My race should be privileged, favored, and given power and funding” are very explicable; they want that for themselves and their families and maybe even sincerely for members of their race they don’t know personally. Self-interest and love for one’s family and tribe is understandable. Might be a problem for others, but their motives aren’t occulted.

People who’s approach to race is, “My race is inferior/bad/evil and should be disfavored/genocided” are a lot more confusing. Like, either you are mentally ill and hate yourself, actually mixed race and hate the parent/side of the family you most resemble, a masochist (sexually or otherwise), or the step 3: profit is achieved by a hidden step 2. In some cases the step 2 is pretty obviously achieved by being the lapdog of some people of another race who are doing explicable pro-themselves actions and are supporting a few [insert appropriate race-traitor term here] of the race they are in conflict with to boost their own race.

But… it’s become increasingly required for people who appear White to formally decry their own race as a condition of being middle class/white collar (college and company required classes and trainings) and not interact with or engage professionally with foods/clothing/stories/etc associated with other races. This makes the step 3: profit extremely explicable: the profit is being white collar and middle class.

The obvious next question is how the heck that happened; why would a majority race…

Wait a second, that happened almost at the exact moment when “White ethnics/hyphenated Americans” stopped being part of the American political discourse. “The Italian-American vote” used to be a topic of discussion and political attention, and mean jokes about people of Slavic heritage used to be an entire genre of humor. Institutions like Yale went almost instantly from discriminating against Italians in hiring to making White students write essays about their crime of being born White.

Is part of the driving force for DEI sublimated elite resentment towards the White ethnics? “Ok you can be a starbellied sneech White but now that’s a bad thing, lols.” Considering how transparent the pairing of resentment and assignment of Whiteness is in relation to how DEI sees Indian and Asian tech workers, there could be something there.

[isaacsapphire]

Sigh, why are people trying to reignite anti-German sentiment in the US and trying to ascribe this to JD Vance. I mean, maybe Vance does think this, but this is a libelous non sequitur.

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

HAL: So anyway. I’m going to be investing in an "Italian Restaurant" to sell "pizza" with my "pizza recipe" that I "looked up online" and also "went to a pizza place to see what good ideas are floating around".

JAKE: I am assuming your pizza will kill me instantly upon consumption!

HAL: You’re goddamn right.

[nyxelestia]

The "Haley Voters for Harris" political action committee, which had been working with President Biden's and rebranded to support Vice President's Kamala Harris' campaign, has gotten a cease and desist letter from former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley.

In a letter sent Tuesday by a law firm representing Haley's presidential campaign, they wrote the group must "cease and desist from any unlawful use of Ambassador Haley's name in your political action committee name, and from any use of her name, image or likeness that implies her support for the election of Kamala Harris as President of the United States."

They should rename themselves to Nimarata Voters for Harris. Watch the Haley campaign bend over backwards to try to sue them for using her name while keeping it as quiet as possible that this is her name.

[muddypolitics]

(via Inside A Secret Society Of Prominent Right-Wing Christian Men Prepping For A ‘National Divorce’ - TPM – Talking Points Memo)

A secret, men-only right-wing society with members in influential positions around the country is on a crusade: to recruit a Christian government that will form after the right achieves regime change in the United States, potentially via a “national divorce.”

It sounds like the stuff of fantasy, but it’s real. The group is called the Society for American Civic Renewal (the acronym is pronounced “sacker” by its members). It is open to new recruits, provided you meet a few criteria: you are male, a “trinitarian” Christian, heterosexual, an “un-hyphenated American,” and can answer questions about Trump, the Republican Party, and Christian Nationalism in the right way. One chapter leader wrote to a prospective member that the group aimed to “secure a future for Christian families.”

This is the real enemy of the United States

[isaacsapphire]

Man, love how conditional Whiteness is from the Right. Now, the Left also absolutely hates anyone who identifies as German-American too, so this may have some value to the Republicans by putting further Left voters off the Democratic ticket. (never mind that the historical American Left was heavily seeded by the 48ers. The American Left has zero hesitation on turning on ethnic groups that many of their loyal members are part of.)

I thought it was just that one lunatic on substack, but with Walz getting the VP pick suddenly there's more "midwesterners aren't real Americans, they're unassimilated Germans and Scandinavians" guys coming out of the woodwork.

Literal Know-Nothing politics

[isaacsapphire]

I’m not sure it explains 100% of white-on-white discrimination, but I think your explanation holds a lot of water.

As a 5th generation euro-American who nonetheless has an extremely stereotypical Slavic name, it has not escaped my notice that certain kinds of WASP are a little weird about it. I’ve also very much noticed that the “whites” most invested in DEI are the same sort of WASPy puritans that were dumping on people like my grandpa for being a Catholic polack (an oaf suited only for having 12 kids and drinking), or my other grandpa for being Norwegian (and therefore the wrong kind of Protestant, and stupid and provincial). And now they say that I’m *too* white. Nifty how that worked.

No matter the rhetoric the end result is always that my group doesn’t get to go to the Ivy League.

Thank you for the input! I was sitting on that one for a while, chewing it over. I really did get halfway through and realized that the timeline for hyphenated Americans taking on White fits really well.

[nyxelestia]

Do you know where I could find some accessible and not overly ..bowlderdized? Colonialized?? Basically without the "they were just close friends"-ing that they do to most of the acessable summaries of other cultures? Or anything a layman could read about the ramayana that won't leave them with a horrifically racist aftertaste?

There are a lot of versions of the myth, so I can't promise any particular version, especially as translated into English, isn't "altered for the audience" so to speak. Overall, I think it's more helpful to look for summaries that are most accessible to you with awareness of their biases, than try to look for something free of biases.

I got a lot of my initial introduction to Hindu mythologies through Amar Chitra comics - a very popular comics producer in India focused on Indian history and Hindu mythology. That said, the comics are largely aimed at children, and the company/comics line is a bit on the nationalistic side. They have a U.S. distributor, and of course 🏴‍☠️ knows no borders.

There's also the 1992 anime Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama, available for free on YouTube. It's also aimed at kids, but does a good job of covering all the major beats of the story. If you go in with the awareness that this was a somewhat politicized project (it was co-produced between Japan and India, and at a time of political controversy related to Rama in India), then it's also a pretty good introduction to the myth.

(Edit: rewatched the movie for the first time in like 25 years and I underestimated how much I forgot. 😅😓 I should clarify that it's good for the action "plot" of the myth, but the surrounding story and context, not so much. So it's a good intro to the overall beats of the legend and important symbols, imagery, etc., but the underlying philosophy, not so much. I'd compare it to how Disney movie can provide a decent intro to the imagery and main characters and plot beats of a story like Cinderella or Hercules, but the details and context are flattened or removed to make it palatable to child and international audiences.)

[suswous]

You know, I am curious, I have this idea that, in the US, someone who comes from a Catholic background but isn’t religious is more likely to identify in some way w/ the Catholic label than someone w/ a Protestant background is to identify as Protestant in some way

[isaacsapphire]

Idk how it is in Italy, but in the US, Italian-americans very thoroughly claimed Columbus as their guy, even though he definitely didn't consider himself Italian.

can one be irredentist for the past? claiming a historical figure for your national mythos who had never heard of your nation-state and didn't even live in its territory? especially if you're trying to (re)claim that figure from a nation you have a grudge against for some reason

[dwuerch-blog]

No Excuses -- Just Do It!

In Exodus we hear about all the excuses Moses had when God asked him to step up and deliver His people from the grip of the Egyptians. Those excuses were: “I’m not good enough. I don’t have all the answers. People won’t believe me. I’m a terrible public speaker. I’m not qualified.” Are those same excuses those that we use? I’ll admit it! I’ve used excuses when I lacked confidence in myself.…

[fairuzfan]

AMAZING article about what it means to participate in anti-Zionism work both online and in person.

If your anti-zionism does not in any way acknowledge that it is a way of thought and practice led by and for Palestinians, then you need to reevaluate your "anti-zionism" label.

Some passages that felt especially relevant to tumblr:

If we accept, as those with even the most rudimentary understanding of history do, that zionism is an ongoing process of settler-colonialism, then the undoing of zionism requires anti-zionism, which should be understood as a process of decolonisation. Anti-zionism as a decolonial ideology then becomes rightly situated as an indigenous liberation movement. The resulting implication is two-fold. First, decolonial organising requires that we extract ourselves from the limitations of existing structures of power and knowledge and imagine a new, just world. Second, this understanding clarifies that the caretakers of anti-zionist thought are indigenous communities resisting colonial erasure, and it is from this analysis that the strategies, modes, and goals of decolonial praxis should flow. In simpler terms: Palestinians committed to decolonisation, not Western-based NGOs, are the primary authors of anti-zionist thought. We write this as a Palestinian and a Palestinian-American who live and work in Palestine, and have seen the impact of so-called ‘Western values’ and how the centring of the ‘human rights’ paradigm disrupts real decolonial efforts in Palestine and abroad. This is carried out in favour of maintaining the status quo and gaining proximity to power, using our slogans emptied of Palestinian historical analysis.

Anti-zionist organising is not a new notion, but until now the use of the term in organising circles has been mired with misunderstandings, vague definitions, or minimised outright. Some have incorrectly described anti-zionism as amounting to activities or thought limited to critiques of the present Israeli government – this is a dangerous misrepresentation. Understanding anti-zionism as decolonisation requires the articulation of a political movement with material, articulated goals: the restitution of ancestral territories and upholding the inviolable principle of indigenous repatriation and through the right of return, coupled with the deconstruction of zionist structures and the reconstitution of governing frameworks that are conceived, directed, and implemented by Palestinians.  Anti-zionism illuminates the necessity to return power to the indigenous community and the need for frameworks of justice and accountability for the settler communities that have waged a bloody, unrelenting hundred-year war on the people of Palestine. It means that anti-zionism is much more than a slogan. 

[...]

While our collective imaginations have not fully articulated what a liberated and decolonised Palestine looks like, the rough contours have been laid out repeatedly. Ask any Palestinian refugee displaced from Haifa, the lands of Sheikh Muwannis, or Deir Yassin – they will tell that a decolonised Palestine is, at a minimum, the right of Palestinians’ return to an autonomous political unit from the river to the sea. When self-proclaimed ‘anti-zionists’ use rhetoric like ‘Israel-Palestine’ – or worse, ‘Palestine-Israel’ – we wonder: where do you think ‘Israel’ exists? On which land does it lay, if not Palestine? This is nothing more than an attempt to legitimise a colonial state; the name you are looking for is Palestine – no hyphen required. At a minimum, anti-zionist formations should cut out language that forces upon Palestinians and non-Palestinian allies the violence of colonial theft. 

[...]

The common choice to centre the Oslo Accords, international humanitarian law, and the human rights paradigm over socio-historical Palestinian realities not only limits our analysis and political interventions; it restricts our imagination of what kind of future Palestinians deserve, sidelining questions of decolonization to convince us that it is the new, bad settlers in the West Bank who are the source of violence. Legitimate settlers, who reside within the bounds of Palestinian geographies stolen in 1948 like Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, are different within this narrative. Like Breaking the Silence, they can be enlightened by learning the error of colonial violence carried out in service of the bad settlers. They can supposedly even be our solidarity partners – all without having to sacrifice a crumb of colonial privilege or denounce pre-1967 zionist violence in any of its cruel manifestations. As a result of this course of thought, solidarity organisations often showcase particular Israelis – those who renounce state violence in service of the bad settlers and their ongoing colonisation of the West Bank – in roles as professionals and peacemakers, positioning them on an equal intellectual, moral, or class footing with Palestinians. There is no recognition of the inherent imbalance of power between these Israelis and the Palestinians they purport to be in solidarity with – stripping away their settler status. The settler is taken out of the historical-political context which afforded them privileged status on stolen land, and is given the power to delineate the Palestinian experience. This is part of the historical occlusion of the zionist narrative, overlooking the context of settler-colonialism to read the settler as an individual, and omitting their class status as a settler. 

It is essential to note that Palestinians have never rejected Jewish indigeneity in Palestine. However, the liberation movement has differentiated between zionist settlers and Jewish natives. Palestinians have established a clear and rational framework for this distinction, like in the Thawabet, the National Charter of Palestine from 1968. Article 6 states, ‘The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.’ When individuals misread ‘decolonisation’ as ‘the mass killing or expulsion of Jews,’ it is often a reflection of their own entanglement in colonialism or a result of zionist propaganda. Perpetuating this rhetoric is a deliberate misinterpretation of Palestinian thought, which has maintained this position over a century of indigenous organising.  Even after 100 years of enduring ethnic cleansing, whole communities bombed and entire family lines erased, Palestinians have never, as a collective, called for the mass killing of Jews or Israelis. Anti-zionism cannot shy away from employing the historical-political definitions of ‘settler’ and ‘indigenous’ in their discourse to confront ahistorical readings of Palestinian decolonial thought and zionist propaganda. 

[...]

In the context of the United States, the most threatening zionist institutions are the entrenched political parties which function to maintain the status quo of the American empire, not Hillel groups on university campuses or even Christian zionist churches. While the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) engage in forms of violence that suppress Palestinian liberation and must not be minimised, it is crucial to recognise that the most consequential institutions in the context of settler-colonialism are not exclusively Jewish in their orientation or representation: the Republican and Democratic Party in the United States do arguably more to manufacture public consent for the slaughtering of Palestinians than the ADL and AIPAC combined. Even the Progressive Caucus and the majority of ‘The Squad’ are guilty of this.

Leila Shomali and Lara Kilani

[nyxelestia]

I feel like a lot of this traces back to the Intent vs Impact discrepancy when it comes to social justice. A lot of people get caught up on not only having the right intent but performing it, and completely dismissing the impact their choices have (regardless of what choice they actually make).

the current trend of "tumblr users embarrassing themselves by proudly announcing why they don't listen to any music made by black people" is really astounding.

i cannot help but think this is a direct result of liberal White Guilt and how people have interpreted "anti-racism" as form of cultural self-segregation - the kind of person who thinks trying to cook chicken curry is cultural appropriation, or sends white people anon hate for wearing a kimono (yes, this kind of discourse happened). like, "oh, no, i could never participate in this culture, i'd get my evil white hands all over it! it would be more Progressive if I only did White things."

if you're a poc you've seen this, i'm sure - this deer-in-the-headlights stare you can get from white people when you play music / show art / share a story / anything that is Racially Coded, this total refusal to actually engage with it out of fear that it is in some way Wrong for them to have any opinion on it. because they read somewhere that it's bad to use AAVE but the only lesson they actually learned from that is "gotcha, white people are not allowed to interact with other cultures as punishment for my White Crimes. this helps to fill up the gaping pit of my white guilt and makes me one of the Good People." this transforms their discomfort around non-white cultures (black culture, especially, i should add) into a kind of virtue

anyway if you are white and reading this. go listen to some fucking haliu mergia. ethiopian jazz. will knock your dick right off. go listen to rap or reggae or bollywood and have a genuine reaction to it - like, an actual, from-the-heart reaction. you are allowed to not like some of it. but you will definitely like at least a little. yes, you can compare it to lemon demon (or whatever) if that helps you get into it and that's your only point of reference. maybe don't say that part out loud. but don't, like, separate yourself from it, like you are seeing it in a museum and the only polite thing to do is go "ahh, huh, very interesting, so much culture here."

[djmophatt]

Black History Month. • #america #american #africanamerican #Black #melanin #blackhistorymonth #blackhistory #usa #hyphen #hyphenate #tonimorrison #teamdl https://www.instagram.com/p/CoLyAYKuUJS/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[gluppingshitto]

I stg some Europeans literally just need to Google the word "diaspora."