As a Canadian, what's your impression of what Americans are like? Since you said 'American' drowns out everything else as an identity component. I wanna compare notes.
ho boy absolutely nothing positive will come of this ask but ok sure here we go
the first word that comes to mind is “un-empathetic”. Now I need to make this exceedingly clear: i am talking about the american so called left, the guys who vote blue, the guys who, particularly, exist in the same social spaces as I do. Theoretically. I make a point to say this because I say “americans” and people go “oh surely she means the republicans” and like no I don’t I mean the guys who are supposed to be on the same side as I am, because if I was talking about the republicans I’d just say ABSOLUTELY UNHINGED
so, americans. man, americans are self-centered as FUCK. You can see it on the little things. If you’re on a server with like 500 people from all over the world and someone asks what’s your height, not only do americans answer in feet, everyone else does too for the sake of their comfort. “Only I use feet in the planet and yet everyone caters to me.”
If I was ever to start a post about, say, Luciano Huck, who is a guy pretty much every brazilian knows, I’d start it with “So there’s this guy who is a famous TV host…” But an american can and will start a post that goes “WE SHOULD MOBILIZE AGAINST BOB MCJOHNSON” and never once for a fucking second have the courtesy of even explaining who the fucking dude is, because hey, I gotta know, right? A post about Brazil starts with “In brazil…”. A post about the USA starts with “THIS NATION”
I think I only truly realized the extent of this self centeredness when we had a disaster very near me and I posted about it and it got ignored over a trump tweet. Americans will go “well you can’t expect me to have the energy for every disaster in the WORLD” but then fill every single pore of the internet, news and social media with news about their california fire when the pantanal in brazil has been burning so much, we’ve lost nearly 20% of the ecosystem and my dad can’t breathe because of his asthma.
And that’s just the thing - they take and they take and they TAKE but when the time comes you realize they won’t as much as throw a look your way. Hey true, no one has the energy to carry the world on their back. But you know what? When I turn on the TV and I see there was a quake in mexico, the first thing I think about is “hey, some people I know live there. Even if we haven’t talked in a while, I should check on them.” Because I care. It doesn’t have to be a huge tumblr SOS post. Just one fucking text - “I heard there was a quake. Are you okay?”
americans, save for very few exceptional people I’ve met, will make you feel like you’re fucking invisible. And that’s the worst feeling in the world. You know how many USA people have asked me whether I’m safe from the pantanal fires? Maybe two or three. You know how many americans I exchange regular conversation with, people who I, in turn, would ask whether they are safe in face of disaster? Yeah. More than two or three.
meanwhile my friends from other places don’t always get the news - third world only makes headlines when someone is profiting from it - but when they do, they IMMEDIATELY go “Brazil was on the news, how are you??”
like seriously I don’t think I’ll ever get over the heartbreak of publicly talking about a huge problem so close to me that it directly involved me on a server, with people I cared for, and having it be completed ignored except for a couple europeans and latinos who actually took the time to go “sorry for your loss”. that’s it. that’s all I needed.
americans are also immensely unsafe to be around. there’s a paulo freire quote that applies well here, and you know what, I’m not gonna fucking explain who paulo freire is either. The quote is “When education is not freeing, the oppressed dreams of becoming the oppressor.”
and that’s how social movement spaces that are USA-majority feel. Americans feel, and I’m gonna get heat for this, but americans feel like fucking cops. I’ll talk about the LGBT spaces because those are the ones I’m most inserted into, but this generally applies everywhere - they’ll assume their experiences are universal and you have to fall in line and will jump at any chance to tear you down.
Like. We are not socially at the same situation. Not all concepts apply equally. I do not UNDERSTAND all concepts. I have my own struggles with abstraction. And mistakes are human and everyone makes them.
But when faced upon a mistake, you can choose to take the role of the educator or the role of the enforcer, and by god do americans choose the latter most of the time. And you know, you don’t have to fucking be an educator all the time, but combing though people’s words in the search of minimal mistakes so you can take the satisfaction sending them a violent, cruel message because you feel like you have a moral high ground? That’s. That’s not fighting the enemy. That’s… a cop. That’s a cop searching your car for a broken taillight so they can escalate this into an arrest, not because they want to make the world a safer place, but because they wanna fuck you up, because they feel entitled to this power. Except you and the cop come from the same place, and the big bad guys are looking at you two fight and laughing.
And that’s what it all boils down to - the entitlement. I don’t post the hate I get. But dude. I’m a gay ass latina living in a messed up country struggling with my mental health. I have been through Some Shit. And it fucking hurts to get people going “I think you’re a shit doctor and I hope you lose your license” because you know what? People like me aren’t usually doctors to start with. I struggle with that thought every single fucking day. People will go “I wish law/healthcare/etc was more diverse” and then immediately, upon meeting a minimally diverse person, feel entitled to treat them not as actual human beings, but as entities from which you demand unachievable moral perfection based on USA standards, giving no space to learn either.
Americans feel entitled to my life story, and if I don’t promptly give it to prove whatever the fuck, then they feel entitled to be brutally emotionally violent towards me. I would never fucking address another human being with the tone, the cruelty, the sheer entitlement, the desire to harm in the most personal, hurtful way the way I’ve been addressed here. American centered movements do not include me. There’s no space in the USA-LGBT movement for me at all, I’m not represented by it, my friends from the third world are not represented by it, we don’t feel safe sharing our experiences, we don’t feel included, we feel POLICED far more often than included, we don’t feel like we MATTER. We are. Invisible. And silenced. Again.
And calling a movement global is nothing short of a hypocritical way of going “I hope the whole planet cares about this thing in the United States, but I sure as hell won’t acknowledge the role of the USA in putting the most violently cruel people in power - people that will cause this exact same problem, but elsewhere, so none of my business and I’ll ignore it over a trump tweet.”
anyway that’s the tea basically
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