#like yeah i get that their experiences are different from white usamericans

[starrynightsoversunflowers]

Goodreads recommended books for hispanic heritage months is so funny because it's really easy to tell when a book was written by a latin american and when one was written by a usamerican with latin american heritage.

Like. The children of immigrants always seem to use words and names in spanish mixed with english to make it known that they are latines. Like the hacienda, hello mi amor or whatever. The books whole appeal are about them being hispanic

Meanwhile latin american authors get translated and they give no hint of any heritage in the title until you read their name. Because for them the experience of being latin american is not the main part of the plot, but the background

No shade. It's just interesting how there's this whole market that uses the "exotism" of being latin american in the us that romanticizes an idea that is often very different from the reality

[pharahsgf]

This is the fella that sent an ask in about modern AUs and yeah, you hit the nail on the head w “cultural diversity and creativity are completely lost on ppl who consume stories looking only for 'relatability'” bc way wayyyyy too often I see like modern AUs set in America (when the original setting was... definitely Not America), Japanese characters shown celebrating Thanksgiving, even if the country that the modern AU is set in isn't named explicitly it can still be deduced as America, it's kinda... I don't know, man, I guess it's the “relatability” for the majority but I can't feel it since I'm, well, not American. Maybe that's why modern AUs tend to not resonate with me— being Asian, that stuff is deeply unrelatable to me. Tf is a sophomore?

exactly... modern aus are fun to experiment with but you'll quickly reach a point where you're just talking about original characters with your faves' names slapped on them. and if that's your primary way of interacting w the material then what's the point of getting into any media besides bland modern sitcoms and teen dramas?

Maybe it's just because I'm a chronic overthinker, but if an aspect of a character's backstory is taken away surely something will change within the character, right? That's the entire premise of the For The Want Of A Nail AUs. Maybe it's just me, many people seem to be able to smooth out the wrinkles just fine, but if someone were to hold a gun to my head and force me to write a modern AU I'd just... crumble. I'd be stumped with the first damn step bc in my mind “I was an illegitimate child born of a slave woman and my mother and I were abandoned to die to eliminate the threat I pose to the firstborn lawful son but he raced up the mountains to save us and it was too late for my mother but I survived and he raised me singlehandedly and so I want to make him proud and be a worthy successor after him and that's why my sense of worth is so intrinsically tied to how useful I am in battle as a warrior and commander” is like... I dunno man it's a keystone to that character's everything and if I remove that, if I remove the cultural context of a world that created his circumstances in the first place, what the hell am I gonna be left with, it'd change his character, and perhaps to an absurdly unrecognizable degree that he becomes an empty husk wearing that character's name and skin. I'm sure some other folk could pull it off but... not me. I can't. Because then what's the point?

This is not to say people aren't allowed to write or enjoy what they like but man, why? I can't really understand.

i've said this before but i'm not surprised so many people cite 'less research' as the primary reason they write modern aus, because nine times out of ten characters appear completely disconnected from their canon native cultures and will instead reflect the habits and values of young white usamericans. and i don't even think it's a 'relatability > everything' issue as much as it's just... people being a little oblivious to cultural differences regarding things like food, marriage, family, school, social etiquette, home ownership, car ownership, what apps and brands people use, etc. like it's just a little off putting to see chinese characters in a supposedly chinese setting do or say something distinctly american bc the author thought it was universal. ykwim.

+ yeah agreed w the last bit, writing characters accurately is already such a fucking struggle and completely changing their environments often renders them unrecognizable. it's fun to play around with who would be what in some other setting but if that's all you ever create or consume then you're probably more into the character archetypes than the characters themselves rip

[kitsunebishake]

rant/vent about how the US constantly tries to impose their ways onto others

the whole "latino" talk is crazy to me because

did y'all know that chinese people with absolutely no mixed blood in their veins who speak in broken spanish are considered latinos here...?

because most of them have been living their entire lives here

they speak broken spanish because they spend their whole lives making sure they don't lose their chinese roots (and often times are just exaggerating just for the sake of it, they also use "chinese names" but in their birth certificates they're called very normal venezuelan names like jose maria lol)

being latin american is not like being chinese, it's not a race, it's not a nationality, it's an entire socio economic and geographical experience

you don't get that living in the us or somewhere else, and i know this for a fact, because plenty of inmigrants always talk about how different things are

my highschool friends in the US are living entirely different lives right now that i am, despite being in similar situations

and it's really sad that most of the time it's foreigner people telling us what to do, how to feel, not just on this topic but on several topics like this as well

and most of the time, it's either the US or Spain telling us what to feel, because for some reason whatever they decide something is, means they're right 100% and everyone else is wrong

yaoi? yeah, definitely this meaning that some white person in the early 2000s pulled out of their ass is the real meaning

fujoshi? of course that means fetichizers, who cares what japan thinks or if reducing it to that absolutely destroys the fact that it's a queer-friendly feminist movement in japan

oop, the white gringos started using the word gringo as a slur for african americans? too bad! it now means that exclusively, if you try to use it you'll get treated like you're saying the n word!

and i'm sure there's many words from other languages that have suffered the same thing that i either do not know or do not remember at the moment, because this is a thing that is consistent with USamericans and some europeans: they just do whatever the hell they please without regard for what others think

their truth is ultimate and if you protest it, you're the bad guy

it's tiring, and it really makes me tread carefully around USAmericans whenever i talk to a new one, in fear of once again being treated like this

[duncebento]

you study abroad right? how has that been? i want to but im worried its going to be too hard to adjust to plus school

i do!! i’ll give pros n cons though they might be specific

pros:

- i’m confident that i’m getting some of the best education i could be, which even though i’m from new york where there r many college options i still feel that it would’ve been settling to stay at home. to me it’s worth being there for the school

- i do like having the opportunity to immerse myself in another language as someone interested in linguistics!

- for italy specifically, food, art, architecture, pre-capitalist city planning which i feel is more….human-centric?

- since my school is in english, i have meet ppl from allll around the world. my class was originally 16 ppl and we were from 10 different countries across 5 continents. of the friends i’ve made there, one is chinese from hungary, one is from portugal, one is from india, one is from zimbabwe, and two are other usamericans.

- the cost isn’t great since it’s a private school, but i’m still paying less than i could have been in the US, n godwilling i will not graduate w student debt

- europe has trains so i can go places so easily

- night-out bar and club culture that i wouldn’t have access to yet in the US w/out a fake, but which i feel is crucial to the college experience lol. will treasure memories dancing to live music at the cuban bar, drinking spritzes on the river, bringing bottles of prosecco to house parties

cons:

- paperwork is so annoying ESPECIALLY because italian bureaucracy is ill-managed. BUT americans have such a passport privelege, my old roommate from iran couldnt come to school for months bc of her visa

- apts are still expensive i general, especially in places like florence w a high tourist appeal bc they are also airbnb infected, which has totally jacked up rent rates. right now i’m blessedly paying what i would definitely call reduced rent because a rich friend of a friend of a friend had an old apartment that she’s renting to me for far less than market price. but without knowing people from the area already apt hunting is hell.

- it’s not entirely a con, but def a learning curve around communication, because european profs are often excitable or brusque or sometimes even cruel in my experience in a way that wouldn’t fly so much in american colleges (though part of that is the fashion element imo.) it was hard for many americans to adapt to this sort of criticism

- i am definitely more conscious of my blackness in italy, ppl are more ignorant about black people (though imo not actually more hateful.) but ppl are also so amazed by my hair which is nice sometimes lol…..american whites will like never compliment black hair cos theyre scared. but yeah white ppl in europe dont have much of a faux pas developed against certain racism yet

- i do miss my family when i’m there— though now i miss my friends when i’m not there! and the time zone diff >_<

- it is very easy to be lonely, esp. at first. at fashion school i’m not really around “my type” of people, which means i feel really isolated even around the other americans. they just don’t know how to make heads or tails of me i suppose. but then, if i really think of it, that might just be a con of being weird in general. my usual odds of finding someone i really gel with are about 1/500, so that puny statistic decreases even further when most ppl around me don’t speak english as a first language.

[straighttxhell]

Honestly I’m latinx and all I’ve heard about “aave” is that it’s bad and that if you’re a bad person if you use it and I still have absolutely no fucking idea what it is, at this point whenever the USAmericans say something I just kind of go “yeah, okay, whatever” because it’s way easier to not question them

Okay so I'll give you a small lesson from what I know, cause its not something bad but IT IS bad if you use it

"aave" stands for: African American Vernacular English

Which to put it simply, are words and phrases exclusive to the English speaking African American community, and you're not supposed to use it if you're not black.

Now here are some examples of aave:

Aave is badly portrayed by white USAmericans who literally say it is "stan twitter language" or "american gen z slang" as if its something quirky and it's not cultural appropriation.

The thing about being from a country where English isn't spoken, it's that here no one uses these words and phrases, no one. No one speaks english here as a first language, and people need to understand that, no one here goes around speaking in English, no one here uses slang in English, NO ONE.

When you're from another country, that doesn't speak english which, SURPRISE, it's almost the entire world!! (Americans don't know this), you have no idea what aave is. Because no one in your country talks it.

Now lets put ourselves as an example, we're latinos, I don't know where country you're from, but I'm gonna use my own experience, I am Mexican, I was born and raised in México, I have been living here my entire life.

Now, I know English because I have been taught since I was a toddler, I was raised basically as bilingual, but I don't speak English unless it's through social media.

So plan the situation, you join social media, you realize how everything is pretty much Usa centered, but you know English so it's okay! You start interacting with english twitter, english tiktok, english instagram, english tumblr, etc. Which is a vast majority, and sometimes it helps you to get to more content of whatever you're looking for, so you stay on the English speaking side of social media because you understand it, you can communicate and you like it.

But here's the thing, you start picking up slang. You start noticing things can be said in a different, shorter way, in a cooler way, whatever. So you learn "poggers" can mean something is cool/good/ expresses enthusiasm right? You also learn "idk" means I don't know, you learn what "ilysm" means and start using it. Cause you weren't taught this in your formal school education.

And you pick up TONS of slang, so you start seeing words like "slay" "period" "go off" and you know what they mean, and from context you deduce what they're used for. And you just think of it as slang, and pick it up as the dozens and dozens of slang you already picked up. Because you thought it was okay, because everyone is using it, because you see it everywhere, and because you have seen it referred to as slang, and "gen z slang", and "stan twt language" and a million other ways that white USAmericans have referred to it, so you think it is, because you have no reason to doubt it, because you don't see anyone use it in real life, you don't see it on media, you just see it in a screen with black letters on a white background.

It isn't until you see someone speak about aave that you're like "...what is it?" because remember!! english isn't your first language!! there's no english speakers in your country, NO ONE USES ENGLISH SLANG IN YOUR COUNTRY ON A DAILY BASIS.

So you see someone mention aave, you question what it is and get informed, or someone explains to you what aave is, and you understand and you're like "Oh so I should stop using those words/phrases because they were created by the African American community and since I AM NOT BLACK, I shouldn't be using them". And that should be fine.

Because again, you just thought it was slang.

And it's great when someone educates you on what it is, and you understand that you cannot use it if you're not black, because Black people have explained that it's a way of mocking how they speak when a non-Black uses aave, even if it's not intentional.

After being in english speaking social media as a non USAmerican, you want to point out this experience to USAmericans, cause you want to make it clear that Non Americans don't know what aave is, they just see it portrayed as slang and don't think much of it cause they have never seen someone actually use it in real life, they have no reason to doubt it's just slang, so yeah it's wrong for them to use it, but you can't blame them because they're not doing it on purpose, they don't even know what is aave, they have absolutely no idea it is something exclusive for African Americans. It is fine to educate people on what it is, and tell them to stop using it, but you want also to make people understand that we literally have no idea of this at all, because it isn't happening in our country, it isn't something we see in anything other than social media, and we just want to let people know how the experience is for a Non American to see this and then learn that you were unintentionally doing cultural appropriation.

But the proble starts when people don't wanna hear that and they say you're racist for not knowing what aave is, and that's a really America-centered opinion, cause again aave stands for African American Vernacular English, key words AMERICAN and ENGLISH. This language is exclusive to the USA. Outside of the USA, no one really knows what it is unless you're too deep in the internet.

That's what Non USAmericans want you to understand.

And it's really sad that people are twisting the words of OP saying they're being racist and sending them anons saying that they should kill themselves. 🙃

If you didn't bother reading, don't bother answering.

We're trying to tell you our ignorance is unintentional and we're willing to learn and do better, but when you don't wanna hear us out on this, your ignorance is a choice.

[diaryofanangryasianguy]

I’m seeing a lot of talk about a racial ladder where White people are at the top and Black people are at the bottom, and everyone else in the world is in between. & that those of us in between align ourselves w/ white supremacy for our own benefits + participate in anti-blackness to distance ourselves from Black people, and that this isn’t only specific to America or the West, but throughout the world. I feel it’s more nuanced than that, but what are your thoughts?

Do you ever get hate/‘call outs’ for your views? I’m asking because I think you’re the only social justice blogger type of person who I see talk about examples of prejudice that Asians face even if it’s by Black people—not saying it’s a systemic thing, of course. And tbh, I feel like we need more dialogue between our communities.

Dude. Most people that be saying this have never even been outside the country. The problem is that people greatly underestimate how big the world really is and this is a huge understatement in itself. So the way that we try to fill the gaps of what we don’t know about the world, we do it through charts, graphs, media stories, movies, articles, and our own personal experiences and ideologies. But even all this doesn’t even come close to telling how big the world really is nor how it’s really like.

I’ve been to France, Mexico, and the Philippines and I can tell you it’s more than just Black and white issues lol. When you visit different countries and talk to the people there, you’ll laugh (and feel sad) when you come back because you’ll realize how ignorant you were.

Obviously every country is far more complex than what we think it is. And while racism definitely exists in every country, it’s far more complex than just Black and white. Tbh every country is more than just Black and white. In the US, yes it is largely made up of a racial binary between Black and white people but in other countries, it’s not and I don’t want to erase all the different kinds of people and social issues throughout the world just because we live in the US. Honestly, neither white nor Black people make up the majority of the world population if you didn’t already know.

The US and USAmerican ideologies are not the center of the world and it pisses me off when people try to “Americanize” every other country and their social problems by oversimplifying them. Honestly, the US is one of the only countries that is so heavily focused on race in the way that it is. If you go to any other country and try to talk about systemic racism and the racial dynamics between Black and white people to the average person on the street, I guarantee you that most people won’t even know what you’re talking about. While I do think that USAmerican racism can be applied to racist examples in every country, every country can’t be oversimplified by USAmerican racism.

So when we go back to “the world” conversation, most people have never even been around the world to see what it’s really like. And even when you travel, you won’t see all there is to see or know all there is to know. What people then do is fill in the blanks of what they don’t know—and these fillers, they’re only limited to what we know and experience ourselves. If you’ve only lived in the US, then your knowledge and experience with race and racism will mostly be of Black and white, even if you aren’t Black or white yourself. It will be difficult to see or even accept anything else than what you know (or think you know) until you’re really out there to see things rather than living through some charts, videos, or articles about countries that you know nothing about.

I’m not the kind of person that even likes to travel but when I do, it always opens up my mind to so much more than what I only know from here in the US. So it’s important to try to bring different realities into social media rather than living a naive life on social media—that’s what makes my blog different from some. I try to talk some truth to what some like to be naive about, or maybe just don’t even know.

And yeah, I do get hates and callouts but I don’t mind them because I’ll say what I need to say in the way that I will say something. In general, I’m not gonna say something that I don’t believe is completely true just because everyone else is saying it. When you speak, you’re coming from your perspective right and when I speak, I’m coming from my perspective. So I’m not gonna repeat someone else’s perspective if it’s different from mine. I also certainly am not gonna repeat someone else’s perspective back to them just because they don’t like mine.

People always say they want “dialogue” but really all they want is their words to be repeated back to them and tbh Asian Americans are always put into the position of being the repeaters instead of the talkers. No one even listens to us anyway so we might as well start being the talkers.

Angry Asian Guy