Following Virginia activist/filmmaker Annabel Park's posted item about very personalized ethnic conflict in China, a thoughtful someone writes:
heart wrenching... but the equivalent of this is an equally heart wrenching story about israeli settlers in palestine or even us settlers on indigenous american soil... ultimately, the chinese shouldn't be in xinjiang, and the israelis shouldn't be in palestine.Goddamn. Something a lot of people (like me) need to think about. The privileges of being Han Chinese are extensive, and I've only begun realizing this. You have a cultural history that won't be washed away. The numbers of your ethnic population are not under threat of extinction. I've been thinking about the "concentration" that I have to do within my concentration. I think I'll do it on internal colonialism.
i tried to read the story understanding my privilege as a Han Chinese, and as a settler in N. America occupying Native American lands. It's hard.
Concentration is such a word. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.
I've thought about this a little since being here... I'm not a white person, recovering my past and repaying my ancestral sins. I see myself as an inheritor of a whitewashed American history, filling in holes in my personal and historical education. But I'm also Han Chinese--just the other day I thought, should I be studying the indigenous peoples of China, and figuring out that situation? But does being Asian American make us doubly at fault? Must we answer to our ethnic and our societal backgrounds? I'd say, maybe it's another privilege (or a burden, I suppose, depending on your perspective--I'm also thinking a lot about how EVERYTHING is a matter of perspective) that we become aware of all these histories. Because in the end, I really do think that these histories belong to all of us. Continuing to fracture our identities can't be the structure of our paths forever.
ReplyDeleteI'm also thinking about how conquering and overtaking land has happened throughout all time. It's not like American Indian tribes didn't wage war with each other. Israel was only established in Biblical times through God's condoning the destruction of an entire group of people.
ahhh need lunch. fry bread will kill me.