Thread by @sqiouyilu

this is exactly why I keep insisting that white people (1) have ethnic identities, (2) have heritages, and (3) have cultural contexts, because acting like white people are a default unmarked state with “no culture” actively enables cultural appropriation and coloniality

https://twitter.com/KariDru/status/1567744824706490368

in fact this is a very big part of why I wrote #InTheWatchfulCity, because after a lifetime of white peoples (stet autocorrect, thank you) telling me they have “no culture” while I simultaneously have to learn white sociocultural and discourse norms to survive,

I decided to write nearly 40,000 words saying “LISTEN PAL, YOU HAVE A LIFE STORY TOO, WE ALL DO, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE LESS INTERESTING THAN THIS MINORITY REPORT DUDE, Æ THINKS ÆR LIFE IS UTTERLY BORING TOO, BUT IT’S ALL ABOUT C O N T R A S T AND P L U R A L I T Y”

conversations I have with other non-white people often go down the “oh wow, y’all do it that way? in my culture, we do it this way” path of comparing notes out of genuine curiosity, and! this is not a conversation that I can’t have with white people! you can do this too!

in fact by explicitly asking white people about their habits and norms, I learned things like white people in snowy climates often have a dedicated mud room where they take off their shoes before entering their house, but white people in milder climates don’t and just walk in

so while I often simplify things like making “OMG I’M TOO ASIAN FOR SHOES INSIDE” jokes, the reality is there’s patchwork cultural overlap between *any* two cultures, and yes! white people have regional differences too! white people have a DIVERSITY of experiences!!

which is also why I fucking hate “diverse” as an adjective for people because it literally makes no sense in isolation, “diverse” is only used to describe contrast, which you can’t do if there’s nothing you’re contrasting against,

or the worse outcome, that people contrast against an unspoken unmarked default that they haven’t given two seconds of thought about, nor have they considered how their use of “diverse” reifies coloniality, which could all be remedied if we just stopped relying on euphemisms

anyway, here’s an essay I wrote on coloniality, if you would like terminology and a framework for understanding how to make unmarked defaults un-invisible: tor.com/2020/03/10/a-f…

and here’s a lot more depth into BENEATH THE RISING that goes even further into concrete examples of coloniality and its links to labor exploitation: strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/be…

and for good measure, an essay on EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE that goes into the concept of cosmological frameworks and how the unquestioned default of “religion” in the west is actually inadequate to describe the rest of the world: strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/ev…