Conversation

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When the prejudices go the other way — a city elite person acting contemptuous of an exurban, small town or rural type — they get called on it, shamed for it, and a parade of politicians rushes to denounce them and extoll the virtues of Real Americans™
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In a way it’s a deep kind of patronization to not hold these self-proclaimed Real Americans™ equally accountable for their prejudice-soaked self-narrativizing the same way demonized urban elites are. They’re not children even if they want to be treated as such.
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On the flip side, actual under-represented minorities have to get less lazy too in telling their stories too, when given the chance. Self-essentializing intersectional tropes are part of the problem, not the solution. You’re a human being, not a baseball card. Act like it.
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When afforded an opportunity to tell your story, tell a universally interesting human story first. Worry about “representing” who you are second. Don’t let the nice-to-have representation and identity affirmation hijack your story and make it tedious. You’re better than Ayn Rand.
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On a related note, it’s telling that watching foreign TV/movies is coded as “elite” in the US, with an exception made for telemundo. Yes, the art-house stuff is affected and elitist, but you now have streaming availability of mediocre-middlebrow TV/movies from around the world.
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If you want to see people very different from you as human, there’s literally nothing stopping you these days. No access problems. Solid subtitled samples of middlebrow equivalents of your local fare from around the world are available on Netflix. It’s not elitism, it’s curiosity
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Just to be clear this is not a problem unique to the US. But the peculiar mix of unusual narrative homogeneity for a country this big and diverse is weird (328m, of which 236m is white. The 92m non-white fraction of this country is bigger than most countries).
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It’s one thing for say South Korea (51m, 99% ethnically Korean, largest minority, Chinese, at 20k) to tell that kind of homogeneous story about itself (it kinda does). It’s quite another for the US (6.5x in size, 30x the diversity) to do so.
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It’s particularly weird for me. Growing up in India, the population was 600-900m when I was growing up (1974-92). Only 2x-3x the size. But literally ~30 mutually unintelligible linguistic regions. They didn’t even all tell the Mahabharata story the same or explain Diwali the same
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Comparing American Christmas to Indian Diwali is revealing. The former is some sort of homogenized Boomer-childhood monoculture compared to Christmas around the world. Diwali *within* India has an off-by-one regional date variation and at least 2 unrelated mythologies.
Replying to
India is probably too much of a cultural chaos for its own good, just as Korea is probably way too monocultural, but the US probably needs to 10x the narrative chaos. There’s too little story for this much country.
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Telling only 1 kind of story as the Real American Story™ should count as a weapon of mass destruction in a country this big, and diverse. And not a young country either. 528 years of post-Columbian history is plenty. This country is too old to tell itself kindergarten stories.
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Things that happened after 1492: - Galileo, Shakespeare born 1564, 72y later - Napoleon’s brother Joseph *retired* to New Jersey - The French Revolution was *after* American one Enough with the “young country” excuse. More a country living in its parents basement at age 40
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Though Hollywood’s attempts to increase the narrative bandwidth are often cringe, at least they’re trying. Real America™ actively resists any sort of variation on the official story. A communist party propaganda wing could only dream of engineering this kind of mind-closure.
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