For Context: I’m Chinese American, and I do not feel “ashamed” for my heritage, neither do I feel “ashamed” for being a US Citizen.
The CCP is not my fault. I do not feel any shame of saying I’m from China.
Similarly, the trump admin is not my fault, I voted Harris. I do not feel any shame for being American.
So what is the thought process of people feeling shame/guilt?
Similar question pointed at you. I now understand it’s wrong(though not sure why), but when asking an Asian American where their ancestors are from, they get offended and proudly point out that they’re American. Why would you be proud to be an American? Or was I just a few years early in thinking that way?
I mean, a person from the western world is not gonna view this the same as someone from a non-western less-developed country.
Like, I know people shit on the US a lot, and perhaps it might be “the worst” in the Western World. But compared to globally, it’s far from “the worst”.
Like, if you gave a North Korean PRC Citizenship (which does not really happen btw, just a hypothetical), then the Now-Former North Korean would probably be proud to be a Chinese Citizen rather than being in North Korea.
Because it’s relatively better by comparison.
So its the same with me. Sure, I know there are far better countries like Norway, but I mean like… Norway does not take many immigrants, and the best place I could be, given my circumstances, is the US. So, it’s less about “I’m proud of my government” or “I’m proud of the history of this country”, more like “I’m glad I’m here instead of [their ancestral country]”. And as to getting questioned, its the fear of getting “othered”, of getting rejected. So its natural to immediately declare their US Citizenship status as a defense.
I mean, I think nowadays, that’s even more so the case.
Like I didn’t really worry about this before. But especially nowadays, if someone, especially someone claiming to be a cop, is trying to talk to me, the first thing I’ll do is immediately declare my Citizenship status and then assert my rights immediately after.
I still have memories of China, and I do not like being there. Not every Chinese American is gonna feel the same way as I do, but, at least in my case, our life in China prior to emigrating was very poor, and it got better in the US. So there’s that.
When’s the last time you were in China? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a pushed social media post, but it seems like every city I’ve never even heard of in China looks even better than the best city America has these days. I get wanting to announce your citizenship in defense, but it does seem like it’s in, well, defense. Like how Cuban immigrants were cheering their love for Trump, then got deported anyway. Is it just thinking the leapards wouldn’t eat your face? This, again, bring me back to, why be proud of this? It does just seem like a forced defensive shut-up-and-smile kinda deal. Oddly enough, very much North Korean :/
When’s the last time you were in China? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a pushed social media post, but it seems like every city I’ve never even heard of in China looks even better than the best city America has these days.
Around 2010. Guangzhou.
The actual city part doesn’t look too bad, but I lives in a slum neighborhood of Guangzhou that most tourists don’t really see. It was very dirty and you go through narrow alleyways. Like, according to Baidu Maps, its a 10 minutes walk from the main street, in my memory, it always felt like a 20-30 minute walk for some reasons, it felt so distant, the walk was always boring af. It’s as if through through that short walk, you time travel back in time 20-50 years. The school I went to was the worst school I ever went to. Even worst than the shittist American school I went to with a rating of like 4/10 looked better.
Although, it could’ve be my Hukou issue. The school I went to was not a public school, it was one for children of migrant parents that parents have to pay for. Kids without Guangzhou Hukou were not allowed Guangzhou’s public schools.
So far, the worst places I’ve stayed at was the small apartment in Guangzhou, and the ancestral homes in parents villages in Taishan.
I mean, China looks so great? Sure, only if you are privilaged enough to live in the good parts, which my family wasn’t able to. In China, most people have homes in their villages, but if they wanma find work, they’d have to go to cities, and then they’d have to rent some shitty apartment. Landlords are still a thing, but they don’t call them 地主 (di4 zhu3), but instead 房东 (fang2 dong1), people “buy” (not really “buy”, more like 70 years permission to use, but you get what I’m saying) housing, then lease it, kinda profits off it.
In Guangzhou, we were second-class residents.
China isn’t really one united country when you really think about it. It’s a bunch of different countries with different internal passports in a trench coat. Y’all can leave your red state shitholes and go to a blue city, in a blue state, and you are treated as any other resident.
In China, my ancestors are from Taishan, so I’m always a 台山人 Taishanese due to Hukou, even though I was born in Guangzhou and speak both Cantonese and Mandarin.
Because it collectively is our fault.
American liberals would sooner say that the nation is impure than that nationalism is pathological. Many of them literally identify with the state as part of or representative of themselves. Guilt and shame are American rationalisation staples, “I feel bad, but I’m not going to stop.”
What a helpful and fair comment that is absolutely not dripping with smug self righteousness. So refreshing!
What’s “righteous” about this?
You pretend to be any better than the millions of random strangers you don’t know or understand but criticize anyway.
Where do I say that? I understand American liberalism intimately, btw. People can actually know things and also think you’re wrong.
Jesus, I see that word so misused on here but someone using it when I ask where I said something two comments above is pretty hilarious.
Lol I know how this goes. If you had your way I’d still be quoting you and attempting in vain to argue an obvious point 3 hours from now. We can just skip all that.
So for anyone keeping score at home:
This is exactly what OP is talking about. Instead of answering the question with anything even remotely resembling a nuanced take- we have instead, decided to make an uneducated blanket assessment of an entire group of people based on zero evidence and a lack of qualifications to make such an accusation.
For example, I am an American liberal. And everthing they said doesn’t even come close to describing my stance on the issues of nationalism or how I feel about my take on personal political representation.
But one should never let this get in the way of a good ol’ blanket statement! Because nothing says “no need to take anything I say seriously” any louder than this.
Exactly. Well said.
Get this, they responded to me saying that checked my profile- and apparently saw that I somehow equate leftists with liberalism and because of this, I don’t know shit, so they blocked me.
I don’t think I’ve ever put the two in the same bucket.
I saw that. A lot of people out there think they are really smart and also that we care that they think that.
Jesus how dramatic. Please explain liberalism for me so that I know what I’ve gotten wrong here.
edit: checked their profile, they think liberalism is “leftist.” Politically illiterate liberal gets mad at the read. Blocked.
LMAO.
They checked my profile, found that I’ve never once said liberalism is leftist, and created a reason to back out of the argument.
You can’t make this shit up.
And they blocked me? Well, some gifts just wrap themselves, don’t they?
When the rest of the world hates you for shit a minority of your country did, but succumb to generalized thinking and blame all Americans (looking at you, Europe), a guilt complex can be internalized.
Hating every American or having prejudices like believing every American tourists are obnoxious is bad.
But saying you hate what “America” is doing is fair, because the Country is represented by its political class
One word:
Tribalism.
It’s shaming to see people and institutions you were proud of and bragged about being the best, then devolve into something the rest of the world laughs at.
Because I look at my country and what it’s done and feel insufficient for my failure to keep it from doing stupid and evil things.
Also the European and Canadian frustration with America and Americans is understandable, but it has an impact especially when you still think highly of those places and their people.
I’ve been watching the sopranos lately and the answer is because I’m secretly in the mafia and the Italians invented everything
Non parliamo con nessuno al di fuori della famiglia della nostra cosa
I think it’s those who are tricked into thinking their votes are really determining government things who would directly feel at fault for america. Lot’s of us know we are nothing more than powerless blobs whose only hope is for WW3 to just happen already so America can be forcibly changed.
Part of the social contract in America (at least… this is what I believed growing up here) is that we all kinda share in this thing we all have going. Like, let’s say we get into a war. The government can (and does) ask citizens to join the military and fight and the reason that works is because we all kinda implicitly signed off on it. Yeah, sure, you had nothing to do with the country getting into a war. But because you participated in government, in the system, because we run this thing (nominally) by the standard of democracy and consent of the governed, everyone owns at least a small part of the responsibility for the country’s actions. In the case of a war, that might look like joining the military and “doing your part”. More commonly it looks like paying your taxes and still “respecting” the government, even if it’s not the one you voted for.
Now, like I said, that’s more than anything what I felt when I was a kid. Speaking personally, I’m in a very different headspace now as it relates to governance. I also feel like generally speaking all that’s shifting, though I’ve very little to back that up save… gestures at the past couple of decades of American politics.
More to your question however, I think that the kind of social contract I laid out above kinda explains some of what you’ve asked. Even if you want to say it’s purely performative, that’s fine. But the fact that Americans are “asked” about how they should be governed implicitly puts the idea in our heads that we’re responsible for what our country is doing. It’s not just “some dottering old idiot at the top of the org chart decided this thing”, it’s we. America is doing this thing. Even if the truth really is that some dottering old fool made a decision out of personal ambition or greed. We get it drilled into our heads from a very young age that this is our government. And no matter how much you try to distance yourself from that… it still irks you, somewhere in the back of your head.
Maybe, at some point before I was born, that was expressed as a point of pride. I could see some folks being proud of what America was or what it stood for, once upon a time. Now though? I find it hard to believe that that mindset could find any other expression but shame. And weirdly, I believe that’s true regardless of what your politics are. Different reasons are at play there depending on what your politics are, of course. But lately it feels like everyone’s got some grievance against the government. Some reason to feel ashamed about what “our” government, what “we” are doing. Whatever that thing is for you, you don’t want it being done in your name. But the central trick of American “democracy” is that you don’t get to just walk away. Whatever is being done is being done “in your name” whether you want it or not. And it’s been that way since before you were born.
A tangentially related correlate here is that I feel like a lot of Americans don’t feel represented by their government anymore. I certainly don’t feel that way, and I haven’t since Obama was president. That was roughly back when I was young enough to uncritically believe some of the views I’ve expressed here. Things have changed a little bit. Anyways, the reason I bring this up is because part of what I think is going on is that the social contract is breaking down along the lines of nobody feeling like the government they have is actually representing their interests. Maybe, if this goes on for long enough, the social contract will change into something different entirely. Maybe this “shame” we all seem to feel will turn American society into something different than what it currently is, if it’s given the time to do so. But, I can’t really read the tea leaves on that one. All I know is things just can’t keep going the way their going. Something’s gonna break eventually.
They’re pretty tightly wound tbh
I’m just embarrassed as fuck
To the point of being furious…
Speaking only for myself: because the American government has, for 250 years, claimed to act on behalf of the American people. When it was liberating concentration camps and sending people to the moon, that was something to be proud of.* When it was upholding slavery and winking at Jim Crow laws, it wasn’t.
It’s a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and so he purports to speak and act on my behalf. That’s deeply embarrassing and shameful, even if I couldn’t have done anything differently to prevent it.
* (Yes, I know that even those “good” examples are complicated. I’m just forming an example here)
I believe the shame stems from the moral injury we all suffer when we peacefully stand by in a democracy and let bad people control the government and inflict serious harm on innocents
So in some respect it is in fact all of our faults because we do in fact sit by and watch people die so we can respect the democratic process.
I grew up in Indonesia, my sister is from Java, my brother is from Singapore. I’m natively from California, and I’m a huge white boy. I am ashamed that the country of the free, the country of the brave who had bounteous arms to welcome the downtrodden and abused of the world is no longer that place. Instead it’s the land of the secret police, tbe land of a pedophile traitor president who can’t stand any kind of criticism because he’s a fucking coward who dodged military service.
in my own case, it’s that I’ve (not intentionally but still) benefited from a system that subjugated others (natives, people of all colors, and women) to secure the national infrastructure I’ve directly profited from. Everything from education, clean water and housing, to medical care often shockingly focused on what ails and heals white males. And the sickening knowledge that the same ones who want to deport taxpaying workers who rarely benefit from the enormous amounts of money our country throws around are the same as me, living on land stolen from the people who lived here, who we basically exterminated. Finally, we use the trappings of a pseudo-democracy to declare all men are equal, but really, they mean wealthy heteronormative white men, because otherwise you’re the other and disenfranchisement should be expected.
That’s-just-the-way-it-is? only if you accept it.
