Im a migrant to Australia. It’s true Australia has loads of issues involving racism. That said I DO have the right to protest
You are often permitted to stand around ineffectually or be in a parade that has no impact - though not always, of course. Once your action becomes actually disruptive to capital or related institutions, they lean on their own rules and the law to arrest, punish, expel, and/or deport those involved. As a migrant, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with this reality but avoid participation unless you are ready to accept those outcomes (and do not tell anyone your legal status, including me).
The only resistance allowed under liberalism is that which has no real impact on the greater schemes. Capitalist media tells fairy tales about how politics works, but they are falsehoods that whitewash history and try to make us complacent.
and vote towards a better future.
There is rarely much alignment between what you can vote for and what you actually want. Capitalist politics places emphasis on fights and reforms around problems that it itself creates and exacerbates, making you focus on undoing various injustices while doing nothing about the major ones. It provides the illusion of control and bastardizes the term, “democracy”, distilling it down to occasional votes for controlled parties and not rejecting the will and needs of the people. Again, your country is premised on genocide and the theft of the land and practices of indigenous Australians. You are participating in that, you are extolling the virtues of voting for people who engage in that theft and disposession to this day, like making indigenous Australians afraid of speaking to social workers lest the white supremacist institutions take away their children using anti-indigenous bias.
Ask yourself what control you have over various political parties’ positions, how they function, and why some parties enjoy popularity and favorable media coverage and others struggle and are wrongly vilified. Is it democracy in action?
And I can, and do, get involved with my community to do what I can regarding those topics.
It is of course good to be in community.
Importantly though I can live in the country and not face racism daily nor often get treated differently because of the way I look.
I think you are more likely just unfamiliar with what Australian white supremacy looks like because there is absolutely zero chance that you don’t encounter such people on a daily basis. Like I said, try following beauty standards associated with your ethnicity(ies) and engaging in disruptive action and you will immediately and viscerally learn what is often unstated but nevertheless present and impacting interactions. Or do the opposite and model whiteness and see what hapoens. Even just having a white sounding nane will consistently give you an advantage on job applications, including by people who say they are not racist. The racism is deep and pervasive, baked into the everyday.
Regardless I’m obviously going to take the word of the actual Chinese migrants I know of, and the people I know living in China, over strangers on the internet
You don’t have to take my word. Just go to China yourself. Assuming any amount of your stories are true, you should remember that you are negatively stereotyping 1.4 billion people based on a handful of accounts of people of unstated age who decided to leave the country. As an immigrant you should be familiar with the pressure to praise the country you move to and denigrate the one you came from. Immigrants in my country say absolute 100% bullshit things about the countries they came from. It seems to help them fit in. Particularly with white people. Also do not forget that immigrants are often a highly biased sample of the people from a given country. For example, in OECD countries, Indian immigrants are disproportionately upper caste and professionals forwarding petty bourgeois ideals. They will tell you absolute bullshit about conditions in India, they will be disproportionately Hindu supremacists, islamophobic, casteist, and praise light skin. You must dig deepee to understand a large and multifaceted country.
You’re allowed to have your own opinions on it, I just don’t think it’s a great idea to hand wave the racism issues in China, particularly for people who are black or brown.
I haven’t hand-waved any racism, full stop.
The way you speak of these things is so vague and unqualified that you yourself are basically dancing around the fringes of racism. Do you not know what racist logic looks like, e.g. denigrating entire ethnic groups or nationalities based on rumors, anecdotes from “a friend”, and half-remembered guesswork?
As I have consistently stated, racism exists in China but it is a low racism country overall. As you have admitted, the racism you will tend to encounter in China is naivete and not something deeper and malicious, which is what Anglos project from the white supremacy they are familiar with and help maintain in the countries they live in. You are in Australia. Australia is an Anglo settler colonial project premised on the genocide of indigenous Australians. You say you prefer to live there rather than experience rumored racism in China from a vague host of Han people (Han Chinese can refer to people from many countries, regions, ages, etc). Presumably you don’t really care about indigenous Australians and are somewhat naive about what most white Australians think of you, and you are trying to get by as “one of the good ones”, i.e. the subtly white supremacist liberal approach to race and ethnic background. If not, I’d be curious about your perception of how you are treated when adopting beauty standards drawn from your ethnic background(s) and when you politically challenge the violent liberal status quo. When the cops come to break up your direct action on Palestine (do you do anything remotely challenging white supremacy?), who stands with you?
But contrary to what you’re thinking, you can get by just fine in China and advance. But you might not be in a society propped up by imperialism and genocide and therefore need to work longer hours on top of learning a new culture.
Re: my familiarity with China, I am completely confident in what I’m saying and don’t need to tell internet stories about friends or rumors I heard to pretend at knowledge to broad brush countries and ethnic groups. If you don’t believe me, just go yourself. It is very inexpensive for Australians and you can spend a week or two in advance finding people who actually integrated locally and traveled to show you the ropes.
Well you obviously haven’t been to or lived in China for any period of time and most likely have an idealistic view of the countr
Please do yourself a favor and depend a bit less on making things up about other people.
Chinas a great place but being ignorant to its rampant racism is just silly.
I am not ignorant of racism in China, I have already described what form it comes in. You have a chauvinistic view based on a lack of understanding and investigation.
Because you’re certainly wrong. Waste of time comment.
I am correct, actually. But you are behaving quite childishly, letting anyone still reading clock the insecurity.
I suggest developing a plan that is not just about building a better lifenfor yourself, but for others and community. For example, China ticks all of your boxes (yes, even privacy in comparison to the US), but it is also important to consider how you would personally make China better in the process, as you are, by moving, saying that your current conditions are pushing you to want to leave. So what about your current place of living was driven to that and how can this be made the case the world over?
Ultimately, capitalism is the underlying force of reaction, conservatism, and deprivation. It sets the guard rails of social policy, funds and purges the thought-moving forces of society. It creates homelessness. It destroys countries and societies, forcing them to adopy defensive and antagonistic positions to be viable and not only dominated. So I would recommend also thinking of this question in terms of how you might build your life as well as do well in fighting capitalism. As, ultimately, if this force is not recognized, you might find a place that ticka your boxes but is ultimately a forcr for capitalist expansion, e.g. most OECD countries. This wouldn’t make you a bad person but it is a major wrinkle in the idea of building a good life by finding a place based on these (all very reasonable) boxes to tick off.
I think it’s representative of my friend network. Perhaps I misunderstood what you were asking. This was a response to “how many leftists do you know?”
And what was that in response to?
No I have not read Sakai yet. This topic is not new to me, I just disagree with you.
These are somewhat contradictory statements.
But very well, I am glad that we have reached the mutual agreement that it is not an appropriate word for non-indigenous people in general, which was my original point that you responded to:
Reading this reminded me about another unpopular opinion: I think “settler” and “colonizer” are poor terms for non-indigenous people broadly.
As I see it, it turns out we both agree. I misunderstood your initial response to that statement as one that was intending to be a counterargument. So, sorry – I really didn’t mean to straw man you; I legitimately misunderstood what your point was.
I introduced the use of the term. When you started talking about your own understanding, I told you I was talking about something else and explained what it was twice and with examples and context. So far as I can tell that was entirely ignored in order to seek conflict. This is a tendency many of us have at the beginning, but we must train it out of ourselves because it is highly counterproductive.
Like, all my friends are leftists. When we talk about politics, they sound like leftists, they say leftist things, and espouse leftist values. My friends are all leftists because my friends’ friends are leftists and I make friends with my friends’ friends.
Why would you think this would be in some way representative? It’s just your friend network.
Regarding “settler,” I think it’s a motte-and-bailey tactic you’re using. The motte – the easily defensible position – is that settler refers to people who are bigoted. The bailey – the hard to defend position, but which is easily equivocated for the motte – is that it refers to any non-indigenous person. […]
You’re wrong in your attempt to identify a fallacy and are doing your own one at the same time (straw man). I have explained at least twice that being a settler is a psychology derived from settler colonialism. Someone else suggested that you read Sakai. Have you done so before trying to contradict and lecture? Have you asked questions about a topic that is clearly new to you?
You keep belaboring this straw man that it means anyone non-indigenous. I think I was pretty clear on this, so can you explain why you are pretending otherwise?
I don’t deny that it’s a useful verbal weapon against bigots. I would merely like it to be well-understood that a verbal weapon is what it is intended to be.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.
Given that you don’t organize, how many leftists do you know? The people I know ran quite the gamut before winding up coherently left.
I don’t know why you’d be astonished at the term being used dismissively. Generally it’s when someone is being white supremacist, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, etc. They may not even realize it at first because it’s normalized for them, but when they respond negatively to correction well guess who’s digging in their heels about being shitty. That’s exactly who you don’t want to cater to. They will eat up all of your time and fight you the whole time because they have not developed basic humility.
The settler mindset has long outlived the immediate settler colonists that were genociding the natives or otherwise assisting it by stealing land (with extra steps). Nobody who uses the term has that meaning. We are referring to the settler colonial psychology that persists, and particularly its US version that is merged with white supremacy and national chauvinism.
You can also recognize it in other Euro settler colonists like the Afrikaners and “Israelis”. They tell the same stories about deserving the land, of doing a better job with it, of blaming the colonized for fighting back or “bringing up the past”, they seed conversations with racial supremacist implications and sometimes just overt racism. Are cowboys the good guys? Is it cool to be a cowboy? If you picture a cowboy in your head, are they a white guy? Most cowboys were brown and a substantial minority were black. American settler psychology has in some ways moved beyond those examples, however, as the “settlement” is nearly complete so they can entertain performative actions like cynical land acknowledgements while never supporting Land Back or even just basic material improvements for natice people. They can temporarily “feel bad”, but not so bad as to need to actually do anything, because the national genocide doesn’t warrant doing even one tangible thing per year.
I have not gotten too deep into the material basis of the settler mindset, but it is also prevalent and the most important. The fundamental fact of free or almost free land (stolen land) led to an economic base premised on it that has been slowly closing up. It acted as a release valve for social pressures that advanced in Europe, it could create profits from essentially nothing and be a carrot dangled in front of the face of generations that told their kids and grandkids that you could just work hard and go be a farmer. Two depressions resulted from the loss of the material basis for this but not the culture, as The New Deal and associated red scare then coincided with the US firmly taking over as prime imperialist, propping up the welfare of white people of settler culture via neocolonial exploitation. Pineapples on tables and virtual guarantees on jobs and cheap houses for a few generations. Not so much for black or brown people.
These are things in living memory. They color all of our experiences, ambitions, cultural references, and attitudes towards one another - and what we think we owe each other (usually nothing per this mindset).
Re: knee jerk reactions, yes of course, it is supposed to be dismissive when you call someone a settler to their face. It is usually an irrefutable fact and they don’t know how to deal with it because they don’t understand it. Is it always wrong to be dismissive? I think it can carry important emotional content so as to agitate others. Maybe the audience isn’t the centrist settler, or is otherwise someone they think it would be a waste of time to try and convert directly. Most of the time they are going to be right about that. A “centrist” sharing their opinion already lacks humility and that’s rarely the place a person can improve from.
I would agree. Both are just a standard Hero’s Journey where they build a team and increase their power to then resolve the major conflict. And both use East Asian culture essentially as a fantasy element to entertain a Western audience in a relatively respectful way. Most audience members don’t get most of the references because they aren’t familiar with the narratives or traditions to which they are referring. They just understand it as “other” and don’t see a deeper meaning. In that sense they are both somewhat exploitative, though these examples are very far down on my list of grievances against capitalist entertainment media.
The settler mindset is taught to basically every American either through school or wider social conditioning. It is an ongoing challenge to left organizing and has to be unlearned so that one can take liberating actions rather than explicitly oppositional settler ones. It is a mixture of white supremacy, colonial chauvinism, national chauvinism and myth-making, and some other reactionary ingredients that many have trouble observing because they are so normalized. And indigenous people can have this same mindset to varying degrees just like a black American can internalize anti-black racism.
The core precepts taught about US history are fundamentally a lie to benefit this mindset. As Marx said, the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. A bit of seemingly harmless Americana like [fruit] picking, a little farmhouse that sells [fruit]-based goods. Well, about 100-200 years ago you can usually bet that land was native. Not much folksy history to draw on. Not much tradition, aside from what was imported and normalized by waves of settlers for which whiteness was invented by ruling class interests to mollify the newly white people and further exploit everyone else. An identity that rationalized the theft of that land, of “settling” it for the imported culture’s definition of stewardship, of extraction for [fruit]. The history of that place is told as a “family farm for 7 generations”. Its crop is picked by underpaid workers, many of them undocumented: the labor underclass established for the modern settler mindset. Wage slaves and sometimes actual slaves, something considered perfectly normal in the settler mindset. An actual horror and overt injustice often just a few meters away and yet everyone is not up in arms demanding equal treatment. Instead, they respond to the ruling class’ demands to blame the marginalized for the bourgeoisie’s harms, they call for cruelty and deportation or they call for the status quo in response. Rarely do they call for liberation or equal treatment. The idea of open borders is used by the far far right to ridicule the far right that also wants closed borders. The idea itself is considered absurd by the mainstream settler mindset, as they are told it is absurd because it is against settler interests. “Imagine having to make just as little money as a Spanish-speaking brown person!”, they internalize. They pick the [fruit] by the pretty white farmhouse and talk about how nice it would be to own their own place just like this. So long as they eventually own a house - or believe they will - they tend to not organically question the system that benefits them, surrounded by a system that discourages or coopts such thinking.
It is a potent force to overcome and it is why a full socialist education in The West takes so long. So much to unlearn. So many potential pitfalls. So many places where you are basically asking a person to have empathy for others and not interpret this as a form of self-hatred and get all defensive. Because to understand US-based oppression is to hate it. To be revolted. To reject all forms of settler thought as best you can, as you refuse to ever intentionally celebrate genocide or chattel slavery or the crushing of entire nations’ simple dreams of sovereignty, food security, intact families, and limbs.
Monarchy and fascism share some characteristics but the things that make fascism what it is don’t originate from Monarchism or a revanchism for monarchy in any sense. When fascism qua fascism arose in Europe it was a separate formation from monarchists, for example, who still existed in substantial numbers in those countries back then. Instead, fascism arose from declining material conditions in countries that were losing imperialist status, such as losing colonies or having large foreign debts after World War I, and this situation - and “solution” - were both highly capitalistic. Fascism recruits from the petty bourgeoisie for its foot soldiers at the behest of factions of the haute bourgeoisie.
Capitalism is proto-fascism. Fascism, to the extent that it exists beyond World War II, has often been reinvented for crises of capitalism, whether domestic or imposed through imperialism. And who did the fascists take so much inspuration? For the Nazis, it was the United States, a bourgeoisie democracy (capitalist) premised on genocide and slavery.