u/Chinoyboii

Within the last few days, both at work, in my personal life, and online, I have been seeing numerous examples of barbaric comments. From the recent response that Zohran Mamdani has received in regard to his tweets about 10/7 and antisemitism in NYC, to my former supervisor celebrating today as a day of "resistance" alongside his fellow comrades by drinking and partying, and, in general, some pretty unmasked antisemitic shit coming from people who identify themselves as leftists.

I understand that Israel and its genocidal actions toward Gaza, from Trump appointing various technocrats to oversee Gaza's reconstruction and future governance to the broader questions surrounding Palestinian self-determination, have understandably generated a tremendous amount of anger, frustration, and resentment.

Some may say that these acts of antisemitism are explainable, but not justifiable, as a result of the crimes Israel has committed. But honest to God, as a mental health professional, I really don't care about that distinction when it is being used to rationalize harmful behavior, because in the clinical world, we constantly distinguish between understanding the underlying causes of someone's behavior and holding them accountable for their actions.

If a patient acts horribly toward another person despite having experienced tremendous amounts of abuse, trauma, or neglect throughout their life, we don't simply excuse their behavior on the grounds that their past experiences made their actions understandable. We acknowledge how those experiences may have contributed to their behavior, but we also recognize that they are still responsible for how they treat other people.

Expecting Jews to constantly contextualize, rationalize, or sympathize with the antisemitism directed toward them because of the actions of the Israeli government is an unreasonable expectation, especially when we would never demand the same level of understanding from other marginalized groups experiencing prejudice. Why should Jewish people have to acknowledge the historical and political circumstances that supposedly explain someone's antisemitism before they are even allowed to condemn it?

This is sort of the problem when we treat systemic analysis as though it were religious scripture, because we become so preoccupied with understanding how broader political, historical, and socioeconomic structures influence people's behavior that we sometimes forget that individuals still possess moral agency and are capable of making their own decisions.

Like bruh, just because my own people were the recipients of colonialism, whose effects still ripple through our society to this day, I am not going to use systemic analysis as a justification if I decide to be a douchebag toward Spaniards, Japanese people, or your average American simply because their respective countries historically colonized, occupied, or exploited my homeland.

I can acknowledge the historical injustices that my people experienced, recognize how those injustices continue to shape our present socioeconomic and political conditions, and still understand that some random Spaniard or Japanese person walking down the street is not personally responsible for what their ancestors or governments did to mine.

And even if I could explain my hypothetical resentment toward these people through the lens of colonialism, historical trauma, or systemic oppression, that still wouldn't make my behavior any less prejudiced or racist. I would still be engaging in collective blame, and I would still be responsible for how I chose to treat them.

I don't understand why this principle becomes so difficult for certain leftists to grasp when it comes to Jews. If we genuinely oppose racism, collective punishment, and prejudice, shouldn't we be capable of applying those principles consistently, even when doing so requires us to confront people within our own ideological circles?

So, usually I am not the biggest fan of differentiating between the old “individualist vs. collectivist” society dichotomy, as this is a framework that was born from Western academia itself; however, I do think there is still something worth discussing when it comes to how certain Western leftists imagine a future post-capitalist society.

However, I do think there is merit to certain conservative analyses of how many East Asian societies tend to have stronger cultural expectations around family obligation, social responsibility, conformity to communal norms, and the idea that the individual exists within a broader network of relationships and obligations. As someone who grew up in the Philippines Chinese community, certain strands of Neo-Confucianism still influence how people conceptualize family, hierarchy, duty, respect for elders, and obligations to the wider community, even among people who would never consciously describe themselves as Confucian. Our language (Hokkien) is filled with vocabulary that is simultaneously hierarchical and relational, where the way you address someone can depend on their age, kinship relationship, generation, seniority, and position relative to yourself. In other words, you are constantly being linguistically reminded that you do not exist purely as an isolated individual, but as someone situated within a network of relationships that carries certain expectations and obligations.

Occasionally, some uneducated Western leftists who utilize examples of collectivist societies (especially tankies who glaze China) talk about them as examples of what a community could be like; however, they miss the fact that the “communitarian” nature of these societies is not necessarily inspired by some genuine love for one’s fellow man, but by deeply embedded cultural expectations surrounding hierarchy, family reputation, social harmony, and the obligations attached to one’s particular role within society. People are not simply behaving communally because they spontaneously decided that caring about the collective is morally superior; they are often operating within cultural systems that have spent centuries teaching them what they owe to their parents, children, elders, relatives, neighbors, and broader community.

Obviously, there are a plethora of examples of individuals who live in the Sinosphere who don't abide by these expectations, reject them outright, or consciously prioritize individual autonomy over family and communal obligations. However, there is a pre-existing cultural vocabulary for talking about duty, obligation, hierarchy, reciprocity, and one's relationship to the broader social group that has developed over a very long period of time. I think cultural background still matters because even when people reject those expectations, they are rejecting norms already deeply embedded in the society around them. People already have a general sense of what they owe their parents, children, elders, relatives, and community, even if many choose not to follow those expectations.

One reason Han society has survived so long into the modern day is that people were taught to see themselves as part of a family and cultural tradition that extended beyond their own lives. There was a strong expectation that you inherited certain responsibilities from the generations before you and, in turn, had obligations to the generations that came after you. Those ideas became part of everyday social life rather than something people only encountered as an abstract philosophy.

You see this trend in other societies too, like the Jews, Armenians, Samaritans, Assyrians, and other ancient people groups who maintained a strong sense of collective identity across centuries of migration, conquest, persecution, or political change. In a lot of these cases, cultural survival was not just about sharing certain beliefs or customs. It also meant teaching each generation that they were part of a people with a history that existed before them and would hopefully continue after them. Obviously, these groups have very different histories, but I think they show how much cultural continuity depends on people actually feeling responsible for passing something down. And I think this is where my question for Western leftists comes in. If you want a future society in which people are expected to care more about the collective, make sacrifices for people they may never personally meet, and see the well-being of the community as partly their responsibility, then you have to somehow cultivate that sense of obligation. You cannot just assume that getting rid of capitalism is automatically going to make people think that way.

In addition, improved material conditions, while capable of encouraging more prosocial behavior and reducing some of the pressures that make people more distrustful or competitive, are not necessarily enough on their own to create a strong sense of communal obligation. You can give people stable housing, healthcare, education, and greater economic security, and I absolutely think those things would improve society, but that still doesn't automatically answer why an individual should feel personally responsible for the well-being of people outside their immediate circle. Material security can make cooperation easier, but cooperation still has to mean something culturally. There still has to be a reason people see contributing to the community as part of what they are supposed to do, rather than something they do only when it happens to align with their own interests.

A lot of Western leftists are deeply suspicious of many of the things that historically gave people that sense of belonging. Religion is often viewed as reactionary, nationalism as inherently dangerous, traditional family structures as oppressive, and inherited cultural expectations as something people should be free to reject. I understand where many of those criticisms come from, and I am not arguing that we should revive those institutions exactly as they existed in the past. However, if you remove or weaken those older sources of social obligation, then something has to replace them. Otherwise, what will convince someone that they actually owe anything to people outside their immediate circle? Saying that everyone should have solidarity with the working class is one thing, but actually creating a culture where people internalize that responsibility is another.

I guess that is really my question. If Western leftists want a post-capitalist society that is more collectivist, what is actually supposed to create that shared sense of obligation? If older sources of social cohesion are rejected, what replaces them? I don't think changing the economic system alone automatically gives people a reason to feel responsible for one another. The reason why I am a leftist is that I think anti-capitalism offers a better way of organizing society than one built around profit and market dependence. However, replacing capitalism is not the same thing as creating a community. You can change who owns what without necessarily changing how people understand what they owe to one another.

TLDR:

My question is basically how Western leftists expect to build a more collectivist post-capitalist society without also creating some shared cultural sense of obligation. Societies that are often praised for being more communitarian did not become that way simply because of their economic systems; many developed strong cultural expectations about what people owe to one another over centuries. Better material conditions can make cooperation easier; however, they do not automatically create community. If the left rejects many older sources of social cohesion, what replaces them?

A personal belief of mine is that the sins of the father are not begotten to the son, and the sins of the son are not begotten to the father. I was honestly shocked that, in one of the more recent posts on this sub regarding the Romanov family, a few people appeared to justify the execution of the Romanov children on the grounds that, had they survived, they could potentially have become figureheads for a potential monarchist restoration or some other reactionary political cause. I am not defending the Russian monarchy, Nicholas II, aristocracy, or hereditary political power; however, my question is specifically about the moral reasoning being used to justify what happened to the children.

I find it interesting how many self-proclaimed leftists will rightfully condemn the collateral damage caused by Western imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, and military intervention, yet suddenly adopt a very different moral framework when similar harm is committed by a revolutionary movement they sympathize with. The justification often becomes something along the lines of, "You have to look at the forest instead of the trees," or that individual victims are unfortunate but ultimately secondary to the broader revolutionary project.

However, I don't really understand how that solves the moral problem because if we condemn the idea that innocent people can simply be written off as acceptable collateral damage when capitalist or imperialist states pursue their political objectives, why should that principle suddenly disappear when the people responsible identify themselves as socialists, communists, or revolutionaries?

In the case of the Romanov children specifically, they were not responsible for creating the Russian monarchy, choosing their parents, maintaining the class system into which they were born, or determining the political role that other people might hypothetically have assigned to them later in life. Arguing that they could have eventually become symbols of monarchist restoration is still assigning responsibility based on something they might have done, rather than something they actually did.

If potential future political usefulness is enough to justify what happened to them, then where exactly is the limiting principle? Couldn't the same logic be applied to the children of landlords, military officers, wealthy families, religious clergy, political dissidents, or basically anyone identified as belonging to a reactionary class? At that point, political guilt is no longer based on an individual's actions. It becomes very much hereditary.

That seems especially contradictory to me from a leftist perspective. If we reject hereditary privilege and the idea that someone deserves political power, wealth, or social status simply because of the family they were born into, then why would we accept hereditary guilt and the idea that someone can deserve punishment because of that same accident of birth? If our moral opposition to collective punishment, collateral damage, and inherited guilt is actually principled, shouldn't those principles apply even when the victims belong to families or social classes we deeply oppose?

Personally, I have very little political solidarity with leftists who adopt this kind of reasoning because if someone starts arguing that innocent people can be sacrificed, collectively punished, or treated as expendable because doing so supposedly serves some greater political objective, the ideological label attached to that justification becomes increasingly irrelevant. A revolutionary who dismisses innocent victims as necessary collateral and an imperialist who does the same may have radically different political goals, but they are still relying on a disturbingly similar moral logic.

Some may say this is ultimately a battle between a greater evil and a lesser evil, but if so, why proclaim yourselves as representing a fundamentally different moral and political ethic when you still utilize the same logic of expendability whenever it becomes politically convenient? If the argument eventually reduces to, "Yes, innocent people may suffer, but our cause is important enough to justify it," then the disagreement starts looking less like a rejection of that moral framework and more like a disagreement over who is entitled to use it.

I can understand an argument that certain historical circumstances force people into genuinely terrible choices in which every available option causes harm. What I have a much harder time accepting is transforming those tragic circumstances into a positive moral justification for collective punishment/inherited guilt, or treating innocent people as acceptable sacrifices for some imagined future political outcome. If your defense is simply that your political project represents the lesser evil, then say that. However, I don't think "lesser evil" automatically means morally good, nor does it make every action undertaken in pursuit of that project defensible. Otherwise, virtually any movement can excuse what it does by insisting that the alternative would have been worse.

So my operational understanding of indigeneity comes largely from the Philippines, in which an ethnic group is generally understood as indigenous when it has deep ancestral roots in a particular territory, maintains some degree of cultural, linguistic, historical, or communal continuity with populations that lived there prior to their cultures being substantially influenced or transformed by cultures originating outside of their ancestral homeland, and continues to understand that territory as an ancestral homeland.

For added nuance, a Filipino is only considered indigenous if they belong to an ethnic group that practiced a culture before it was Christianized or Islamized, as these are foreign religions to the archipelago. Therefore, Christian ethnic groups like the Tagalogs, the Bisayans, the Pangasinense, and Muslim ethnic groups like the Tausug and the Maranao are generally not considered indigenous in the same political or legal sense because their societies underwent substantial religious, cultural, and political transformation through Christianization, Islamization, colonization, or incorporation into larger lowland and state societies.

However, many indigenous groups can be Christian or Muslim, be it the Kalinga (Christian), the Sama-Bajau (Muslim), the Itawit (my father's family and Christian), the Subanon (Muslim), etc. The reason they're still considered indigenous despite practicing foreign religions is that adopting Christianity or Islam did not necessarily erase most of their precolonial culture, unlike the aforementioned groups. In other words, what often developed was a syncretized form of Christianity or Islam in which our animist and ancestral practices, customary traditions, kinship structures, relationships to ancestral land, oral histories, and other aspects of precolonial culture continued alongside the adopted religion.

For example, the Kalinga practice Kanyaw, which involves sacrificing animals to the god Kabunyan for things such as a good rice harvest, while also practicing Christianity, attending church, praying to the Christian God, and observing Christian religious traditions. The same goes for a Subanon Muslim who attends a madrasa and worships Allah while also participating in traditional rituals during the Buklog festival, which can be held for things such as a good harvest, the recovery of the sick, the celebration of a new clan leader, or other important communal occasions, and involves giving thanks and animal sacrifices to the pagan god Diwata Migbebaya. As you can see, many of these ritual customs are pagan in origin and are considered to be blasphemous by non-indigenous Christian and Muslim ethnic groups. However, these cultural practices are what make us indigenous.

Some of you may disagree with my culture's definition of what it means to be indigenous because this framework seems close to a kind of primordial cultural purism, in which a group is considered more authentically indigenous the more of its precolonial culture it has managed to preserve. By this standard, Jews could be included (with the obvious exception that they did not maintain continuous residence in the land unlike the Palestinians) in this definition because even though they've been away from the land for so long, their people maintained substantial cultural, religious, linguistic, and historical continuity with the population that originated there. Jewish religious traditions continued to orient themselves toward Jerusalem and the Land of Israel, Hebrew remained central to religious and literary life, Jewish holidays and rituals retained connections to the agricultural cycles and historical events of the land, and Jewish communities throughout the diaspora preserved a collective memory of originating from and eventually returning to that territory.

While for Palestinians, because they adopted a culture outside of the Levant through Arabization and, for most Palestinians, Islamization, they would be considered native under the framework I grew up with rather than indigenous. Native in the Philippines basically means any group whose ancestry is rooted in the archipelago and has Austronesian ancestry, regardless of whether that ethnic group is considered indigenous in the narrower political or cultural sense. So Tagalogs, Bisayans, Pangasinense, Tausug, Maranao, Kalinga, Itawit, etc. can all be considered native Filipinos even though only some of those groups would be classified as indigenous peoples.

Applied to Palestinians, this would mean that this framework would still consider them native to the Levant because they maintain substantial ancestral and historical continuity with populations that lived there prior to Arabization, even though much of their contemporary language, religion, and broader cultural identity developed through influences that ultimately originated outside of the Levant. In other words, adopting Arabic and Islam would not suddenly make Palestinians equivalent to recent migrants from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the Christianization of Tagalogs does not somehow make Tagalogs Spanish.

However, because this type of primordial cultural purism is not included in the analysis of Western leftists who often organize groups based on their relationship to the dominant systemic power in the area, I am curious about what type of word should be made or used to describe a population whose culture, language, religion, collective memory, and ancestry originated substantially from a particular territory, but who are not considered indigenous within a contemporary settler-colonial or decolonial framework.

In other words, if someone does not consider Jews indigenous to the Levant because they understand indigeneity primarily through the contemporary relationship between colonizer and colonized, I still do not think simply describing Jews as "foreign" accurately captures their historical relationship to the region either. Their ethnogenesis occurred there, their religion developed there, Hebrew originated there, much of their collective historical memory is centered there, and substantial portions of Jewish ancestry can be traced back to ancient Levantine populations.

So what terminology would better describe that kind of relationship to a land without necessarily using the politically loaded category of "indigenous"? Would "native," "autochthonous," "ancestrally native," "a diasporic people originating from the region," or would something different be more appropriate?

The reason why I am a leftist is not because I believe human beings are inherently good, nor because I believe cruelty, selfishness, domination, greed, or antisocial behavior are simply products of capitalism. Rather, I support anti-capitalist politics because I believe it offers one of the best ways to mitigate some of our more primordial tendencies by reducing the material incentives and social structures that allow them to flourish.

Back in the old country (the Philippines), you may be familiar with the massive amounts of political corruption from Malacañang all the way down to a barangay captain of a town or village. Our culture's emphasis on voting for politicians who come from the same ethnolinguistic or regional group as us, prioritizing family and personal connections, and remaining loyal to political clans can contribute to this as well. Obviously, poverty and material insecurity play a major role in sustaining patronage politics, especially when people depend on local politicians for jobs, money, food, or other necessities. However, I do not think material conditions alone explain why these systems persist.

Even when people's material conditions improve, human beings can still be tribalistic, nepotistic, selfish, status-seeking, cruel, or willing to dominate other people. Material conditions can certainly encourage or intensify those behaviors; however, I do not think they necessarily create them from scratch.

I've worked in the MH field for a bit now (diagnostics) and have worked with a plethora of populations, ranging from individuals with ASPD, BPD, Bipolar I/II, NPD, trauma-related disorders, substance use disorders, and psychotic disorders to people who do not meet criteria for any major psychiatric diagnosis at all. One thing that experience has reinforced for me is just how incredibly complicated human behavior is. Across those populations, I have encountered patients who behave cruelly, manipulatively, impulsively, selfishly, or violently for an enormous variety of reasons, none of which can always be reduced to whether or not their material needs are being met. Obviously, improving material conditions can help tremendously, especially for individuals whose behavior is partly driven or exacerbated by desperation, scarcity, housing instability, or other forms of material insecurity. However, improving those conditions does not automatically eliminate every other source of harmful behavior, nor does it account for the full range of psychological, developmental, interpersonal, cultural, and situational factors that can influence a person's symptomatology.

In the past, my clinical professors, who've been in the field longer than I have been alive, have generally emphasized that human beings are neither inherently good nor inherently evil, and that empathy, greed, violence, altruism, selfishness, cooperation, aggression, and compassion all exist within the range of human behavior. Which tendencies become more pronounced can depend on an interplay of temperament, development, attachment, trauma, socialization, culture, environment, incentives, personality, neurological factors, and material conditions. In other words, changing material conditions can absolutely change behavior, sometimes dramatically, but that does not mean every destructive human tendency originates in material deprivation.

To be specific, I am attacking the idea that cruelty, greed, selfishness, domination, tribalism, violence, and other forms of antisocial behavior are fundamentally products of scarcity, capitalism, class society, or inadequate material conditions, and that if we were somehow able to sufficiently resolve those conditions, these behaviors would largely disappear. I am not attacking the much more reasonable argument that material conditions have an enormous influence on human behavior. Of course they do, as poverty, desperation, inequality, competition over resources, and economic insecurity can make people more vulnerable to exploitation, crime, political extremism, interpersonal conflict, and a plethora of other social problems. Where I disagree is with turning that observation into an absolute and assuming that destructive behavior must therefore have a material explanation at its root.

Human beings can have their material needs met and still desire status, power, recognition, dominance, revenge, or preferential treatment for themselves, their families, or their in-group. Someone does not necessarily need to be starving or economically desperate to enjoy exercising power over another person, resent an out-group, engage in nepotism, manipulate others, or rationalize cruelty when doing so benefits themselves or the people they identify with. Improving material conditions may reduce some of the circumstances that incentivize those behaviors, which is one reason I support doing so in the first place, but reducing the incentive for a behavior is not the same as eliminating the human capacity or inclination toward it.

From what I've seen, many Western leftists try to support their ideas by citing pre-writing societies in their arguments, even though the lack of material/archaeological evidence makes it incredibly difficult to prove many of the broader claims about how those societies actually behaved. I apply the same principle to American conservatives who hold that human beings are inherently evil, citing evolutionary psychology-inflected ideas popularized by figures like Jordan Peterson, particularly arguments about dominance hierarchies, aggression, competition, and the supposedly inevitable tendency of human beings to organize themselves into unequal social structures.

The truth of the matter is that human beings appear to be capable of both extraordinary cooperation and extraordinary cruelty, and I do not think either side benefits from pretending that one of those capacities is somehow more “natural” than the other. We can show empathy, reciprocity, sacrifice, mutual aid, and genuine concern for people outside our immediate self-interest. At the same time, we are also capable of dominating others, tribalism, exploiting others, enacting revenge killings, and showing indifference toward the suffering of others.

That said, if you do hold the belief that humans are inherently good, I have 2 questions for you.

First, what would actually change your mind? If every example of cruelty, domination, tribalism, exploitation, or violence can always be explained as the result of capitalism, scarcity, trauma, bad socialization, or some other external condition, then is there any kind of human behavior that would count as evidence against the idea that people are inherently good?

Second, even if we dramatically improved everyone's material conditions, why would we assume that things like status-seeking, tribalism, revenge, jealousy, resentment, nepotism, or the desire to dominate other people would just disappear? A person does not have to be poor, starving, or economically desperate to be cruel to someone else. So what makes you think eliminating class exploitation or material scarcity would also eliminate harmful behaviors that are not primarily driven by material need?

It seems to me that there is a tendency for Arabs to highlight the shared Arabized culture that existed between Jews and their Muslim and Christian neighbors in places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and elsewhere. Oftentimes, it seems like this is done in order to emphasize a narrative of historical coexistence, sometimes to the point of romanticizing Jewish life in Arab-majority societies or minimizing the less harmonious aspects of that history. In addition, it does appear that by doing so, they believe that they can encourage the Jew of MENA to segregate themselves from their Askenazi counterparts and ultimately Zionism. In other words, there sometimes seems to be an assumption that if the Mizrahim and Sephardim can be persuaded to understand themselves primarily through their historical cultural proximity to Arabs, then this should naturally weaken their identification with broader Jewish nationalism or with Israel.

Within my earlier posts in this sub, I've mentioned that among the Mizrahim/Sephardim that I know in my personal life, all of them are staunch Zionists despite the fact that their grandparents spoke Levantine Arabic, Darija, etc., and that their families had lived throughout the Middle East and North Africa for many centuries, in some cases tracing their presence in those regions back well before the Arab conquests and subsequent Arabization of the area. In contrast, out of the few Ashkenazim I know, most of them are strongly aligned with the Anti-Zionist movement, nor do they hold a strong attachment to their Jewish heritage.

For the most part, my Mizrahi/Sephardic peers don't really interact with Arabs in their personal lives or online, as they tend to prefer being among their fellow Jews outside of the few Gentiles like myself whom they are close with. However, due to the generational experiences that their families had in Arab lands, many of them have developed very strong antagonistic sentiments toward Arabs and a deep distrust of the idea that Jewish life under Arab or Muslim rule was continuously harmonious.

Even though I don't identify myself as a Zionist within a political context, I don't deny that the Jews of MENA experienced genuine forms of discrimination, persecution, violence, and political marginalization throughout different periods of their history in Arab and Muslim-majority societies. Nor do I think those experiences should be minimized simply because acknowledging them may complicate a broader anti-Zionist narrative. At the same time, I also don't think that this means Jewish life throughout the Arab and Muslim world was continuously miserable or that coexistence never existed. Obviously, the experiences of Jews differed enormously depending on the country, historical period, ruling government, social class, and local community involved. There were periods of relative stability, cultural exchange, and coexistence alongside periods of intense discrimination, insecurity, and violence.

What I am more skeptical of is the tendency to take the existence of shared Arabized culture and use it as evidence that Jews from MENA backgrounds should therefore understand themselves as politically or nationally closer to Arabs than to Ashkenazi Jews. Cultural proximity does not necessarily translate into a shared political identity, especially when the historical memories of the communities involved may differ markedly.

Therefore, I want to know what the experiences of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews themselves have been like when interacting with Arabs online, on social media, or in person, particularly when the subject of their family background comes up. Do some of these Arabs emphasize the cultural similarities between your communities once they learn where your family came from? Have you encountered people who seem to assume that your family's historical connection to Arabic-speaking societies should make you less Zionist, less attached to Israel, or more inclined to distance yourself from the Ashkenazim?

Personally, as someone who was born and raised in Asia and grew up with a leftist father and uncle, I was not really exposed to the idea that you cannot be racist or prejudiced toward groups that are perceived as privileged because those groups possess greater systemic power. Even though my father and his siblings grew up within left-wing political traditions, they never raised me with that understanding of prejudice. To them, there was still an important distinction between criticizing systems of power and essentializing an entire ethnic, racial, or religious population. I know many American leftists tend to think about racism differently, particularly through definitions that emphasize institutional or systemic power. I understand the usefulness of that framework when we are talking about issues such as employment discrimination, housing, policing, political representation, wealth inequality, and other structural disparities.

However, from a psychological and interpersonal point of view, saying degrading or hostile things about people because of their race, ethnicity, or ancestry can still be harmful regardless of whether that population occupies a comparatively privileged position within society. Telling someone that they should simply tolerate hostility because their group is privileged, or that they need to "educate themselves" about why people are treating them that way, strikes me as a very unhealthy principle.

For example, as someone who works in the MH field, it would be like telling a patient who is distressed because people repeatedly insult them on the basis of their ethnicity that their emotional reaction is illegitimate because their demographic group possesses more social privilege than the people insulting them. I would never tell a patient, "You need to understand why they are treating you this way," as though understanding the social origins of someone's hostility somehow makes the hostility psychologically harmless.

It would be similar to telling a male patient who is being abused by his wife that, because men as a class have historically possessed greater social, political, and economic power than women, he should simply tolerate the abuse or spend more time reflecting on why his wife might resent men in the first place. That would obviously be an unacceptable response in a clinical setting. Understanding the broader history of patriarchy might help us contextualize why she developed certain resentments or attitudes toward men, but it would not make that particular man's victimization any less real, nor would it mean that her abusive behavior should receive some kind of moral pass simply because she is a woman who has herself been affected by a patriarchal society. Her behavior may be explainable within the context of how patriarchal institutions, gender expectations, previous experiences with sexism, or mistreatment by men have shaped the way she understands gender and power. However, being able to explain why someone developed resentment toward a particular group is not the same as saying that acting on that resentment against an individual member of that group is morally acceptable. Social context can help us understand behavior without absolving someone of responsibility for it.

In a way, I also think this can end up reinforcing the very gender norms that critics of patriarchy are supposedly trying to dismantle, except now systemic and left-wing language is being used to explain why the expectation is supposedly different from traditional patriarchal attitudes. The older message to men was essentially, "You're a man, so suck it up, stop complaining, and deal with it." The newer version can sometimes become, "You're a man, and men possess structural privilege, so your suffering should be contextualized accordingly, and you should understand why someone from a less privileged group might treat you this way."

Within the context of the Jewish people, the non-Jewish left has imposed litmus tests regarding a person of Jewish heritage's opinions on Israel, Zionism, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before deciding whether that person's concerns about antisemitism deserve to be taken seriously. A Jewish person may be expected to establish that they are sufficiently critical of Israel, sufficiently anti-Zionist, or sufficiently detached from mainstream Jewish communal/cultural institutions before their experiences of antisemitism are treated as legitimate rather than dismissed as an attempt to "weaponize antisemitism." This creates an uncomfortable double standard, as we generally recognize that members of minority populations should not have to prove that they hold the politically correct position on some government, nationalist movement, or geopolitical conflict associated with their ancestry before they are entitled to object to prejudice directed toward them. Yet Jews can sometimes be placed in exactly that position.

Amongst my Jewish peers, I have seen people behave like absolute assholes toward them and then rationalize that behavior through political language about privilege, Zionism, colonialism, or Israel. Because of experiences like that, several of them have told me that they increasingly feel alienated from the contemporary left, have stopped identifying with the left altogether, and started to orient themselves towards liberal Zionism or more explicitly Jewish political spaces because those environments seemed more willing to take their concerns about antisemitism seriously.

Someone could respond by saying that they should simply "suck it up," recognize their privilege, and understand why other people are angry with Jews or Zionists. Nevertheless, human beings generally do not work that way psychologically. If someone repeatedly enters a political community and experiences contempt, suspicion, stereotyping, or demands that they prove they are one of the "good" members of their ethnic group before receiving basic empathy, they are unlikely to become more receptive to that community's politics. They are more likely to become defensive, resentful, and distrustful, and eventually seek a sense of belonging elsewhere (i.e., the Zionist political faction). Political movements cannot continuously treat people with hostility and then act surprised when those people stop identifying with the movement.

From a psychological perspective, belonging matters. People generally gravitate toward communities in which they feel that their identity, experiences, and basic dignity are recognized. If a Jewish person feels that one political space constantly asks them to apologize for Israel, minimize antisemitism, distance themselves from Jewish communal institutions, or prove that they have sufficiently repudiated Zionism before they are accepted, while another space tells them, "You do not have to apologize for being Jewish, and we will take antisemitism seriously," it should not be surprising which community may eventually feel safer to them.

And I think simply responding, "Well, they should educate themselves about why people treat them that way," misses something fundamental about human behavior. Understanding the historical or political origins of hostility does not make repeated hostility emotionally inconsequential. You cannot shame, stereotype, or socially exclude people indefinitely and assume that because you possess a structural explanation for your behavior, they are obligated to remain politically loyal to you.

If anything, I think this creates a self-defeating cycle. Some left-wing spaces become suspicious of Jews because they perceive them as disproportionately Zionist; Jewish people encounter that suspicion and become alienated from those spaces; they then gravitate toward communities that are more openly Zionist or more protective of Jewish collective identity; and their movement in that direction is subsequently cited as further evidence that Jews were politically suspect in the first place. At some point, I think we have to acknowledge that human beings are not abstract representatives of social classes or demographic categories. They are individuals whose political identities are shaped in part by how the communities around them treat them with dignity. Structural analysis is important, but it cannot substitute for basic interpersonal decency.

Despite my complaints about Western academia during my generalist studies, I do appreciate my experiences in learning about the changes in human stratification, from relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to more sedentary agricultural societies, the development of increasingly complex political institutions, states, class systems, inherited social hierarchies, and eventually the enormous diversity of social structures that exist today. I also appreciated learning about different kinship systems, religions, ethnicities, gender-related topics, dialogues surrounding colonialism, economic systems, and the ways human beings have organized their communities throughout history. One thing I especially appreciated about anthropology and sociology was being forced to recognize that many things we consider completely natural or self-evident are actually historically and culturally contingent. Ideas surrounding family, property, gender roles, race, individualism, social status, childhood, marriage, religion, and even what constitutes a distinct ethnic group can vary enormously between societies.

I mentioned in an earlier post my views toward what I would describe as Western academia's reductive progressivism, in which Western colonialism is sometimes treated as the primary explanation for why different societies possess hierarchical or oppressive structures that continue to restrict the self-determination of marginalized groups. Since I have already talked about that at length, I will not focus on it here.

One of the complaints I do have surrounds the nature-versus-nurture debate. In my experience, professors in the social sciences have often leaned very heavily toward nurture, sometimes to the point where biological influences are treated with suspicion, as though acknowledging them necessarily leads to biological determinism. This is something I have increasingly disagreed with, especially because of my work in clinical diagnostics. The more exposure I have had to psychology, psychopathology, neurodevelopment, genetics, temperament, and environmental influences, the harder it has become for me to view human behavior through a predominantly nurture-based framework. In reality, it seems much more accurate to think of human beings as the product of a constant interaction between biological predispositions and environmental conditions. Acknowledging that biology influences behavior does not mean claiming that behavior is genetically predetermined, immutable, or morally justified. Likewise, acknowledging the importance of culture and environment does not require pretending that human beings are infinitely malleable blank slates whose differences are entirely produced by socialization.

For example, even when discussing something strongly influenced by biology, the way that trait is expressed, interpreted, encouraged, suppressed, or accommodated can differ enormously depending on a person's environment. At the same time, two people raised under relatively similar circumstances can still develop very differently because they do not necessarily possess identical temperaments, neurodevelopmental profiles, genetic predispositions, or responses to environmental stressors.

Another complaint that I have actually comes from an old cultural anthropology class of mine, in which a professor made a generalized comparative statement about Chinese and Arab cultures. Essentially, she argued that Han Chinese culture was more inherently patriarchal than Arab culture because of the historical influence of Confucianism and the historically placed importance on patrilineal descent, filial hierarchy, ancestor veneration, and the continuation of the male family line. Even though Arab societies have also historically placed considerable importance on patrilineal descent, agnatic kinship, male authority within the household, and the continuation of lineage through men, she nevertheless presented Chinese culture as somehow more intrinsically patriarchal. It is what it is.

That said, what have your experiences been like, and what are some of your own complaints regarding Western academia? Obviously, experiences are going to differ enormously from institution to institution, department to department, professor to professor, etc, so I am not trying to suggest that there is one unified Western academic perspective on any of these issues.

So I am not Latino/Hispanic; however, I am someone who originally comes from a country that was colonized by the Spanish Empire for 300 years (i.e., the Philippines). There have been decolonization efforts by Filipino-Americans to incorporate the term Filipinx into our lexicon as an act of "decolonization" from our Hispanic cultural influence. I know it is most likely very different in the Spanish-Speaking world when it comes to the term "Latinx". However, nearly all languages in the Philippines are gender-neutral except Chavacano (a Spanish-Creole language that incorporates some of our Austronesian vocabulary into its lexicon and is spoken in Zamboanga Province).

For the most part, most Filipinos who live in the Philippines find this term unnecessary because Filipinos often call themselves Filipinos, be it a man or a woman; Filipina is also used in Tagalog as well, but women also call themselves Filipinos, as the term "Filipino" is kind of seen as de facto gender-neutral even though the term primarily derived from the masculine form in Spanish. In everyday Filipino usage, "Filipino" can refer broadly to anyone from the Philippines regardless of gender, while "Filipina" can be used when someone specifically wants to indicate that the person is a woman. As a result, one common criticism of "Filipinx" is that it attempts to solve a grammatical gender problem that does not really exist in most Philippine languages. Tagalog, for example, already uses siya for both "he" and "she," and many other Philippine languages similarly do not require speakers to constantly mark a person's gender grammatically.

Within the LGBTQ+ community in the Philippines, the term "Filipinx" is rarely used, as it is much more closely associated with Filipino-American and other diaspora spaces, and many Filipino LGBTQ+ people online have actually advocated against the term because they view it as unnecessary and somewhat American-centric. One criticism I have seen is that "Filipinx" takes a debate about grammatical gender that developed largely within English-speaking diaspora and academic spaces and then applies it back onto a society whose indigenous languages were already largely gender-neutral to begin with.

I know there are some Indonesians in this sub, and thus they would probably be familiar with the fact that, for the most part, many Austronesian languages do not have grammatical gender in the same way Spanish does. Indonesian, for example, uses dia for both "he" and "she," much like Tagalog uses siya. Obviously, Austronesian languages are incredibly diverse, so I do not want to imply that every single one works exactly the same way, but grammatical gender generally does not occupy the same central role that it does in Spanish.

All being said, since I don't come from the Latin-American world, I am curious about how people who actually grew up in Latin America view the argument that "Latinx" should be understood as an act of decolonization. Do you think there is merit to the idea that moving away from the masculine/feminine grammatical structure of Spanish can be considered decolonial because Spanish itself was introduced to the region through colonization? Or do you think that framing misunderstands the relationship that Latin Americans have developed with the Spanish language over the last several centuries?

I am also curious whether there is a meaningful distinction between supporting gender-neutral terminology for LGBTQ+ and nonbinary people and specifically describing that terminology as "decolonial." In other words, someone could support terms such as "Latinx" or "Latine" because they believe they are more inclusive without necessarily arguing that using them constitutes an act of decolonization.

https://preview.redd.it/0xgiexby3llh1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=e247b1b33661e48db3d12e1c021f8b6f9101f951

Displayed in this photo is the Zinati family; from left to right, Mazal-Saada, Yosef, and Margalit Zinati. According to the family's tradition, the Zinatis of Peki'in descend from the ancient Jewish population of the Galilee and are among the descendants of Jews who remained in the region rather than becoming part of the larger Jewish Diaspora.

The Zinatis are generally associated with the Musta'aravim, the longstanding Arabic-speaking Jewish communities who lived in Palestine and elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking Middle East before the arrival of many of the Sephardim following the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. From what I understand, Musta'aravim communities existed in places such as Jerusalem, Safed, Peki'in (In the case of the Zinati Family), Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo, although over time many of them were absorbed into the much larger Sephardic communities around them.

I became interested in them because they seem to complicate some of the categories we commonly use when talking about Jewish identity. They were not Ashkenazim, and at least originally they were not Sephardim in the genealogical sense either. They were Arabic-speaking Jews whose communities had existed in the Levant and surrounding regions before the Sephardic migrations, but many eventually adopted Sephardic religious customs and became incorporated into broader Sephardic communal institutions.

Of all the Jews I know personally, I only know one who identifies as being of Musta'aravi ancestry. He is of Syrian Jewish origin, but his family's religious customs have more or less become Sephardic over time due to the influx of Sephardic Jews into Syria following the expulsions from Iberia. From what I understand, this was not particularly unusual. In places such as Aleppo and Damascus, the preexisting Musta'aravi Jews and the newly arrived Sephardim initially constituted distinguishable communities, but over the following centuries the boundaries between them became increasingly blurred, and Sephardic religious customs eventually became dominant.

Despite saying all of this, I am curious if any of you have actually met any Musta'aravim, or people of Musta'aravi ancestry, and what your experiences have been like when discussing their identity with them. Do they generally still see Musta'aravi as a meaningful and distinct part of their Jewish identity, or do most simply identify as Sephardi or Mizrahi today because their communities were gradually absorbed into the broader Sephardic world?

So, understandably, I think most people here would agree that Ashkenazim are generally considered white within contemporary American society for a variety of reasons, ranging from some Ashkenazim being phenotypically white-passing to their perceived proximity to white systemic power, socioeconomic mobility, and the gradual incorporation of Ashkenazi Jews into the broader category of American whiteness over the course of the twentieth century.

However, I am curious whether left-wing Ashkenazim actually benefit politically from simply accepting that incorporation, rather than placing greater emphasis on it within left-wing dialogue. For some, they would express that Ashkenazim will always be perceived as white because the current systemic structures surrounding whiteness are ultimately the ones that determine who is socially classified as white, regardless of how Ashkenazi Jews understand themselves ethnically. Therefore, it would seem kind of pointless to consciously reject whiteness if the broader society is still going to categorize Ashkenazim as white anyway.

However, I am not entirely convinced by that argument because racial categories are socially constructed precisely through the way people continuously negotiate, reproduce, challenge, and redefine them. The fact that a dominant social structure currently categorizes a particular population in one way does not necessarily mean that the population itself has no ability to contest that categorization or emphasize aspects of its identity that the broader racial framework tends to flatten.

Personally, as someone who is an ethnic minority, I find it somewhat uncomfortable to simply label Ashkenazim as “white” and leave it there because I am aware that Jewish ancestral and cultural origins ultimately trace back to the Levant and developed outside of the Anglo-Christian cultural framework that historically shaped American whiteness. Obviously, the Ashkenazim later developed as a distinct Jewish population in Europe and absorbed varying degrees of European ancestry and cultural influence, but that does not mean their historical identity was simply that of another European ethnic group.

To me, there is a difference between saying that many Ashkenazim are socially perceived as white and therefore receive certain privileges associated with whiteness, and saying that Ashkenazi identity itself is simply a subdivision of whiteness. The former is a sociological observation about how people are racialized within contemporary American society, while the latter can sometimes flatten the historical, ethnic, diasporic, and religious distinctiveness of the Ashkenazim.

Personally, I am a believer that systemic cultural change can only really become durable when it develops from the bottom up. Institutions obviously have enormous power in determining how racial categories are defined and reproduced; however, those institutions are also influenced by broader cultural attitudes, political movements, academic discourse, community organizing, and the ways ordinary people choose to describe themselves and others. If marginalized groups simply accepted whatever identity categories the dominant society assigned to them on the grounds that those categories were already structurally entrenched, then many of the ways we currently understand race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity probably would never have changed in the first place.

This is why I am wondering whether there could be some political value in left-wing Ashkenazim more consciously emphasizing Ashkenazi Jewishness and their connection to the Holy Land/Levant rather than allowing their incorporation into American whiteness to become the dominant framework through which their identity is understood. I do not mean this in the sense of denying the centuries that Ashkenazim spent in Europe, the European influences that became part of Ashkenazi culture, or the privileges that many Ashkenazi Jews presently receive from being perceived as white. I am wondering whether emphasizing these aspects of Jewish identity could challenge the tendency within some left-wing spaces to treat Ashkenazim as essentially white Europeans who happen to practice Judaism. There seems to be a meaningful difference between acknowledging that Ashkenazim can occupy a position of whiteness within the contemporary American racial hierarchy and reducing Ashkenazi identity itself to whiteness.

So, for the Ashkenazim here, do you think there would be political value in emphasizing your distinct ethnic identity, and historical connection to the Levant more explicitly within left-wing spaces? Do you think doing so could gradually complicate the way the broader left understands Jewish identity and antisemitism, or would attempting to distance Ashkenazim from whiteness ultimately create more political problems than it solves?

Not that long ago, I had a conversation with some of my religious Jewish homies in which they were expressing their antagonistic views toward Reform and Conservative Judaism and how they essentially see these movements as abominations and departures from traditional Rabbinic Judaism. These peers of mine are Sephardic/Mizrahi, and so their historical experience with Jewish modernity is somewhat different from that of many Ashkenazi Jews whose communities were directly shaped by the Haskalah and the emergence of the Reform and Conservative movements. To them, it is basically either you are a religious Jew or a non-religious/secular Jew; there is not really an equivalent denominational spectrum in the way many American Ashkenazim understand it.

During our conversation, one of them brought up how, in his opinion, the existence of Reform and Conservative Judaism has made it easier for non-Jews to convert without having to accept the same level of halakhic obligation that would traditionally be expected under Orthodox conversion standards. From there, he also expressed that there are now some people on the political left who essentially convert to Judaism because they are already anti-Zionist and want to be able to criticize Israel or Zionism specifically as Jews.

Personally, I have only seen this alleged trend online, but then again, most of the Jews I know in real life are Orthodox Zionist Jews, and the few I know who are Reform or Conservative are not particularly observant and did not pay too much attention to their synagogue services during their youth, lol. So my personal social circle is obviously not very representative of the Jewish left, especially the kinds of spaces where I would be most likely to encounter anti-Zionist gerim in the first place.

However, that being said, this trend online does seem reminiscent of how some Chinese people become suspicious of Westerners who adopt Chinese cultural or political identities and then immediately position themselves as spokespeople for what “Chinese people” supposedly believe, especially when those views conveniently align with a preexisting ideological commitment. The issue is not that an outsider can never sincerely become part of a community, nor that converts or cultural adoptees are somehow permanently less legitimate. Rather, I think the suspicion emerges when someone appears to approach identity almost instrumentally, in which joining the group seems less like the culmination of a genuine religious or cultural attachment and more like acquiring a particular kind of political credibility.

That said, I am a Gentile, so I do not really think it is my place to determine whether another person's conversion to Judaism is sincere or legitimate. If a recognized Jewish community accepts someone as a Jew, I am not going to sit here and conduct some ideological purity test on their Jewishness simply because of how they feel about Zionism. I have met a decent number of people in my life who wish they were born into a more "collectivist" culture like mine because they feel alienated by the individualism of mainstream American society, and I do not automatically assume that their attraction to another culture is fake simply because it is partly shaped by dissatisfaction with their own. People are complicated; someone could be attracted to Judaism because of its communal orientation, intellectual traditions, ritual life, history, family structure, or sense of peoplehood while simultaneously finding anti-Zionist Jewish spaces politically attractive.

What would strike me as different, however, is if Judaism itself were largely incidental to the person, and conversion functioned primarily as a way of acquiring the rhetorical authority to say, "As a Jew..." in political arguments they were already deeply invested in. I am not asking whether anti-Zionist gerim are "real Jews," nor whether having strong political motivations automatically invalidates someone's conversion. However, I am curious whether people who have encountered such individuals for whom becoming Jewish appeared to be substantially motivated by the political usefulness of being able to oppose Zionism as a Jew.

I have not posted here in a while; however, I just have some thoughts I wanted to share. So, as many of you know, Asian Americans have continued to experience systemic injustice both in terms of legislation and in Western soft culture/media. Despite many improvements in addressing the barriers that Asian Americans continue to face, White-dominated capitalist institutions and mainstream American culture have historically placed considerable pressure on Asian Americans to assimilate, prove their economic usefulness, and demonstrate that they are capable of succeeding according to standards that were not necessarily created with us in mind.

Many Asian Americans have complained about the way they are treated or portrayed in Hollywood, their work environments, and the political rhetoric espoused by our politicians; however, despite these complaints, some still remain deeply supportive of the same capitalist structures and assimilationist expectations that have historically shaped many of these experiences.

It is strange for me to see the discrepancy of someone who genuinely wishes to maintain their cultural heritage, whether that be Korean, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Tagalog, Ilocano, Japanese, etc., while simultaneously supporting an assimilationist framework that, at least historically, has often expected minority cultures to gradually subordinate themselves to the dominant Anglo-American culture. There seems to be a tension between wanting your children and grandchildren to retain their language, food, traditions, communal identity, and connection to their ancestral culture, while also believing that successful integration ultimately requires adapting yourself as closely as possible to whatever the dominant society considers “American.”

Even though I am a Leftist, I do not subscribe to the idea that humans are inherently egalitarian, cooperative, or naturally inclined toward solidarity across social boundaries. Our species is obviously capable of cooperation, mutual aid, and building relatively egalitarian communities, but we are also capable of hierarchy, competition, tribalism, and constructing very strong in-group/out-group modes of social organization. However, just because I hold this view does not imply that I think hierarchy, exclusion, etc are therefore morally desirable or that we should simply accept them as inevitable features of society. The fact that human beings are capable of behaving in a particular way does not tell us whether that behavior is ethically justified. If anything, I think recognizing those tendencies gives us even more reason to construct social institutions that restrain this primordial part of our monkey brains.

But I digress. I find it strange, for example, for an Asian man to have voted for Donald Trump during our last election and somehow believe that the anti-immigrant, assimilationist, and at times explicitly racialized rhetoric surrounding his political movement will simply stop at the groups he personally considers “undesirable.” I have met Asian Americans who complain about being treated as perpetual foreigners, who become angry when someone tells them to “go back to China,” who dislike the way Asians are portrayed in Western media, and who want their children to retain their ancestral culture, but who will nevertheless support a political worldview that places an enormous amount of emphasis on molding ethnic minorities to be their Protestant Anglo flavor of what an “authentic American” is supposed to look, sound, and behave like.

Don't you think this would reinforce the very same perpetual-foreigner dynamic that many Asian Americans complain about? If being considered a “real American” is implicitly tied to behaving, speaking, worshipping, or organizing one's family life according to a historically Anglo-Protestant cultural template, then Asians are effectively being told that our acceptance remains conditional upon how successfully we can approximate that template. You might personally clear whatever cultural threshold is being demanded at a particular moment, but that does not mean the threshold itself disappears.

If you are upset that Asian Americans are constantly asked where they are “really from,” stereotyped as culturally foreign, or treated as though our loyalty to the United States is somehow more questionable than that of White Americans, then why support a conception of Americanness that continues to make cultural conformity one of the primary measurements of belonging? Is it because there is a belief that, by assimilating enough, working hard enough, distancing yourself from other minorities enough, or demonstrating sufficient patriotism, you can become one of the “good ones” who are exempt from the prejudice directed at everyone else?

Like, imagine complaining about how much it sucks that Asian men are stereotyped as effeminate in American society, wanting those stereotypes to change, and then simultaneously supporting a broader cultural framework that still treats White Anglo-American masculinity as the default standard that everyone else is supposed to approximate. At that point, are you really challenging the hierarchy, or are you simply asking for Asian men to be admitted into it on more favorable terms? If your objection is that Asian masculinity is unfairly devalued, then I would think the goal should be to broaden what masculinity itself is allowed to look like rather than proving that Asian men can perform the dominant version of masculinity just as well as everyone else. Otherwise, you can end up reproducing the same hierarchy that marginalized you in the first place: masculine over feminine, dominant over submissive, culturally “American” over culturally foreign, with the only difference being that you now want Asians to be moved higher within that ranking.

Or if you're an Asian woman who somehow resents being fetishized, stereotyped as submissive, hypersexualized, or treated as though Asian women are naturally more accommodating to White men, but then embraces a worldview that still places White Western femininity and relationship norms at the center of what is considered socially desirable, aren't you running into a similar problem?

I know that many White liberals and leftists put Asians into this weird position of being Schrödinger's White, similar in some respects to the way Askenazi Jews are sometimes treated: technically considered people of color or minorities when convenient, but simultaneously viewed as “not quite POC” because of stereotypes about our socioeconomic success, educational attainment, or supposed proximity to Whiteness. I have definitely encountered liberals and leftists who will talk endlessly about intersectionality and listening to marginalized communities, but then become strangely dismissive when Asian Americans bring up forms of racism that do not fit neatly into their preferred racial framework.

That said, even though the stupidity of American liberals and leftists can be incredibly frustrating, I do not understand why the response would be to run toward a political movement that is even more comfortable with assimilationism, racial hierarchy, and a narrow conception of what an “authentic American” is supposed to be. The fact that one political camp does a poor job understanding Asian American experiences does not automatically make the opposing camp better for us. Being ignored, patronized, or awkwardly classified as “White-adjacent” by some liberals has been an ongoing and frustrating battle, but I would rather challenge those internal failures directly than conclude that the solution is to embrace an ideology that may accept Asians primarily insofar as we are economically productive, culturally assimilated, sUbMiSsivE, and willing to distinguish ourselves from minorities who are considered less desirable.

TDLR:

I find it strange that some Asian Americans can recognize anti-Asian racism, complain about being treated as perpetual foreigners, worry about losing their cultural heritage, and criticize stereotypes about Asian men and women, while still supporting strongly assimilationist, capitalist, or conservative ideas that often measure belonging through proximity to dominant Anglo-American norms.

I am not arguing that experiencing racism should automatically make someone a Leftist, nor do I think humans are naturally egalitarian. However, my point is that if you oppose the stereotypes and hierarchies that marginalize Asians, simply trying to become one of the “good minorities” who is hardworking, economically useful, patriotic, culturally assimilated, or sufficiently masculine/feminine according to dominant standards does not actually challenge the hierarchy; it just asks for Asians to be moved higher within it.

I also understand why some Asian Americans become frustrated with liberals and leftists who treat us as “White-adjacent” or “not quite BIPOC” and dismiss forms of anti-Asian racism that do not fit neatly into their framework. But I do not see how responding to those failures by embracing an even more assimilationist conception of Americanness solves the problem. I would rather challenge those failures directly than seek conditional acceptance based on how culturally non-threatening Asians can prove ourselves to be.

I am neither Korean, Javanese, nor Japanese; however, as someone who grew up in a Tagalog and Hokkien-speaking household, with Itawit (a Northern Filipino Language) also sometimes spoken on my father’s side, I understand that these languages often emphasize the importance of age, kinship, seniority, and showing respect toward people who occupy different positions within your family or your wider community. Tagalog, for example, has po and opo when speaking respectfully to elders or people of higher social standing. In the Philippine variety of Hokkien, we also have specific kinship terms that indicate birth order and relative position within the family. For example, on your father’s side, if you have multiple paternal uncles who are older than your Father, you can distinguish them by birth order: the eldest may be called a-peh or tōa-peh (大伯), while the second can be called dī-peh (二伯), with dī indicating that he is second in the sibling order and peh referring to an older paternal uncle. So the kinship term itself can tell you not only how someone is related to you, but where they fall within the family order relative to your father.

Despite the complexity of the Hokkien language, I personally think Korean and Javanese are much more extreme in this regard. From what I understand about Korean, they even have specific verb endings and speech levels that change depending on the social relationship between the people speaking, including differences in age, seniority, familiarity, and social position. So you generally would not speak to your close younger friend or your close older friend in exactly the same way, even if you are equally close to both of them, because the age difference itself can affect which speech level feels appropriate. In addition, the age difference becomes more pronounced when speaking to your grandmother, professor, employer, older stranger, etc. The grammatical choices themselves, therefore communicate how you understand your relative positions within that relationship. In Javanese, I believe they also have specific registers commonly called Ngoko, Madya, and Krama, which roughly correspond to different levels of familiarity, politeness, and deference. Ngoko is generally the more informal register and is commonly used among close friends, with younger people, or in relationships where formality is unnecessary. Krama is the more deferential register and is traditionally associated with speaking respectfully toward elders, unfamiliar people, or people of higher social standing, while Madya falls somewhere between the two.

Therefore, I am curious about how some anarchists in this sub might view these linguistic traditions. Obviously, utilizing relational honorifics is not equivalent to having a landlord, monarch, boss, or state exercising coercive authority over you. However, if younger people are socially expected to linguistically defer to older people, or if someone is considered disrespectful for refusing to use the appropriate level of speech toward a senior, does that count as the kind of hierarchy that anarchists seek to dismantle?

I recently talked to a former classmate of mine whom I had not seen in a couple of years, and unfortunately she has become a campist. During our interaction, she asked me whether I thought Taiwan and the Mainland should eventually be reunited, and what the average Taiwanese person actually thinks about the issue because, by her own admission, she had never met a Taiwanese person before.

I am not Taiwanese myself. However, she knows that my mom's siblings and their children live in Taiwan, so I told her that the Taiwanese people I personally know do not generally think about the issue in the simplistic way that she was framing it. In fact, my cousins at least don't even think about reunification because they personally hold the belief that, despite being Han Chinese, Taiwanese culture has developed independently from the Mainland, especially because of the Japanese, Dutch, and Austronesian influences.

For those who don't know, most Taiwanese Han are descended from migrants from southern Fujian, particularly Hoklo/Hokkien-speaking populations, along with Hakka communities and later waves of Mainlanders who arrived after the Chinese Civil War. Over several centuries, however, Taiwan developed its own historical trajectory under Qing rule, Japanese colonial rule, the Republic of China, and through sustained interaction with the island's Indigenous Austronesian peoples. So while Taiwanese Han obviously share ancestry and many cultural traditions/elements with people across the Taiwan Strait, that does not mean Taiwanese identity is simply interchangeable with Mainland Chinese identity.

Unfortunately, my very "internationalist," very "anti-nationalist" former classmate believes that because Taiwanese Han and Mainland Chinese Han are ultimately part of the same broader ethnocultural people, their political separation is somehow unnatural and reunification should therefore be the preferred outcome. What struck me was that she was not making a geopolitical argument about American hegemony, the Chinese Civil War, or the One-China framework; she was making an argument grounded in shared ancestry, historical peoplehood, and cultural continuity.

Personally, I am consistent in my values, so I do hold the belief that Mainland Han, Taiwanese Han, Chinese Malaysians, Chinese Indonesians, Chinese Filipinos (in my case), Chinese Jamaicans, Chinese Mexicans, etc., all belong to a broader Han Chinese ethnocultural people while still developing distinct national identities, sub-cultures, and historical experiences depending on where their communities actually developed. I do not think acknowledging a shared ancestry or broader peoplehood requires believing that everyone belonging to that people should live under the same state.

I then asked her, “What do you think about the Jews?” If shared ancestry, historical peoplehood, cultural continuity, and a common civilizational identity are enough for you to say that Taiwanese Han and Mainland Han naturally belong together politically, then wouldn’t you have to at least acknowledge that Jews have a similar claim to being a historical people rather than simply a collection of unrelated religious communities? She did not like my question, but her response can basically be summarized as: “Well, most Jews do not have meaningful genetic ties to the Levant, and Jewish peoplehood is largely an imagined community rather than a real historical ethnocultural continuity.”

That was the point where I found her beliefs inconsistent af because she was willing to treat Han Chinese peoplehood as something historically real, even across enormous geographic distances and centuries of cultural divergence; however, when the exact same concepts of having shared ancestry, collective memory, cultural continuity, shared historical origin, and diasporic identity were applied to Jews, suddenly it goes out the window. So I went deeper. I asked her whether she had any personal beef with Jews outside of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because at that point I was genuinely trying to understand whether her skepticism toward Jewish peoplehood came from a broader theoretical position about nationalism or whether Jews were being treated as a special exception.

I really should not have asked, because her response was quite antisemitic, to say the least. She started saying things along the lines of, “Well, they all call us goyim/gentiles; they think we will be their slaves during the end times; they think they are superior to us; they think they are the master race,” and so on.

I then responded that if you were to ask my ancestors, or look at how many previous Chinese dynasties understood other “races” and neighboring peoples, you could find plenty, and I mean plenty, of ideas that would sound extremely ethno-supremacist by modern standards. Historically, if a people were seen as existing outside the Chinese cultural sphere, they were categorized as“barbarians,” uncivilized, morally deficient, and in need of transformative domestication through Chinese culture and political order. Shit, even if you adopted Chinese culture, as the Koreans and Japanese did to varying degrees, you would still be treated as an outsider to the Chinese civilizational center, basically a more “cultivated” barbarian rather than truly civilized. Obviously, I would never take those historical attitudes and conclude that modern Han Chinese people secretly believe every non-Chinese person is inferior (maybe not in the Mainland LOLOL). I would not look at some chauvinistic Confucian text, pull out the most offensive passage I could find, and then say, “See? This is what the Han believe.” That would be an absurd way of talking about hundreds of millions of people across different countries, political systems, religious backgrounds, and levels of attachment to traditional culture. That was basically my point to her. If you are willing to grant Chinese civilization historical complexity, to acknowledge that ugly ethnocentric beliefs existed without treating them as the essence of every Chinese person today, then why would you refuse to grant Jews the same basic nuance?

She did not know how to respond to this, so we ended up talking about our professional lives instead. However, I am honestly flabbergasted because I did not realize pan-ethno-nationalism was apparently back on the menu, provided that the ethnic group in question belongs to the “correct” geopolitical camp.

That is really the part I cannot wrap my head around. If someone on the right argued that people who share ancestry, language, culture, and historical peoplehood therefore ought to be politically united under the same state, most leftists would immediately recognize that as an ethnonationalist argument. Yet when the subject is Taiwan and Mainland China, North and South Korea, etc., it is sometimes framed as anti-imperialist, historically corrective, or even inherently progressive.

So I guess my broader question is whether any of y'all have encountered this kind of selective pan-ethnonationalism among campists, where nationalism is supposedly reactionary until it can be used to justify the territorial claims of a state they already support?

As you know, there is no agreed-upon global consensus on what defines a person as indigenous. To some, indigeneity is defined primarily by blood ancestry, having a culture untouched by European influence, maintaining a connection to a particular ancestral homeland, or descending from populations that inhabited a territory prior to colonization. In contrast, there are those who define indigenous peoples more through their current social and political position, particularly as populations who are the recipients of systemic injustice, dispossession, discrimination, or marginalization because another group holds greater institutional, economic, or political power over them.

I don't know if there are any Filipinos on this sub; however, if there are, you probably know that back in the old country we tend to use the term indigenous somewhat differently. In the Philippine context, “indigenous peoples” usually refers more specifically to ethnolinguistic communities that have maintained distinct ancestral territories, customary practices, social institutions, and cultural identities despite centuries of colonization and integration into the wider Filipino nation. In other words, indigeneity is not determined by whether a group is currently marginalized or lacks systemic power, since virtually all Native Filipino ethnolinguistic groups descend from the very same Austronesian populations that inhabited the archipelago prior to European colonization.

On the Filipino side of my family, my Father, my siblings, and I are considered indigenous because we belong to the Itawit people, my tribe from the Cagayan Valley in Northern Philippines. My tribe is recognized by the Philippine National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) as one of the country’s Indigenous Cultural Communities/Indigenous Peoples (ICCs/IPs) because, despite having been Christianized for centuries, we have continued to preserve a number of precolonial pagan and shamanistic rituals and other customary practices alongside Christianity.

In contrast, lowland Filipino groups (e.g., the Tagalogs, the Bisayans, etc.) are not usually classified as indigenous, even though they also descend from precolonial Austronesian populations and obviously have deep historical roots in the archipelago. The distinction is more that many lowland groups became much more thoroughly incorporated into the colonial state and the broader Filipino national culture, whereas Indigenous Filipinos retained a stronger degree of continuity with their precolonial social structures, customary practices, ancestral territories, and shamanistic traditions.

Muslim Filipino groups like the Maranao, Tausug, and the Maguindanao are not considered indigenous by the Philippine government, as their adoption of Islam roughly 600 years ago and the centrality and extreme loyalty to the concept of tawhid gradually subordinated many of their earlier pagan and shamanistic religious traditions. In contrast, Muslim Filipino groups such as the Yakan, Iranun, and Badjao are also recognized as indigenous communities by the NCIP and have retained a stronger degree of continuity with older Austronesian customs, spiritual practices, and social traditions alongside Islam (Various Imams in the South don't think they're real Muslims because of this). In their case, Islam did not replace the entirety of their earlier cultural framework, but became incorporated into communities that continued to preserve their older pagan/animistic traditions.

When I explained this to some of my fellow leftists from the West during my academic years, they found the Philippine understanding of indigeneity somewhat uncomfortable because it does not map neatly onto the way indigeneity is often discussed in Western progressive spaces. Some of them seemed to assume that the groups experiencing the greatest degree of marginalization or systemic injustice should automatically be understood as the most indigenous, whereas the Philippine framework places much greater emphasis on which communities have retained the strongest degree of continuity with precolonial cultures, spiritual traditions, and social institutions that existed before the introduction of Catholic Christianity and Sunni Islam.

In addition, I think some of them are uncomfortable with this definition because it can also support the argument that Jews are indigenous to the Levant, even though Palestinians would fall under that classification as well. If indigeneity is based partly on historical continuity, ethnogenesis, ancestral attachment, collective memory, and a longstanding relationship to a particular territory, then it becomes difficult to argue that only one of those populations can possess an indigenous relationship to the land. That does not eliminate/undermine the enormous present-day power imbalance between the Jews and the Palestinians, nor does it excuse the atrocities that have been going on within the last 80 years.

However, it complicates two things. First, if they reject my people’s definition of what it means to be indigenous, then they also have to explain why the framework they are using should take precedence over the way indigenous communities in other parts of the world understand themselves, especially when advocating for indigenous peoples and respecting their right to define their own identities are supposed to be important left-wing principles. Second, if indigeneity is defined primarily through present-day marginalization and systemic power, then it creates the strange implication that a people can become less indigenous once they gain political sovereignty or institutional power, even if they have a historical, cultural, and ancestral connection to a specific land mass.

Personally, I find both definitions of what it means to be indigenous useful, but I do not think either one is sufficient on its own. Historical continuity, ancestral bloodlines, cultural persistence, and attachment to a particular homeland obviously matter; so does dispossession, political marginalization, and unequal power relations. That said, my concern is more with collapsing indigeneity entirely into the second category, because doing so can turn what is supposed to be a historical and cultural concept into a purely political one.

Personally, I think a population/people group does not stop being indigenous because it gains political power, nor does another population automatically become more indigenous simply because it is more oppressed at a particular moment in history. It is entirely possible for two peoples to have legitimate ancestral and historical ties to the same land while existing within a deeply unequal political relationship. In conclusion, recognizing the indigeneity of both does not require pretending that the power imbalance between them does not exist.

TLDR:

I personally think both definitions of indigeneity are useful; however, I do not think either one is sufficient by itself. In the Philippines, indigeneity is generally understood more through ancestral continuity, attachment to a particular homeland, preservation of precolonial traditions, and the maintenance of distinct cultural practices rather than simply through who currently experiences the greatest amount of systemic injustice. My concern is that if indigeneity becomes defined primarily through oppression and power imbalance, then it creates the strange implication that a population can somehow become less indigenous once it gains political power. This also complicates cases like Jews and Palestinians, where I think both populations can have legitimate ancestral and historical ties to the same land while still existing within a very unequal present-day political relationship.