#us centrism for ts

[janiedean]

Haha yeah let's make fun of Americans for their shitty education system that's failing them, we're so European and enlightened! Next we can make fun of their school shootings and all the people that die because if the bad healthcare system. They totally deserve it!

…. anon for fuck’s sake I’m the first person on the face of this planet to not make fun of americans for their shitty education system which y’all know because I talk about it all the fucking time and I spent the last year reading nonfiction books about exactly the issue because oh guess what I’m interested in the topic and I would never make fun of school shootings or their healthcare except when pointing out that no first world country shouldn’t have public healthcare, but y’know what?

ALL THESE PSEUDO-ACTIVISTS ON TUMBLR DON’T GET TO PLAY THIS CARD.

because, my dearest darling anon who assumes I don’t know shit about how the us of a works when it’s 90% of what I’ve been reading about since I was twelve, the shitty education system in the US of A mostly affects… hmmm… poor people, and waaaiiitttt, what are the teen poorest states in the US?

Mississippi

New Mexico 

Alabama

Louisiana 

West Virginia

Kentucky 

South Carolina 

Arkansas

Georgia

North Carolina

now, nvm that I just read a book on cotton pickers in alabama this summer that gave me nightmares to the umpteenth degree which if was at all read by tumblr would cut off the white people/incest jokes by a good half, let’s check a moment. for whom did those states vote during the last elections?

Mississippi > trump

New Mexico > clinton

Alabama > trump

Louisiana > trump 

West Virginia > trump

Kentucky > trump

South Carolina > trump

Arkansas > trump

Georgia > trump

North Carolina > trump

hmmm. waaait. what do y’all say on tumblr about people who vote trump and states where trump won? that it’s all racists who should die and if they lose their jobs fuck them because they should have known better to vote for trump? hmmmmm. oh, yeah, the US school system is so great that this is the literacy level:

aaah, 14% plus 4% of non literate people means that 18% of the population pretty much can’t read functionally, and hmmmm how much is 18% of the US population? 327,2 million. how much is 18% of 327,2 million?

58.8.

hmmmmm… where do most of those almost sixty million illiterate people live according to you? I’ll spoil you: most likely in poor areas. hmm, what jobs did most of these people do in the 70s/80s? I’ll tell you because I read on the topic, they worked manual jobs in factories ie steel mills and similar places… which ah, wait, all closed because either economic crisis or whatnot, and no one thought that a lot of those people didn’t have other marketable skills. and aaah wait what did trump say? let’s make america great lIKE IT WAS, FUCK THE PARIS AGREEMENTS, LET’S GO BACK TO COAL -

ah.

yeah.

I absolutely can’t understand why would any of those people vote for trump, huh?

now: guess what, I absolutely understand why they would, and mvho is that if the US left would concentrate on, hm, reforming the public school system so literacy rates go up and people don’t fall for trump, it would solve 99% of their problems, buuut what do I see on tumblr? all people saying that whoever voted for trump is a neonazi and should die.

and now we get to the point: MY PAL, YOU CAN’T BE AN ACTIVIST OR CALL YOURSELF AN ACTIVIST AND NOT LISTEN TO OTHERS AND KEEP ON STEWING IN YOUR FUCKING IGNORANCE. I don’t laugh about the poor people failed by the public US educational system - my problem is kids on tumblr who all go to college or some private school paid by their parents who also pay for their internet and most likely their computers and who SAY THEY’RE ACTIVISTS who not only don’t know fucking shit about the issues in their own country, but presume and have the arrogance to push US social categories on OTHER COUNTRIES while not even knowing how the fuck their own social categories work because if y’all entitled people on tumblr had a fucking clue of why people make incest jokes about alabama you wouldn’t be laughing at them and you would stop not including classism in your precious social analysis of your country’s issues which almost never includes categories y’all wanna laugh at. AND YOU CAN’T BE AN ACTIVIST NOT CARING FOR THE RIGHTS OF PEOPLE THAT DON’T VOTE WHERE YOU VOTE, INCLUDING THE POOR WHITE PEOPLE WHO VOTE DONALD TRUMP. 

and on top of not even knowing how your fucking country works and only wanting to fight for the rights of people who think like you - because if you look at the notes on the post for the fundraiser in favors of the miners of harlan county kentucky from this summer it’s full of people saying they deserve to die because kentucky is a red state, and btw as I just got some birthday money I gave them some fifteen bucks too but hey, keep on telling me I make fun of poor americans anon -, you show up on posts where people discuss their issues in their countries according to their societal standards and you presume to know better than us how our countries work and sorry but my pal, I say that the school system failed SO-CALLED COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO, GOING TO COLLEGE IE FUCKING HIGHER EDUCATION, SHOULD KNOW BETTER THAN ASSUMING THE ENTIRE WORLD REVOLVES ALONG THE US SOCIETAL CONSTRUCT.

now: I 100% have a lot more sympathy for poor americans who can’t afford going to the doctor and most likely die in shootings and whose teacher didn’t bother with them in obligatory school because they decided they weren’t smart enough than for fucking entitled college kids on tumblr who declare themselves activists and then proceed to read the entirety of world history through american lens and prove the stereotypes about US americans way more right than any person actually affected by crappy public schooling might.

if you go into fucking debt to go to college - which btw I consider a total travesty and y’all should just fucking vote sanders and get on par with most places where you don’t have to join the army to get a chance at an education - I would assume that college gives you an education good enough to give you enough reading comprehension to understand whatever the hell I say in posts that I used to make extra-long and extra-detailed so that people who don’t have the context might get it.

since y’all obviously don’t have it, then your overpriced, crappy sub-par higher education failed the shit out of you. and it’s high time someone informed you of that.

now please go troll someone else and possibly go find dale maharidge’s books including the ones out of print that I went to hunt down on abebooks because they’ll enlighten you re all the things you, as hopefully an activist, should do to avoid trump 2020. now I’ll go back writing my novel in which I’m taking care to point out that y’all’s calvinist society is a damned dystopia and I sure as hell hope you think before messaging people this stuff next because I’m really fucking tired of y’all purposefully misreading everything I say.

sayonara.

[hxrryspotter]

www(.)theatlantic(.)com/international/archive/2013/12/13-countries-where-atheism-punishable-death/355961/ but yes, atheists are at the peak of the societal pyramid lmao. stop with your us/western centrism already

omg you’re so embarrassing. you send me an article abt this and ts 13 COUNTRIES. im sorry but those countries? living there doesnt seem easy at all, you cant be gay, you cant do this or do that. idk why you look at those countries and suddenly think you’re a minority, globally? bc ur not.

don’t start with atheism is a ‘minority’ when being an atheist these days is totally more accepted than being jewish/muslim. you wanna complain to be about believing in nothing or believing in ‘science’ is such a hard life. maybe in those 13 countries but out of 190+ countries.... really.  wow so hard for you. how could i forget you face as much discrimination and hate crimes us as who follow a religion, who are gay, etc. in EVERY country. its nice to feel so important isnt it, anon?

im not saying that you dont face discrimination, just that you’re not a fucking minority.

[janiedean]

... Ok, by this point I'm just left here wondering whether they do ANY kind of text analysis in American schools, because it shouldn't be possible to misunderstand a written text so badly ("here we're uncomfortable with the word 'race' because WW2 & related fuckery, also socio-cultural dynamics are different" "SO UR SAYING RACISM DOESN'T EXIST IN ITALY OMFG???") unless you're doing it on purpose and out of malice. But then again, maybe it's limited to just Tumblr users. *shrug*

I thought I answered this one but kljglsk anyway: the thing isn’t even text analysis (even if at this point seeing how people can’t recognize that jaime’s pov in asoiaf are 70% sarcasm which means you can’t take it at full face value), it’s that some people have already decided that the world works like the us of a and anyone telling them otherwise is wrong and spoilers, 99% of those people don’t even know how the fuck the us of a work because they’d discuss classism a lot more if they did, but like...... who gives a damn. you want to not listen to others, you do you. I’m tired of this discourse and it’s been like five years since it was rampant, if ppl didn’t get it in 2015 they won’t now. *shrug*

[janiedean]

(Ciao, sono italiana ma scrivo in inglese perché purtroppo internet parla solo inglese, e ci dobbiamo arrangiare) I saw your posts on the great Italians are POC/white discourse and I felt I needed to offer my point of view, because while I'm absolutely sure that Italians and Europeans that are not children of immigrants are not POC, I also feel that defining us white is not correct. (Follows in the next ask)

(From the ask before) I always feel that "whiteness" as a concept was born to describe the US society, and applying it to the European (and especially Italian context) disregards the different history and culture, putting it in boxes that weren't made for it. Not to say that there's no racism, nor that there aren't people who hold a privilege above others. Just that "whiteness" is a different phenomenon and to define Italians "white" to me has always felt a bit wrong. (Grazie e scusa, ciao!)

(anon in realtà visto che sto discorso farlo in inglese porta solo delirio avrei preferito lo chiedessi in italiano così la gente non lo capiva ma vabbe X°DDDDD)

... anon while I see your point... you’re actually being extremely us-centrist here? because I mean, I 100% agree that *whiteness* as a privilege indicator in US society (and anyway it’s in itself extremely flawed, more on that later) is only a thing that exists in the US context/to describe US society, but why should I not call myself white when I am and when the entirety of the content has used it to describe its inhabitants’s skin color since way before US society was a thing? if helen in the iliad had white/pale arms in the description and she was GREEK, now we can’t say greeks were white or are white because it’s automatically become the same as whiteness in the US, and therefore.... we are pushing a US value on this entire continent?

like.

no.

the point is that white in the US does not mean white in europe and we don’t have their concept of whiteness-as-an-automatical-privilege and that we don’t use it as a sociological parameter as much as they do and our racism discourse is a lot more nuanced and based on nationality other than skin color.

but like. POC does not count either because in the US = anyone who’s not *white*/possesses *whiteness*, here poc = black person. period. so what do you call someone with a filipino parent and an italian parent, poc? any person I knew who wasn’t *black* or mixed with a black parent that I’ve ever known in my life (and I’ve known more than a few) would have never described themselves as a person of color. no chinese person in italy describes themselves as a person of color. it’s not that we put US whiteness in european contexts, it’s usually US-american people who do and we don’t, and literally no one has ever said that being white here = being white in the US, but like............. why should we automatically use US sociological terms and parameters to talk about us? the US-americans shouldn’t - and that’s what we spent years discussing before realizing it was a lost fight - and we shouldn’t do that either. like, of course **whiteness** isn’t an european phenomenon. but being white and having **US-american whiteness** are not the same thing and like since I can’t be either white nor poc according to this reason what the heck am I?

like: you can’t discuss US racism and european racism in the same terms because they work on different parameters and if a word means a thing in our context and another in their context, we all can learn to use them correctly instead of saying that one category cannot use it. so like... I really don’t agree with the fact that we should use US terms to describe us in the first place nor with the fact that we should stop using terms we always used to describe us because in the US societal discourse they mean something else. like, US discourse doesn’t own social justice discourse and I’d really prefer if it never did. /two cents

(also add-on under the cut but I don’t feel like discussing THAT too so)

also, I honestly would like to point out that the *whitness* concept in the US is actually extremely specific and only applies to WASP people not necessarily all of the famed white people TM, and anyway the white anglosaxon protestant privilege tends to stick if you’re rich, because if you look at how *poor* (uneducated) white americans in rural areas live/have lived in the last thirty years or so, you’ll find out that these people wouldn’t know privilege if it hit them in the face and that their whiteness didn’t stop them from living in tents or losing their houses and jobs all over and/or riding trains to find jobs during the eighties or living in their car. never mind that if you read any steinbeck reportage or the grapes of wrath, you’ll end up seeing white people from freaking oklahoma being called slurs and treated like third-rate citizens by white californians and if you look around and dig into some reportages (I’ll recommend dale maharidge’s until I die tbqh) you’ll see that the same situation happened at least throughout all of the eighties in texas with ppl from northern states ie ohio or wisconsin who tried to go to texas bc there were supposedly more jobs and the economical crisis left them without choices. I mean in the US white people are automatically privileged when they have money/are rich/in the position to gain money, if they’re poor their life is shit anyway and it’s exactly 90% of the reasons why the american left lost the elections last round so if I were them I’d think long and hard about it.

[janiedean]

Sorry all these white hate on Tumblr gets me riled up like nothing else. It's all a huge double standard and huge amounts of hypocrisy coming mainly from US-americans. I don't care if anyone's skin color gets collectively a few shades lighter or darker but that race traitor anon sounded like they want everywhere to be the ~USA culturally and everywhere should be the same and sorry but I fucking like going to countries for diverse cultural experiences including the ugly whites like polish uwu >:(

nah it’s okay I loathe tumblr’s white hate as well as I think we all know XD idk to me the anon sounded like *I* sound when I say I don’t care for the whole ETHNICAL ITALIANS BEING INVADED BY THE HORRIBLE DARK-SKINNED PEOPLE bullshit and I don’t think it wasn’t that deep but I can see why it’d sound like that? anyway obviously it’s *not* cool to want anyone to be obliterated but I mean having argued with a few people like anon’s parents I can understand they were exaggerating it - with some of them it happens automatically sadly :/ that said obviously no one here thinks cultural experiences should all be obliterated XD

[janiedean]

Am i the only one who cringes when seeing tumblr throwing around the word "eurocentric"?? What a stupid term. The continent is currently divided into 50+ different countries w/ different cultures including Eurasian countries. And!! also!! including the huge influence of the Ottoman empire on eastern Europe. ...Wow the American educational system must be really bad?

the thing is that eurocentrism is a thing that might exist when you discuss.. like, the way history is taught in OUR schools (which is normal I mean I’m sure in china they teach chinese-centered history and so on) and the likes, but it doesn’t mean what they think it means and anyway americans speak from US-centrism, not eurocentrism, or they’d actually know things don’t work here like over there...

[janiedean]

Oh don't whine about muslim countries, they're poc countries, your little white brain cant judge them. In your very white countries, muslim people can be killed when your sitting on your atheist ass in all safety.

..... okay, you’re trolling. you have to be trolling.

that said, okay, sources?

because in my country, last time a refugee got killed because he was a refugee, he was christian and he just got married in a very Italian church. last I heard of dead muslims in Europe, you know who they were? either kamikaze killers or people killed by kamikazes.

of course, isis doesn’t kill muslims in the very muslim countries it’s currently occupying, and I can’t judge *poc* countries where the term poc isn’t even a thing because it works just in the united states of america?

anon, honest. you’re embarrassing yourself and any other religious person with a brain in this entire fucking planet. lol. my little white ass can’t judge poc countries? so I can’t say the japanese were fucking terrible during WWII when they killed 350.000 people in nankin in one month (more than both hiroshima and nagasaki together) and, like, literally ate prisoners of war alive because I’m white and they’re poc so what do I know of war crimes?

pls. also, all the dead atheists in muslim countries are poc, but you don’t care about those poc, can you?

and ah, wait, you meant the USA where muslims can be killed, huh? well, well, well, I’ll tell you, a) my country/continent is not the USA, b)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/26/atheist-discrimination-humanist-association_n_5531296.html

atheists are also discriminated in the USA, and c) in the USA you can get killed because you’re muslim but also if you’re... black, or native american, or a minority, so like, wow, congrats, you’re a minority. you know who else are minorities? christians in muslim countries! who also get killed by isis! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alon-benmeir/the-persecution-of-christ_b_13652002.html I mean, idk, maybe every place where there’s a non-secular society every religious minority gets killed and persecuted, too bad that in the US if you kill someone muslim it’s still a hate crime and you get arrested, in other places if you kill someone who’s not of the main religion it’s okay because by being anything other than that they’re committing blasphemy. but of course your precious divinity is totally okay with all of this, because their ways are mysterious! and I totally should buy that everything happens for a reason and I can’t presume to understand why someone who created me and should love me unconditionally along with everyone else lets people die like that or would hate gay people according to whoever presumes to read their mind and so on! because you all totally are right and we are wrong! and I can’t think that people dying because of what they don’t believe in or what they believe in is stupid and abhorrent because I’m white!

like. either stop trolling or get out of the house and go read the god delusion, it’d be great for you. I lost count how many times that I should read the bible to realize what religion was really about, and I read both christian and protestant versions and it only convinced me that I was right