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december_solsticeThis applies to the common unpopular crowd, the black girl in a predominately white school, the nerd, the bright minds that no one seems to understand.
I admit, I'm enjoying the fact that I "fit-in" here. NYC is a melting pot. It;s progressive. Liberating. It's like seeing your soul materialized into a city. I don't only FEEL the part. I look the part. And, we all know, looking the part makes life a ton easier.
Being a little fat white girl in Hawaii is tough. Even though I'm biracial, I never learned my mother's native language. I don't fit in with my own family. I'm too "mainland". My mom is white-washed. In all aspects of the word. She lost her native tongue due to a sense of internal hate for her own race. She is born and raised in the Philippines but talks like a white lady from the suburbs.
In Hawaii, locals dislike "mainlanders" in general, but for most it's more of a poke fun/mockery than an actual deep disdain for white folk. Though Hawaii's colonization is of course part of it, it's also the fact that tourists are often snotty and rude white people. Gentrification is part of it. Rich white folks moving in and making it too expensive for native Hawaiians to buy property. Ha'ole, a Hawaiian word meaning "without breath", used to describe James Cook, is also used for other white people.
This isn't some kind of pathetic reverse racism claim. I am an ally, and locals should speak out. They should dethrone the politicians. They should run the show. They should be involved in the decisions made for the citizens of Hawaii. Plain and simple.
On the other hand, I'm still human. A shitty human at times, but human none the less. No one likes being an outcast. My reason for leaving Hawaii has nothing to do with this. I left because I could not grow there. I didn't fit in. For reasons not related to the color of my skin. I think the culture, along with my living arrangements (LOTS of racism in my household) was only further perpetuating racism within myself and making me a shittier person.
I was in love with a black boy. My grandma still hadn't accepted the fact that my Mom married a ha'ole (a white guy from California). My best friend was a cute Mexican girl who cussed in Spanish, and my Dad hated her. At the same time, I was hating my own diversity. I did not embraced being hapa. I thought being born a mix plate was a death sentence.
Go ahead and pile on a rebellious nature, a hatred for authority, and an overall anti-god, anti-state personality, I wasn't fitting in. At all.
It's as if NYC is finally welcoming me home.
I admit, I'm enjoying the fact that I "fit-in" here. NYC is a melting pot. It;s progressive. Liberating. It's like seeing your soul materialized into a city. I don't only FEEL the part. I look the part. And, we all know, looking the part makes life a ton easier.
Being a little fat white girl in Hawaii is tough. Even though I'm biracial, I never learned my mother's native language. I don't fit in with my own family. I'm too "mainland". My mom is white-washed. In all aspects of the word. She lost her native tongue due to a sense of internal hate for her own race. She is born and raised in the Philippines but talks like a white lady from the suburbs.
In Hawaii, locals dislike "mainlanders" in general, but for most it's more of a poke fun/mockery than an actual deep disdain for white folk. Though Hawaii's colonization is of course part of it, it's also the fact that tourists are often snotty and rude white people. Gentrification is part of it. Rich white folks moving in and making it too expensive for native Hawaiians to buy property. Ha'ole, a Hawaiian word meaning "without breath", used to describe James Cook, is also used for other white people.
This isn't some kind of pathetic reverse racism claim. I am an ally, and locals should speak out. They should dethrone the politicians. They should run the show. They should be involved in the decisions made for the citizens of Hawaii. Plain and simple.
On the other hand, I'm still human. A shitty human at times, but human none the less. No one likes being an outcast. My reason for leaving Hawaii has nothing to do with this. I left because I could not grow there. I didn't fit in. For reasons not related to the color of my skin. I think the culture, along with my living arrangements (LOTS of racism in my household) was only further perpetuating racism within myself and making me a shittier person.
I was in love with a black boy. My grandma still hadn't accepted the fact that my Mom married a ha'ole (a white guy from California). My best friend was a cute Mexican girl who cussed in Spanish, and my Dad hated her. At the same time, I was hating my own diversity. I did not embraced being hapa. I thought being born a mix plate was a death sentence.
Go ahead and pile on a rebellious nature, a hatred for authority, and an overall anti-god, anti-state personality, I wasn't fitting in. At all.
It's as if NYC is finally welcoming me home.
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no subject
Date: 2015-09-25 05:26 pm (UTC)— almost blind in a rare way (the name for my "disease" isn't even in my mac dictionary)
— fan of japan, japanese, anime, etc. fandom person, fanfic writer... GLBT-related stuff exists heavily in my life.... i even met my wife through fandom.
— moved abroad, married young, don't drink or smoke or do drugs, more or less have learnt a couple foreign languages (AFTER the age of 18 as opposed to from childhood like most people in the world have it), have been way too poor for years now. my own "culture", opinions, hobbies and way of speaking has changed a lot. now i get americans who don't even believe i was born and raised in america, none of my family/old friends would have anything in common with me anymore really.
— my family doesn't talk to me and (mostly due to me not having money or a job) i have no RL friends
— my diet is weird, i don't know social customs or "common sense" stuff everyone knows blah blah.
— i'm really short. this may seem stupid but it means that i can't actually buy clothes here unless i get them in kid's sizes,
— i learned (and use) esperanto, which automatically makes people think you're a weirdo
*scratches head* that's all i can think of for now.
half/whole stuff
Date: 2015-09-26 01:30 pm (UTC)Meaning that even though she was born and raised in this town, she says like the vowel "a" slightly differently (in a way that she can't even hear but other people can) and then people go "Oh you northerners!", but when she's up north they go "you damn Stockholmers!" even when she says like "I'm not from Stockholm" and "I'm not from the North".... And Sweden is only what, the size of California and Oregon put together? : /
She also says she wrote a post on Tumblr a while ago about how racism is different here, as in "in America from what I've heard you just have to be 'white'. Here, that's not it. You can't have Asian eyes or black hair even if your skin is white. You can't have a Russian nose. What would pass as white skin in the US wouldn't here." (I've also heard old Swedish ladies insisting that Obama isn't "black" because his skin definitely isn't black enough). And then some American reblogged, ranted about stupid white people and claimed all that she said was a lie....
Re: half/whole stuff
Date: 2015-09-26 06:56 pm (UTC)As for that experience your wife had on Tumblr, I am not even slightly shocked. I think that is how people are in the US (predominately the users of Tumblr). No matter their convictions, they are incapable of learning or understanding the opposing side. They're about insulting, not teaching.
These conversations we're having now would not even exist on Tumblr.
Cognitive dissonance. You've heard the term, no?
It's basically the inability to accept new information because it is too conflicting w/ current beliefs, ideals, views, ect.
Personally, I think it's fascinating to learn about how different society is where you are, and also getting an outside perspective of Americans and American society.
Though racism exists everywhere in the world, I'm curious why some racism is very systematic/institutionalized in some countries. Here, racism is kind of understood as a prejudice that is intertwined in every area of society. Racism effecting your education system, prison system, justice system, your ability to find work, to obtain housing, receive healthcare, to shop peacefully, to walk down the street feeling safe, ect ect.. ect..
Some races receive prejudice for their race, but may not actually experience the above difficulties in every day life. Ex. a little Chinese girl doesn't need to worry about being stop and frisked while on her way to the subway station. A little black boy, well, there is an incredibly high chance it will happen to them. Ect. ect.
BUT this does not apply everywhere in the world. To not accept that just makes you intolerant of other people's experiences. Makes you an asshole really. An asshole that will never be able to think differently.
RE: Re: half/whole stuff
Date: 2015-09-26 07:00 pm (UTC)too tired to reply much
Date: 2015-09-26 08:31 pm (UTC)for example, people are too afraid to fly the swedish flag for fear of being called racist (as in, nazi-like). similarly, they can't actually tell someone to "learn swedish", you don't even have to know swedish to become a citizen. many would be too afraid to believe in old norse religion stuff or wear traditional clothing openly. yet they HAVE to be extremely accepting about, say, mosques, head-dresses and face-veils, and other such religious stuff from other countries that really "doesn't have any place in sweden". there's a lot of hidden resentment in this, as in a lot of swedes actually want to do these things and feel that it's unfair that every other country can do them but they can't.
i also hear a lot of things like "the schools are racist, the immigrant kids get a worse education". actually, a great many of the immigrant kids don't speak swedish at home and don't study swedish, and might not even use swedish outside of school and might have only foreigner friends, so they don't understand what's going on in class or they can't actually write an understandable essay. and in swedish society in general, english is prized even more than their own language, so ex. many foreigners actually end up getting better english than swedish skills.
among other things, the teacher feels like if they fail the student due to language problems, that would be racist. but if you were to single out the kids with bad swedish and put them in some special class, like how the US puts kids into ESL classes, that would also likely be seen as racist or at least as something that would make the integration problem worse... even though it's all nonsense. you cause trouble for "normal students" when you have no time to teach them thanks to having to constantly help the student who can't even understand the basics.
i remember a norwegian girl i knew for a while, forget where her mom came from but anyway by blood she was half-norwegian and half something else, with some kind of tan skin i guess. her mom even after like 30 years of living in norway still had really shit norwegian.... and this girl blamed it all on "her mom's very first norwegian teacher who was bad and racist and taught her badly". "my mom can't get jobs because of her bad norwegian teacher that she had 20 years ago" etc.
she claimed stuff like kids were really mean to her at school due to racism and all this stuff. except, this girl was a BRAT. the kind of girl who would constantly talk back to her parents and skip school and surprise, would fail school due to skipping too much then tried to pass it off as being "normal" that she was, say, two years behind (i'm pretty sure she was at least 1 year behind, i had two "friends" at this time who were behind and one was behind by 3 years so i really can't remember if it was the same girl or not).
she claimed that other countries weren't as bad as norway in this racism/whatever department, norway was the worst and she just wanted to move away blah blah, she ended up going to japan on exchange for a year (of course, paid for by her loving parents as far as i can guess)... i stopped talking to her before she left but i hope she got a taste of what it's really like to be an immigrant/picked on for that : l and i believe she did the typical thing where she claimed she was whatever her mom was except she didn't speak the language at all or had ever gone there, that kind of thing.
and if you're on tumblr for example, you get "oh you're white you have it so great". maybe i have it great... in a WHITE COUNTRY. if i go to japan i will be treated badly due to my body/skin. if i go to africa, same thing. likewise, if i am an immigrant, no matter which country i move to i will be treated badly because i'm not a native, it'll just be more or less clearly/directly shown to me depending on country. sigh.
RE: too tired to reply much
Date: 2015-09-27 12:11 am (UTC)Fascinating the differences in racism. I am also quite intrigued by the correlation between racism and religion.
Is is fairly secular there?
Race is probably just as controversial as religion here -- especially after 9/11. Islamophobia everywhere! (At least in NYC -- for obvious reasons, 9/11 occurred here.)
I grew up in a Christian household but I've been a closeted non-believer since day one. Atheism or expressing any kind of spirituality that isn't in line with Christianity or the Bible would be a death sentence for me! My dad is also super religious. My mom is flexible, but believes in prayer.
Personally, I have no problem with religion. I am actually a huge fan of religious studies. It is institutionalized/largely organized religion that I think is the problem. When religion is turned into a profitable business and destroys native cultures/faiths. That;s when I have something to say.
As for my religious background -- well, it's as crazy as it gets LOLOL
My Grandma spent 3-4 hours every morning in prayer. If I were to be completely honest, I honestly think her faith makes her a fucked up person. She is a terrible person, very racist, super mean-spirited, extremely hateful in general.
I mean if she wasn't such an asshole, there would be no need for 4 hours of repenting...
I sympathize with your wife, and others who may feel similarly there.
The face of Christian missionaries converting indigenous people happen to be white -- yet we often forget that these same missionaries destroyed the native faiths and culture of several other EU nations (Native Nordic/Norse faiths and culture -- often understood by many as "Paganism", just to name a few.) Similarly, to the indigenous people of North America, it was done by force.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-27 06:28 pm (UTC)"People act like you're lazy if you're playing videogames for four hours, but if you're 'praying' for four hours, that's cool?" comments my wife.
Nearly everyone here is baptized and pretty much everyone does a confirmation but practically no one "seriously" believes in Christianity, you just do these things because you think it's a nice ceremony or because you get presents or because everyone else does it. And (as far as I've heard) they don't circumcise kids, that's seen as a barbaric practise kinda like child torture (meanwhile it's apparently basically the standard in the US, though they claim it's for "health reasons" or something).
The end point is that if they enjoy the message that the religion gives you, then they may call themselves religious. For example, Christianity's message is "You can make mistakes in life, as long as you try to do good it's okay" "Someone out there loves you even if you hate yourself" and it focuses more on people's emotional well-being and the social aspects of life. Meanwhile stuff like Greek or Norse mythology is more about how you fit into nature and how nature works together (and how humans are puny beings in the face of nature), but it doesn't talk so much about your own emotional struggles etc. So someone can believe in both, because the overall message doesn't clash.
Most people even if they're religious however, are doubtful about things and some of the old beliefs still peek through. I'm very sure that more people believe in ghosts than they believe in Jesus. In the past, all this stuff that's nowadays attributed to ghosts was once attributed to gnomes, elves, demons, old gods and so on. And the "go into a haunted house" tv shows here are taken very seriously, as in it's not some kind of show where you're supposed to be screaming and frightened and whatever but they try to do real research about the house and so on.
In general everything is more secular but sometimes in a weird way. They teach you about different religions in school (not just Christianity), and you even go to church as a school field-trip. Politicians are not exactly going to talk about god (unlike American politicians) and no one is going to say something like "Sweden is the land of God" (as Americans say about America in various ways) : l
Even the confirmations aren't serious, like my wife says that in hers they literally just played games and joked around the whole time and then when they were supposed to recite something from memory (otherwise you're not supposed to be allowed to be confirmed) they were actually allowed to just read from a piece of paper. In general church and religion is not at all serious, but it's still a part of normal life in a way. When you watch a Christmas TV special they're going to show religious singing and there will be a passage from the Bible read aloud, then there will be a bunch of stuff like old Disney cartoons. Or everyone will interpret a Disney song as being religious even if Americans don't (modernly) see it that way (ex. "When you wish upon a star").
no subject
Date: 2015-09-27 06:30 pm (UTC)My wife's mom has a picture of Jesus in her room but it's not because she's Christian, it's because she think the picture looks nice. For the same reason, my wife's cousin (who, if she were religious would also be going straight to hell LOL) sings gospel songs. So if you look at it without, say, knowing the language and culture, or if you were to just send out a survey and as "are you Christian, Y/N?", you'd get a very different opinion from how it really seems to be. It's like when you go to buy Christmas decorations or dress up for Halloween - you might get something with an angel on it, or dress up as an angel, even if you don't believe in angels.
I really think that a lot more Nordic people are slowly "reverting" and believing in the Norse gods nowadays, as I keep seeing it all over the place online as the internet gets larger... In Iceland it's relatively really big because they have practically zero foreigners so they also don't have to worry about all this "you're racist!" nonsense that comes with it.
In the past, the Christians worked REALLY hard to erase the Norse religion. Really, really hard. Basically they moved all the Norse holidays to the weekend, changed as many gods as they could to demons/devils, what they couldn't change or remove they said was due to Christ or whatever instead of due to the original Norse gods (ex. Christmas).
Because there was no organized educational system at that time, the church took up teaching everyone and since the church used Latin with the Latin alphabet, they started erasing the Norse alphabet and started teaching the young people stuff like "well you're educated and your grandma isn't - those stories your grandma tells about those Norse gods are just lies, we have the real story" basically. And it was also helped a bit just because Scandinavians love "outside stuff" and love to copy other countries for the most part. So Norway could, say, look and see that Germany was becoming Christian and then the Norwegian king would want to hop on the bandwagon a bit more (then force his people to, no matter what THEY thought about it). Then Sweden would do it just because Norway did it (a sad thing that still happens today).
But this place is still different from most places in the world and is way different from the kind of places that are described by the bible (of what little I know of it). Very little grows here, there's few people, winters are harsh, it's mostly forest and water. There are still people who travel to work on skis in the wintertime and there are no "snow days" off from school, blah blah. When you live in this kind of place you have to (traditionally) be super practical, and a lot of things having to do with other religions or cultures from other countries aren't actually fitting, they may be fads for a while but likely they're very pale or edited in comparision to the original.
Speaking of that, in the past five or so years Swedes have started "celebrating Halloween" (thanks to American TV and places like Toys R US having "Halloween Sales") except no one even knows which date it's supposed to be on so even newspapers print the wrong date for it. I overheard a conversation in a shop where some girls around my age were arguing about whether Halloween was on November 30th or October 1st etc.
(As for my family, my dad isn't religious, I don't know about my mom, my grandparents are Christian but I only found out about it like five years ago by chance due to grandma explaining to my cousin what different people think about how the world was made, likewise my great-grandparents have never said anything but I assume they're Christian)
no subject
Date: 2015-09-27 06:42 pm (UTC)And I think a lot of people are realizing that Christianity is "bad", as in it comes with a bad culture. When you hear of religious people you tend to hear about crazy Islamists and crazy American Christians for example, or religious cults. Normal, average people who may or may not be Christian see stuff like documentaries or bits of news about America on TV and they hear about these crazy people. So I think that in our generation it's turning a lot more people off, or people feel like they're sort of "too busy" for the kind of religion where you have to go to church every week, etc.
(I have heard of a few crazy religious people here - they were all either foreigners or they were actually just crazy, like they must have been abused as kids or something)
RE: Re: half/whole stuff
Date: 2015-09-26 08:33 pm (UTC)Re: Re: half/whole stuff
Date: 2015-09-27 12:18 am (UTC)While on topic, I also find it quite sad and discouraging that people think white people don't have culture. White isn't a race. Neither is black. Those are skin tones Lol. Black people could have immediate roots in Africa or...perhaps Jamaica. There is also very dark Latinos with a bit of African in them. There is also very dark Filipinos.
People here have zero connection to their culture. White people are just white. It is rare that they will tell you where from Europe their ancestors come from. Shit, I don't even know. My maiden name is German. That's all I know.
RE: Re: Re: half/whole stuff
Date: 2015-09-27 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-27 03:11 pm (UTC)Aside from that? I've heard that I have some kind of native American ancestry, as well as Swedish and who knows what else. But I've never seen any proof of it. And I have no idea about my dad's mom's mom for example... (who is still alive)
35 siblings?! holy shit...
There's a story in my family about how some relative had 12 or 14 sons, and went to the hat-shop (or clothes-shop or something) and asked for hats for all his sons. The hatter was like "you're lying, there's no way you have that many - if you do then I'll make you the hats for free" and so he came back with all of his sons and got free hats.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-29 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-29 09:11 pm (UTC)Muti-racial people definitely bring a little spice to life. They can understand and empathize with the many struggles of being a person of color.