Blog against racism meme

[lizwilliams]

This post comes with the proviso that: I am a white, middle class Brit. Pretending that I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of racial violence and discrimination would be fatuous in the extreme.

I'm not even sure whether this is a post about racism per se or about something else.

Like matociquala, I've been accused of being too PC in my writing. I take this as a compliment, given the sort of people who do the complaining. With those novels that are set on Earth (POISON MASTER, NINE LAYERS OF SKY), I've chosen to write about other cultures because those are the ideas that grabbed me at the time. In the case of Nine Layers, I lived and worked in Central Asia and wanted to write about it. In part, it's because of this: there are a lot of people in this world who don't give a shit what the West does. They have only a vague idea of where America is (I've met several people who were surprised to learn that the UK was not part of the N American mainland). They don't like what the US does in regard to its foreign policy, but in general they're just as pissed off, and probably a lot more so, about the Russians or the Indians or the Chinese or the Israelis or the Arabs, depending on who you speak to. And not everyone wants to emigrate to the West, either: I also know several people who were granted green cards and then decided to go back or not go at all, because they didn't like what they saw of the West or because they just didn't want to leave home after all.

There is a general Chinese view (correct or not) that America's economic dominance is just a temporary aberration and during the course of the 21st century, Chinese economic hegemony will once more be restored, particularly when oil starts to run out. Recently, on the other side of the planet, a friend of mine who is a well-respected historian did a programme on ancient Orkney, for the Discovery Channel. He couldn't front the programme itself, because he's British, so they had to scour the country for a possible American presenter and came up with someone from the engineering department at Cambridge.

When I asked him if he objected, he laughed and said that the States is in exactly the same position that Britain was in a hundred years ago: there's the same ebullience and sense of self importance just before the empire crashes. So his view was that they should just be allowed to get over themselves. Under the circumstances, he's entitled to be a bit patronising, IMO.

I'm sure some people will take this as an attack on the US. It isn't - it's a great country and I am in many ways very pro-America - but it is an attack on the Western (American and, tagging along, British) perception that everyone else sees everything we do as Terribly Significant. Maybe that's the case. But it's not a global perception and I think that's why I like writing, as far as I can, from the perspective of other cultures.

Comments

[fastfwd.livejournal.com]

This is why I run around the world apologizing.:)

It is difficult to get across to people outside the US exactly how isolated the US is. It's so big and so far removed from anywhere else that most of the people in it have had no contact with anyone with a non-US background. Furthermore, the vast majority of US people will never have much, if any, contact with non-US people. (Most people in the US don't have passports--they won't need them.) Those who do meet people from other countries automatically assume that those people came to the US to "be American." They don't assume this because they are racist--it's simply what they've always been told, especially if they themselves are the children--or more likely, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants. And furthermore (again), they've been told--by parents, teachers, and their own government--that people from other countries want to go to the US to become American.

And no one--and I do mean no one has ever told them differently. Which is why USA-Americans seem so full of themselves. They just don't know any better.

Honest. I speak from firsthand experience.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

I'm sure this is true. The British can be massively insular, however, with much less excuse.

And there's also the issue that rather a lot of people moved to America to stop being slaughtered in Europe. I don't think we can take the moral high ground....