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highlyeccentricCourtesy of the Down Under Feminists Carnival:
Randa Abdel Fattah on writing and identity - Sgrio, I think I recommended R.A.F's work to you when you were asking for Australian and/or POC book recs.
Speaking of, I've never been sure that the term "POC" works properly outside of the US. I think I asked this once, and a bunch of LJ comments came back saying that yes, it does, it's a perfectly decent term. And it's handy, I'll grant you that, but it comes - especially in internet discourse where everyone tends to think in American - with mostly American connotations. Apparently people better qualified than me to talk about race in general object to this too. And also to many other things that bug me about American discourse on the internets. It's a fun article! Everyone should read it.
While we're on the topic, Notes from beyond the centre of the universe discusses something that's bugged me before - non-US discourse, commentary and controversy just doesn't grow legs on the internet. Rachel Hills talks about writing and publication; the necessity of being in the US in order to join certain conversations, and so on. Me, what bugs me is that, were Stephen Conroy in charge of a *US* department, the internet would've caught fire the day he announced his objectionable little filtering scheme. Instead, word gets out sluggishly, australian activist groups do their best, and the internet, when it notices at all, says "oh no, I hope you guys win that fight!" and goes back to whatever important US related things it's doing at the time.
Randa Abdel Fattah on writing and identity - Sgrio, I think I recommended R.A.F's work to you when you were asking for Australian and/or POC book recs.
Speaking of, I've never been sure that the term "POC" works properly outside of the US. I think I asked this once, and a bunch of LJ comments came back saying that yes, it does, it's a perfectly decent term. And it's handy, I'll grant you that, but it comes - especially in internet discourse where everyone tends to think in American - with mostly American connotations. Apparently people better qualified than me to talk about race in general object to this too. And also to many other things that bug me about American discourse on the internets. It's a fun article! Everyone should read it.
The United States is not the world. It’s not even the centre of the universe.
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Not all non-white people are black. Stop referring to us as such. In fact, neither do all non-white people fit into that routine construction of ‘black/Latino/Asian’ that you so frequently employ.
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USian racial dynamics do not translate anywhere else on the planet. Hence their being called USian racial dynamics. No one else has the precise history you do, that unique racial make-up, those particular constructions of what those identities mean – things that ought to be respected. Likewise, this stuff works differently in other countries because your experiences don’t magically melt over into and obliterate ours. Do not, do not, ever try erase or modify our experiences of racism, Indigenous experiences in particular, by framing my country’s appalling racist history in USian terms. Have some respect for the stuff other people have to deal with every day, some basic consideration of where we’ve been. That means sometimes people are going to be uncomfortable with the use of terms that are benign or even positive to you, like ‘person of colour’ (because it’s often considered a term particular to the USian context, because it indicates a sense of alliance that isn’t universal, stuff like that).
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We are not all super unlucky to not be in a country like the United States of America, because there are lots of great things about living in other countries too and quite frankly a country with that bad a healthcare system in spite of having that much money and that large a population is not really a country I want to be in!
While we're on the topic, Notes from beyond the centre of the universe discusses something that's bugged me before - non-US discourse, commentary and controversy just doesn't grow legs on the internet. Rachel Hills talks about writing and publication; the necessity of being in the US in order to join certain conversations, and so on. Me, what bugs me is that, were Stephen Conroy in charge of a *US* department, the internet would've caught fire the day he announced his objectionable little filtering scheme. Instead, word gets out sluggishly, australian activist groups do their best, and the internet, when it notices at all, says "oh no, I hope you guys win that fight!" and goes back to whatever important US related things it's doing at the time.