The white people who've made me the most viscerally uncomfortable and aware of "Orientalism" as a concept have been people like the white guy from Pittsburgh who always said "Beijing" tonally (Běijīng) and always had a different younger Asian girlfriend every couple years
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Lol I mean my dad is the least "PC" person in the world - he's a Catholic Republican who hates the SJWs and the commies - but he actually warned me before college not to make friends with "white people who like Chinese culture too much"
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"I had a professor like that back when I was in graduate school She was very kind, she meant well, but it was very strange and unhealthy If you spend too much time around those people you'll end up feeling really bad about yourself"
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You know what I mean, the hunger for authenticity, this sort of aggressive hunger to be cooler and realer and more with it than anyone else You think you're not being a tourist - desperate not to be one - but you are, you're being a worse tourist
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Like I'm not pissed at white people who like Chinese food or artwork or language or whatever But if someone is, because of the legacy of colonialism, well that's their prerogative And you can't like earn your way out of it by accumulating cred
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The whole thing about this is that as languages go, English is very unusually accommodating In modern English it is surprisingly easy and common to drop in a word from another language with the "rules" attached to it mostly intact and just go ahead and use it
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Because English is an uninflected language based on word order Because it's a "world language" This fact is not really a demonstration that the Anglosphere is the most humble and self-effacing linguistic community in the world The opposite, that it's the most rapacious empire
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So I dunno, I have tremendously mixed feelings about the idea among hipster liberals that if they learn the language, if they learn the right words, if they pronounce everything properly that's some kind of absolution To me it almost feels like the opposite
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Who's more of a colonizer really, the white girl I knew from Pensacola who said "tortilla" with a hard L and blushed over her redneck past because of it, or some NY celebrity chef who says it perfectly and has made a fortune from "Mexican-inspired fusion cuisine"
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Yeah, Im inclined to agree that that sort of attitude is rooted in the same sort of classist (and often racist) "you dont talk right" attitude people have. Conversely, Im infuriated by the opposite sort of "Foreign language funni" joke white people make by purposefully
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Mispronouncing something- makes me wanna fucking throttle people i stg
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