Holy fucking US centricism batman.
Something I’ve been noticing about them lately is they don’t seem to realise American culture is actually a distinct thing. They’ll talk about ‘black culture’ or ‘white culture’, when in fact they mean ‘black/white American culture’. For instance, they describe AAVE as ‘black language’, even though the vast majority of the world’s black people don’t use it. They describe miracle whip and wonder bread as ‘white food’, even though neither of those things are available anywhere outside North America. The ‘American’ qualifier is always left off.
They do similar things with politics. They’ll lump other continents in with America in contexts where doing so makes no sense. For instance, the numerous posts suggesting Europeans and Americans experienced the world wars in the same way. Likewise, if you mention Chinese people, Irish people, or Indian people, their minds will jump straight to the Chinese/Irish/Indian diaspora in the USA, as opposed to China, Ireland or India. I’ve seen this logic go the the extreme where Japanese people in Japan were described as ‘struggling to hold on to their endangered culture’.
There’s also a big problem where they’ll refuse to accept that situations are different in different parts of the world. American standards are a universal barometer which everything has to match up to. If a word is offensive/correct in the USA, it is assumed to be offensive/correct everywhere. If a group are accepted in the USA, any persecution they face in other parts of the world will be brushed off as irrelevant.
Now, my country is more similar to the USA than most others. It would still take me ten hours to write a list of American theories, stereotypes, problems, tropes, terms and jokes that don’t apply here. God knows how little of what Tumblr social justice say must apply to for instance, Nepal or Ethiopia.
I agree with most of this but as an extension: this means that white people outside of the us who get most of their viewpoints on race from US/americanized sources (such as tumblr) dont actually know the ways in which they benefit from racism or white supremacy in their own lives, they know the ways they would benefit if they lived in the US. Which is still better than nothing but until you are aware of some of these things you do or benefit from you can’t do anything about them.
(Also if something isn’t offensive where you are but is anywhere else and you are speaking on a global platform -such as the internet- you still shouldn’t be using it)
fearlessstateofmind backup 