Decolonization and Alienation: Why I Find My Peers’ Politics Unrelatable

[Recursion]

https://medium.com/%40creatrixtiara/decolonization-and-alienation-why-i-find-my-peers-politics-unrelatable-6de743a7471f#.hz1y5xw4o

Kind of South Asia specific, but really interesting. Plus I figured it's a break from the primaries foolishness.

Sometimes efforts at decolonization come off as exotifying or romanticizing the homeland, or reducing it to particular unrepresentative facets. For instance, South Asia often just gets reduced to a particular cultural area of India that’s Hindu-centric and I think also limited to a particular caste. I once pointed out to a friend — a very well-respected QWOC writer and activist who is part South Asian — that while she meant well when she talked about how our South Asian ancestors would practice yoga every morning and thus we have a deeper connection to yoga than other cultures, it was also erasing South Asian Muslims, Christians, and other faith groups who have been around for centuries and who wouldn’t have yoga as their daily practice because it’s a Hindu thing. (Meanwhile people are shocked when they find out that my first time trying out yoga was at college in Australia because they offered free classes.)

Then there’s the fawning over traditional outfits, the racebends that always go back to a historical version of a particular culture (rather than anything contemporary), the constant efforts to “reclaim the bindi” and “we’re beautiful in our culture!”. Over here barely any fashion store in Malaysia carries my size (inflated from M in the West to XXL at least because I am busty), I get parsed as a man walking around my parents’ Bangladesh because I’m wearing a shirt/tunic & jeans rather than a salwhar khameez, people accost me with skin-lightening products all the time, and bindis have become so commercialized that people here aren’t that worried about appropriation. I am more likely to see someone that looks like me being represented as beautiful in the West than I ever would over here. Hell, I had a TV presenting gig in Australia — that would have never happened here in Malaysia, I’m too “dark-skinned” for TV, even though those were my words that their light-skinned VJs were reading off the teleprompter when I worked at a major music TV channel in KL some time ago.

Sometimes this shows up when my decolonial activist friends come to the homelands to visit or to move permanently. Maybe they’re planning to do so, especially when their current town has become too expensive and isolating. They speak about the homeland in such loving dulcet tones, marveling at how easy the food nourishes their soul, how everyone looks just like them, how they feel at peace because they are back to where their ancestors were. They’re home.

...

Must be nice to find home. Home’s a place that I have never known. I’d gladly swap places with them, take up their spot in San Francisco or Toronto or wherever, being able to eat whatever I want wherever I want, talk about who I am more than what I am. Their home felt more like home to me than mine ever did.

When Nina Davuluri won Miss America a couple of years ago (btw she'll be in Mumbai next week and I might get to meet her) there was, rightly, a lot of shock in India at the racist invective that was tweeted and facebooked about her in the US... and then people dug up what was being tweeted and facebooked in India, about how they can't understand how a woman that dark-skinned could possibly be in a beauty pageant to begin with. Sigh.

[JustAnotherGen]

1. At the end of the piece

Eerily similar in these days of calling black people stupid because they aren't voting for TANF and SNAP benefits.

If you don’t fit into the US-centric racial discourse, if you have any questions or qualms about any tactic or strategy, if you find your perspective on anti-racism to be subtly different than the norm, you are colonized. Decolonize your brain. Decolonize yourself. Decolonize the Western Activist way.
Hmm, maybe the decolonization activists need to look at how colonial their approaches really are.

[Recursion]

3. Very eerie, yeah?

I'm not saying there's a good answer. I just thought this was a really interesting piece.

[Kind of Blue]

2. Growing pains of Westernized PoC.

I've read a few articles by young PoC caught between two cultures, very familiar with but not fitting in either. I certainly wish there were more people like her when I was coming up. But my final working analysis is the world is my oyster, I'm a part of all of it. It's a matter of not even trying to fit in. Let go of what or who does not serve you. She'll find more people just like her and create her own space and family the more she grows in love with herself as incredibly unique.

Thanks, Recursion!

[The Polack MSgt]

4. That was...

A fascinating read.

Thanks for the link.

[VulgarPoet]

5. Is it sad that I'm actually somewhat envious of decolonialists?

I grew up more or less a nomad as a kid, and wound up disowned from both sides of my family-- I don't even know what home is, just what makes up my color. Food for thought, I guess-- thanks for the link.