One interesting thing about this whole debate is that people seem very fixated on the concept that being anti-China translates into anti-Asian American. There certainly may be backlash (plenty of Koreans went to internment camps during WWII), but most Asian countries are super hawkish on China (eg https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/poll-most-south-koreans-are-wary-china-175989 ). Probably because the grandparents that Nina Luo referred to were soldiers in the army (or contemporaries of soldiers in the army) that threatened Korea and other Asian countries in the 50s and 60s.
To the extent I get angry about incorrect discourse, it's when Chinese Americans claim to speak for all Asian Americans...
I live in Vietnam where anti-Chinese sentiment is extremely high. To the point where there are no "Chinese" restaurants. They will go out of their way to say they are a Cantonese restaurant or a Shandong restaurant or even "We serve a variety of Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, and Sichuan food". Anything but "Chinese".
It's true that the politics of East Asia among East Asian people are actually nearly incomprehensible to the discourse. Then I see my School's few Asian students who are almost entirely Filipino taunted on the school yard over the course of the year when kids think adults aren't listening.
I don't quite know what to do with the fact that it's really quite hard for most people to distinguish between the nation and the state. Once you release those furies it's very hard to make any sense of anything.
yeah totally. I think it's super ironic that a bunch of Koreans were interned because the US was at war with Japan, when Japan was simultaneously committing terrible atrocities in Korea.
But I think the point here is not "pretend that there is no racism against all Asians as a result of anti-China discourse." I think similar to Matt's evergreen point that "don't assume Asian American activists are representative of all Asians," there is also "don't assume that Chinese Americans are representative of all Asian Americans" or, similarly, that an anti-China policy position is inherently anti-Asian.
Anecdotally, Asian Americans joke a lot about how their parents are probably more racist towards other Asian ethnicities than white Americans would ever understand...
or even, if you believe that not all prejudice is racism... for decades my US-residing Korean grandparents refused to buy Japanese cars (and I am sure would have done the same had there been a widely-available Chinese car in the US).
I'm glad you have a picture because otherwise i'd be thoroughly confused by 4 posts in a row that all seem like an Andrew talking with himself. There are two Dan S commentators without pictures on this forum and sometimes they get into discussions with each other; it's confusing.
I totally take your point. I was an English teacher in Seoul and Shanghai for years. The name Asian American is weird considering how raw feelings are between pretty much all Asian nations with China and Japan.
Where it bothers me is some of the anti-Chinese stuff doesn't seem to have any clear point but being rude.
yeah absolutely. btw, I don't want any of the above to come across as justifying any kind of prejudice. I don't think it is a good thing that a lot of Koreans really hate Chinese (my wife is Chinese!). I just think one shouldn't react to warrantless OR "warranted" (not the right word, but I think you get the point) discrimination by saying "don't criticize China"
The idea may be that the kind of people who make racist attacks on others just don't know or care about the distinction between people of Chinese background and other Asian-Americans. It's the same kind of thing as casually referring to Hispanic people as "Mexicans" or people from the Middle East as "Arabs".
well, or maybe a better example is the progressive pundits who were shocked that "Latinos" shifted towards Trump, a topic on which Matt has written quite a bit
One thing that would help a lot is simply to talk about "CCP" or "Chinese government" human right abuse and cover up of the COVID-19 outbreak, not "Chinese," "Israeli government" policy of allowing settlements in the Occupied Territories instead of "Israeli" policy. Of course the CCP and the parties forming the Israeli government WANT everyone living in those countries to support government policies. Our rhetoric should not assume much less promote their success.
Came here to comment something to this effect! I’d guess outside the Beltway most regular voters have zero trouble distinguishing between the people of a country and its government - especially when it’s an unelected authoritarian regime like the PRC. It’s only the actual racists and the people most neurotic about accidentally appearing racist who assume that criticism of a bad government must mean condemnation of its people. But it would cost politicians and media figures $0.00 to say “the Chinese government” instead of “China” when it would be more accurate to do so, and I think it’s worth being careful about that so as not to grow the ranks of the racists.
I disagree. Most people don't want to distinguish between the people of a country and its government. Most Americans like to suggest that government action is fully representative of all the people who live in different US states and they live in the same country! Its not different than all the people who like to lump together all the BLM protesters with the rioters or want to lump together all whites as being fundamentally racists.
People like to disparage groups - especially others. They will happily use whatever excuse is available to do so.
Interesting debate between a view of "most people" that's glass half-empty versus class half-full. I've met plenty of people with views that fall on either side - one of my last co-workers refused to travel to red states since trump's election, for example. I guess my take is that both of your descriptions correctly describe a lot of people, but I'm not sure which one describes "most" people.
I think people can be amazingly thoughtful and generous, especially in person. I also think people love to knock other people whether it be because of sports, location, style (or lack thereof), etc. Our host is a great example of both.
"[M]ost regular voters have zero trouble distinguishing between the people of a country and its government" -- I hope you're right about that! Even if that's true, though, another reason to be careful about this is that if I see a random person criticizing "China" when they mean "the Chinese government", I'm not a mind reader, *I* can't be sure that they aren't one of the small fraction who are confused about the distinction--and it only takes a little uncertainty to create a lot of nervousness.
Completely agree with this! I understand that "country X" is fewer syllables than "the government of country X", but I still loathe it when people use the former as shorthand for the latter in contexts like this, for all the obvious reasons. If you always say "China" when you mean "the CCP", how can I be sure you have a bright line in your head between the government and the ordinary humans who are stuck with it?
Criticizing China (for good reasons like human rights abuses or bad reasons like ‘Kung Flu!’) may have spillover into creating prejudice against Asian Americans as a whole, particularly the large population of Chinese people who come to the country as graduate students, high skilled workers, or both.
This is obviously, a bad thing. Yet I agree with Matt that it’s unavoidable if you want to have serious conversations about the wrongdoing of nations.
Nevertheless I have never encountered an immigrant graduate student, professor, or high skilled worker from any country who moved here thinking that there would be no bigotry. It’s something that is kind of known negative about the United States. It’s also, not really that easy to remove. What some young activists have gotten so right about this new push for equity is the idea of removing “systemic” barriers to equity.
If we want to make life in America better for recent Chinese immigrants/visa holders, then look at what can be done tangibly to remove systemic barriers that they face. These people deal with what is essentially a nightmare of alphabet soup in terms of getting a student visa, getting a temporary work visa, a permanent work visa, then like forever later a green card.
This makes them take grunt coder/quant jobs long after most have been promoted. They work long hours, and are overly dependent on their employers just to stay in the country.
When they finally make it, if they wish to use their high stable salary to move their parents closer to take care of them in their elder years, this is once again very difficult.
Look more closely at stuff like this. It will go a lot further to help Chinese people in this country than chasing down someone who said “Kung Flu” while drunk.
Re the idea that bigotry is a known negative of moving to the United States:
I can't imagine anyone planning to move anywhere in the world to a culture other than their own who would not expect to feel, at a minimum, somewhat alienated and "left out".
This would be the case with, say, a white American moving to Japan.
"Nevertheless I have never encountered an immigrant graduate student, professor, or high skilled worker from any country who moved here thinking that there would be no bigotry. It’s something that is kind of known negative about the United States."
FWIW, I live in Vietnam. A lot of Vietnamese emigrate to America. Even more want to. American bigotry is essentially completely unknown here. (Well, at least until the latest round of anti-Asian violence in the US made it into the news here.) So there's a data point. America, and living in America, is hyper-idealized and the ones who make it there send back a *very* whitewashed version of their lives. (Everyone is rich. Everyone has great jobs. Everyone is happy all the time. Everyone can buy everything they want. Everything is perfect in America. Don't you wish you could be here, too?)
The first time my (Vietnamese) wife went to the US for a 3-week holiday to visit my family, she was there three days before someone in a supermarket told her to stop stealing "our" jobs and go back home. Before that she had no idea that America was racist. She also doesn't understand TV shows like Lovecraft Country or the HBO Watchmen. She keeps asking "I don't understand, why are they doing that to him?" And I have to keep saying, "Because they are white and he is black."
Wow that’s new information. Hadn’t encountered that kind of “pure positivity” before.
I guess I will just say in defense of my nation.... That yes America has racism. But nothing like what happens in Lovecraft Country is happening today. No people of color in 2021 are sitting down at a diner only to be instantly chased out of town by a gun toting militia because they wanted a cheeseburger at the wrong place.
Some amount of proper criticism of CCP human right policies may rub off on Chinese grad students, but with carful use of language, this side effect should be minimizable.
I'm not really sure I agree with you about the power of carefully chosen language. It seems to me that people are going to draw the associations and implications that they have set up in their brains even if you carefully avoid giving them strict textual excuses.
(This is a general criticism I have of people's attempts to police language.)
>>>based on the (to the best of my knowledge, false) idea that bat-eating is some incredibly widespread Chinese practice<<<
I believe Matt is correct here. It's incredibly rare, I'm pretty sure. I've never seen it on a menu, and I've been all over this country. I've never even heard of people eating bat.* I'd bet my life bats are occasionally used as a food source *somewhere* in China (it's a big country!), but that's true of literally dozens of nations: bats have been an important source of meat for humans forever.
*I've never lived in a Western-bubble here, and thus haven't been spared exposure to some of the more exotic-seeming protein sources. I'm personally eaten wild boar, donkey, frog, snake, bamboo rat and (I was punked, and didn't know I was eating it!) dog in my near decade in China. I really do believe I'd have encountered bat by now were it a common foodstuff.
Also, forgot to mention: I think the consensus still holds that, if a natural zoonotic spillover was the source of the virus, an intermediary species was more likely than not involved, right? Or is that no longer the case? Anyway, if so, it would seem to coincide with the uncommonness of bats as a marketplace item for sale in China.
The idea of unconscious bias is described as a “mindbug” in the book Blindspot. While the psychological phenomenon they’re describing is real, I can’t help but think the *idea* of unconscious bias in *others* is the more pernicious mindbug. It has totally warped our ability to interpret someone else’s claims or ideas on the merits, and instead motivates a certain set to be constantly on the lookout for evidence of other people’s latent bigotry.
It helps that if you can cast someone as racist, unfairly or not, lots of people will feel they don't have to engage with the merits of the person's argument.
Similarly, I have long noticed that there are some people who engage in discussion forums who have a shallow (and, ultimately, wrong) understanding of the Dunning–Kruger Effect and try to use it as a cudgel.
All sound points, but worth a reminder that some criticism of Israel involves delegitimization of Israel, which in my view is antisemitic. There is no "China isn't a county; it's a settler-colonial entity" comic circulating on Instagram.
I don’t think that anyone should delegitimize Israel, and I often speak up to defend Israel’s right to exist when my fellow Leftist friends speak in ways that suggest that Israel shouldn’t exist. (In fact, it *really* bothers me that so many people have strong opinions about Israel and Palestine despite knowing little-to-nothing about the last century of that region’s history.)
That said, I’m not sure that delegitimizing Israel is necessarily antisemitic. Like, I think my friends are being stupid and ignorant and simplistic—but not necessarily prejudiced. But I could be wrong about this, so why do you think delegitimizing Israel is necessarily antisemitic?
Not the biggest fan of Israel here, but I'm trying to think of another example where it might be at least somewhat okay to say that a nation shouldn't exist. That seems to me to be particularly disturbing in the case of Israel critics.
Is this because Israel looms so large in the US political discourse? Serbia, Kosovo, South Sudan, etc all have or recently had some contested status. None of them are very important to US domestic politics, but some people in the respective regions would probably say that those countries shouldn't exist.
The Serbia-Kosovo issue has been mostly resolved, so it's less of an issue than it once was. Also, Israel isn't just a big political issue in the U.S., it's a big political issue in many countries in the world that have few if any Jews or Palestinians living there. Probably a combination of Zionism being a legitimately unique national-political movement, the U.N. being heavily involved for its entire existence, and Jerusalem mattering to a lot of people for religious reasons. Also a bit of oil diplomacy, Cold War politics, and antisemitism.
Well, during the 90's wasn't it an acceptable position to say that Yugoslavia shouldn't exist? (I'm thinking out loud here—I'm not trying to justify the "Israel shouldn't exist" claim and there could certainly be problems with the analogy.)
Isn't that what the wars were over? Yugoslavia was a one-state collection of different Slavic nations. Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo wanted to leave Yugoslavia, reducing it to Serbia & Montenegro (which is what happened). So supporting the separatists (which I think was the liberal consensus) meant supporting the end of the nation. Or, on the flip side, as Maggie points out above, people argued that Bosnia, Croatia, and especially Kosovo shouldn't exist as independent countries.
So, the liberal consensus was that having an entity for multiple ethnic groups can’t possibly work? I was expecting that to be the nationalist view, particularly given that there were no clean lines to separate different people within Yugoslavia, so displacement would definitely be needed.
(I realize my use of "different Slavic nations" might be confusing there, since in that case I'm not using it as synonymous with "countries" but elsewhere I have. There I mean "nations" in the sense of "ethnic groups.")
I'd say that no nations should exist. The obvious best-case solution is one worldwide state, with total freedom of movement and universal democratic governance (this is very unlikely in the foreseeable future, of course, because most people have a really unfortunate degree of nationalism and don't favor unlimited immigration, and a bunch aren't fans of democracy either, but it's still the solution we should have in our heads as the ideal)
It's antisemitism against Jews as Jews (Communist-style) rather than antisemitism against Jews as people (Nazi-style). Delegitimizing Israel involves asserting that Jews have no historical rights or ties to the Land of Israel, which is delegitimizing Jews as a people. I believe that some people do this without believing that it's antisemitism, but it still is. Just like people who aren't prejudiced toward individual BIPOC people but have issues with distinct nonwhite cultural identities are expressing a form of racism, even if not intentionally so.
Would you describe a one-state solution where Israel/Palestine was a secular state (possibly with an Arab majority) as anti-Semitic? What if it recognized a right of return for Jews (and Palestinian Arabs)?
A good and fair question. In theory I don't think that a binational state that recognizes the legitimate, non-colonial historical ties of both Jews and Palestinian Arabs to the land is a problem from that standpoint. The main objection to a binational one-state solution is that it's highly impractical -- Belgium is probably the most successful such state in the world and even they have serious issues. But a one-state solution is often used as code for a single Palestinian state that might allow some Jews to stay as a former colonial minority of sorts, and in that case it has the same problem as delegitimizing Israel.
A federation like Bosnia might be a better model. There are some striking similarities: the Serbian portion is in two parts (like the West Bank and Gaza) and there's a district that belongs to both but is governed by neither (Brcko/Jerusalem?)
It would be hard to sell many Israelis on a binational peace plan of "be like Bosnia," even though it is true that Bosnia is doing relatively well compared to what one might have expected in the 1990s. I think most Israelis and Palestinians would prefer full sovereignty over parts of what they consider their homelands to limited sovereignty over all of the land. But the biggest problem is that neither side really believes that the other side wants peace, and without that neither a binational one-state nor a two-state solution will work.
It would depend on the details. If your reasoning is that “ethnostates” are bad, then you can start with dismantling every European country (to say nothing of China) and once you’re done with that we can discuss Israel, the one ethnostate serving an ethnicity that actually has been persecuted everywhere they’ve ever been.
If the reasoning is “because two states don’t work” then it’s more of an empirical discussion. In that case you're not anti-Semitic, you’re just very confused.
"delegitimizing Jews as a people" — I'm not sure what "people" is supposed to mean here. Is it roughly synonymous with ethnicity (or the nation in "nation-state")? Because, if so, then I would say:
As a Jew, the claim that Jews are not (or should not be) an ethnicity does not strike me as particularly antisemitic. In particular, it seems reasonable to define Judaism in terms of religious belief instead (even if this is not the majority view among Jews).
People = ethnicity, yes. And I'd argue that it's systematically antisemitic in the same way that it's systematically racist to like racial minorities as individuals but oppose or deny their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness (and that's a view that members of those racial minorities themselves can hold).
I don't want to mischaracterize your opinion, but it sounds like you're arguing that it's antisemitic to reject a claim along the lines of "Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state because of the historical kingdoms of Israel and Judah"
I think it's a misunderstanding to characterize the Jewish historical claim to the Land of Israel (which, to be clear, does not negate the Palestinian historical claim to the same land -- two peoples can both have legitimate historical claims to the same land) as based on the Bible or the Davidic kingdoms. The Bible is obviously a matter of faith, and there are historical questions re the precise nature of the ancient Davidic kingdoms. But it is historically and archeologically quite clear that the Jews were the primary occupants of the area during the Greco-Roman eras, until the Romans expelled the Jews. So the Jewish right to a national home in Israel (not to be confused with a theocratic state, and not to be confused with exclusive rights to all of the traditional Land of Israel) is based on more recent, historically-verifiable ties and the lack of a national home elsewhere.
I would say roughly 98% of Zionists do not base Israel’s right to exist on ancient history. (Some will talk about it but that’s not their basis for Israel’s legitimacy). And I know a lot of Zionists, including a lot of fully crazy ones.
It gets really dicey really quickly. What standard can you possibly apply that would only fit Israel but not 100 other countries?
Now it’s entirely possible that you (the putative israel delegitimizer) are just not thinking this through, and are stubborn enough that you won’t back down even when this is pointed out to you, and you are comfortable with the fact that this talking point of illegitimacy was invented by actual genocidal Arab nationalists. And I mean that - it really is possible, with decent probability, that someone is like that. People are stubborn and don’t think things through and are generally flawed.
But… at that point it’s also reasonably likely they are uniquely opposed to Israel existing for less savory reasons.
TBF, some people have tried to use a similar logic to delegitimize countries such as the USA and Australia, arguing that they should be "given back" to their native inhabitants.
Not to derail but the "We acknowledge this event is on Tongva land" thing progressives like to do now bugs me a lot and I've been trying for a while to think about whether there's a rational reason or if it's just a reaction on my part. I guess "delegitimization" is a good word for it—it seems like just a hollow rhetorical gesture that is both radical in what it implies and safe in what practically follows from it. But I acknowledge I might just be a grumpy white guy about it.
It's all performative. The folks who hold (correctly!) that the US stole all the land from the indigenous folks aren't rushing to hand over everything they own to those folks and go, I don't know, somewhere else.
My company, the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, sold its land to the city which built the very lovely Tongva Park, you know. because the Tongva people once lived there. It's very nice to hang out in and see lots and lots of people with not a Tongvan in sight.
I acknowledge that there is some academic disagreement about whether or not war and territory annexation is a thing back to prehistory, but my read is that all land in the world has been violently taken many, many, many, many, many times. If the most recent time it was violently taken is illegitimate, the previous owners were almost certainly just as illegitimate.
I don't know if I'd say "just as illegitimate"—I think it makes sense to say that as civilization develops, so does our sense of morality, continuous ownership, etc. If we decided to conquer Newfoundland or something today, that would be to my mind less legitimate than whatever primeval first conquest happened there. But your general point is well taken (and of course my framing runs into problematic "what do you mean 'more developed civilization,' Kemo Sabe?" territory).
Yeah, I don't know where the cutoff exactly is, but I agree, if we decided to conquer Newfoundland today, it would be less legitimate.
I was remembering when my wife was trying to build some affordable housing in San Jose and the meeting started off saying that we acknowledge that this is Ohlone land, which caused me to roll my eyes. So apparently my cutoff for not caring about legitimacy is somewhere between "right now" and "250 years ago."
I've been joking to people for a while that the next wacky leftist activist movement in the same vein as "defund the police" will be the "rename America" movement, since Amerigo Vespucci was a white colonizer.
If that ever happens IRL and if politicians actually start nodding toward whatever the proposed alternate terminology is, we'll have reactionary domination of government for the next 50 years.
That's not a "progressive thing". Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister of Australia, is the head of the Liberal part (i.e. right-wing) and leads the Coalition with the Nationals (even more right-wing).
He's not a progressive.
He *always* starts by acknowledging the traditional owners. See here a transcript of a speech he gave about Israel which starts out with:
"Thank you very much. Please be seated. Shalom. It’s wonderful to be here with you all this evening.
"I want to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we gather, the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation."
I think with places like the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia you just have to properly acknowledge that we are in fact settler-colonial societies, and you mitigate this as much as possible by recognizing the rights of native political entities to the extent they still exist (a big deal at least in the U.S., Canada, and N.Z.) and treating the country as a multi-ethnic society rather than a nation-state of one settler people.
China is a settler-colonial entity, they just got started a lot sooner. That's what's happening in Tibet and Xinjiang, that's why a bunch of peoples live in Southeast Asia, etc.
Well one can certainly argue that portions of China involve Han Chinese colonization of other peoples (this also applies to a number of countries in Europe), but no one argues that there shouldn't be a legitimate nation-state of China within at least a large portion of the territory of the current PRC. Can't say that about world opinions re Israel. Saying that Israel is a legitimate nation-state that is wrongly colonizing Palestinian parts of the West Bank is different than saying Israel is an illegitimate settler-colonial entity.
It’s a ridiculous talking point invented by the losers of Israel’s many wars against Arab countries who turned to activism when they realized 1948 was the high water mark of their relative strength. I don’t understand how anyone says this stuff with a straight face.
That meme was unadulterated brain cancer in meme form, wrapped up with a nice picture of two ladies drinking tea, and it deserved more explicit condemnation than it got.
He was just being consistent with the long history of right-wing Republicans claiming to deplore Middle Eastern regimes but simultaneously rejecting the idea of letting in any dissidents from those countries. The Don Jr. Skittles episode being a particularly egregious edition of that.
He was being careful not to cross the anti-immigration wing of his party (that's like, 90% of the base these days) is what he was doing. I have to say he handled his craven decision perfectly, from a messaging standpoint: A) he avoided any potential charges of being insufficiently restrictionist in his immigration politics and B) he managed to blame the Chinese Communist Party. Well-played!
Matt, of course, is right that's the there's nothing intrinsically racist (in the least) about criticism of the actions of the government of the PRC. I do think it bears mentioning, though (not that there's much that can be done about it) that, flowing from white privilege in the US is the notion that some people are "visible" minorities. Americans of Russian heritage, for instance, never came in for much abuse during the Cold War. German-Americans caught some grief during the First World War, but they weren't interned, and during WW2 as far as I know their ethnicity was barely a thing. (I mean, Eisenhower was German-American!). Something very different was experienced by Americans of Japanese heritage. Anyway, this is a long-winded way of getting up to my main point, which is: Chinese-Americans (and Asian Americans in general and Asian residents of the US who aren't citizens yet) probably are pretty vulnerable to various kinds of ugliness because of their non-whiteness. I'm glad the current administration in Washington seems sensitive to these concerns. The previous administration appeared to think lack of sensitivity on this score was a net vote gainer for them.
There was a good amount of hysteria against German-Americans in WWI, including a mass killing of dogs of German breeds in Columbus, OH, I think. (There is a good WWI documentary series on PBS which I recommend.) There were also people interned in Fort Oglethorpe, GA (and other places I think) for crimes like being the conductor of a symphonic orchestra that played songs by German composers.
I think there's something to the point though, that by WW2 times nothing like that happened with Germans but did happen with the Japanese. That may be partially because German-Americans spent the inter-war years accelerating their assimilation by shutting down German-language schools, clubs, radio stations, etc...and a much larger percentage had been born in the US than had the Japanese-Americans. But it's unlikely that that explains all of it
I agree with you about WWII and the different treatment towards people of Japanese ancestry vs people of German/Italian ancestry. I just wanted to point out that German internment existed during WWI.
Some China issues are pretty one-sided, but the lab-leak virus possibilities bring the extra difficulty that the Wuhan researchers are well-integrated with American colleagues, and have received NIH and other American assistance and funding. Several of our famous names are involved. So if we discover that millions of deaths and trillions of lost income are the results of a little scientific hubris, we're in it together. And, although this shades into conspiracy stuff, the line between biowarfare at Camp Detrick and medical science at NIH has never been entirely clear. This will have to be unpacked with great care, which is probably why Biden asked the intelligence agencies to be responsible for the unpacking.
To start off with, I'm just going to shill and say that this is an excellent piece.
There is a lot to unpack here, but beyond any specific policy positions on China, Israel or whatever else, the injunction to ignore the intent behind any argument does not help the discourse move forward in a productive fashion; intent is important, and differentiating between good faith arguments and bad faith ones makes it easier to differentiate between good arguments and bad ones.
Liberals like me are probably more prone to falling into this trap, which leads to self-censorship or hypocritical-seeming positions on things like far from progressive religions ideals and practices.
Thanks once again for a well-informed voice of sanity. I hadn't known about the goofy WHO disease naming rules. Most of the rest is unsurprising if sad; thanks for putting it all together.
Are those rules goofy? I don't know. When I was young, all hurricanes had female names. Then they switched to names from both genders. A bit odd at first, but now it's totally fine.
"COVID" is a perfectly useful name. Why would we insist, or desire, to apply a name that could cause unnecessary difficulties?
(However, being a California resident, don't get me started on wildfire names. "LNU Lighting Complex Fire" "SQF Complex Fire" "Camp Fire" (*Camp* Fire?!?) Sheesh.)
I see from Matt's posting that WHO objects to the universally-used terms "Chagas Disease" and "Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease" despite their virtually universal use among practitioners and researchers. It objects to "Lyme Disease" and "MERS," both of which are in general use, and "Legionnaire's disease" (caused by the Legionella bacterium); are we now to rename the bacterium to humor the WHO?
Meanwhile, the WHO waited until March 11 2020 to declare COVID-19 a pandemic. Indeed there may be some cases where the WHO nomenclature guides might be useful or appropriate, but I'd say the naming rules exemplify an apparent focus on cosmetics over proper execution of their core task. "Goofy" is the word that came to my mind. Perhaps fairer would be to say instead that "likely for political reasons linked to the nature of the WHO, it devotes unreasonable amounts of time and energy on trivial issues while executing its core tasks inefficiently and sometimes poorly."
Letting hurricanes have names from both genders was good because it creates a natural experiment that shows that female hurricanes are deadlier https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8782 (this paper is mostly about the lab experiments though)
The rules aren’t goofy; it doesn’t make any sense to name new diseases based on an early hypothesis about its origins or initial infected cohort since these turn out to be wrong almost every time: the Spanish Flu wasn’t from Spain, swine flu doesn’t necessarily come directly from pigs, etc. These folk names often spur useless folk practices that compete for people’s attention with real public health recommendation - how many people stopped drinking Corona in 2020?
I don't disagree but I do find it humorous that I haven't seen any fervor the other way over labeling mutations as the "UK variant" or "South African variant". They're not official monikers but they are used in the media all the time.
It’s actually something we’re talking about in the community, a lot of virologists have stressed the loci codes over geographical names, and the WHO’s new guidance is to assign new variants one of a sequence of Greek letters.
I’d heard the opposite, but even if that was an urban legend it’s still proof of the concept: we’re wasting attention on Corona beer for reasons entirely and only due to the coincidental name of the disease.
Agree governments should be criticized for bad actions and that doing so is not racist but disagree that Trump bears no responsibility for antiAsian attacks. He did not focus his criticism on the Chinese government- he repeatedly threw out taunts directed at Chinese people, signaling to all the bullies that it was okay to attack that group. Like January 6, he stirred up hate among the weak minded and then pointed them in the direction he wanted. That’s how he works.
Many of thorns are hidden here. MY gets to this position because 1) he wants America to pursue its national interest and 2) he can’t admit to being racist. (These days, anyone who doesn’t want to get cancelled must pretend that racism is binary and all racism is bad. MY would totally get slammed on Twitter if he admitted racism is a spectrum and that he doesn’t care to sit near the non-racist poll because he likes markets, academic and professional competition, and order). Accordingly, MY denies that there is an American race so he can have it both ways.
Unfortunately, this ignores a lot of history.
Through the 1980s, almost all American political, military, and foreign policy elites were white. The boundary of whiteness is fuzzy and has expanded over the years to include not only Wasps, but those of Irish, Polish, Italian and Jewish extraction. It is expanding today to include many Latinos and Asians. Edge cases include Barack Obama and even Kamala Harris.
Whiteness has explanatory power. It explains the ethnic cleansing of native Americans on the frontier, the internment of Japanese (but not German) Americans during world war two, most of post-reconstruction Southern politics, and the stark polarization of the electorate after Obama’s election. Collective effort to perpetuate a hierarchy between white and non-white (and to tweak these categories in convenient ways) is a core theme in American politics.
It is naive to say that this continuity has ended merely because we have had a mixed race president and vice president. Race still explains a lot. Most voters, not just a handful of deplorables, view the world in somewhat racist terms. The logic of nationalism can inspire racist whites to cheer for black athletes because they are American. It can inspire racist whites to laud the sacrifices of black GIs (while hating “those people). Nationalism is not strictly or necessarily racist. However, the correlation between nationalism and racism is pretty strong, strong enough that those who preach nationalism should admit that their policies will activate and enable racists. The question is to what degree.
No one disputes that racism is at the core of one version of nationalism, and that this version of nationalism animates one thread of American history; that's what the mention of Horatio Seymour's campaign was about.
I think Matt's point is that there is another nationalist narrative available for us to activate if we so choose, viz. the narrative of America as an idea and not a nation. Pace the determined counter-reading of anti-racists, this narrative holds the mainstream place in American life, which is why it's embedded in the civic liturgy led by every modern president except the shitty orange one.
Its a good narrative, not least because it's often true! Not only is it an entertaining trope of war movies that the cohesive fighting unit starts out as a ragtag band of ethnic stereotypes, it's actually a more-or-less accurate description of the American military! My rifle platoon in Iraq literally included a Dominican b-boy from the Bronx, a teetotaling Mormon kid, an Iowa farmboy, a Korean-American from LA, etc.
As someone on the left (at least in my head), that is one reason why I find the new anti-racism so annoying and wrong-headed. Injecting "ACKCHYUALLY America is about white supremacy" into the normie discourse only increases the salience of race in politics, when what we should be doing is decreasing it.
The strange property of socially constructed constructed identities, like racial/ethnic categories, is that the more attention you pay to them and, most of all, the more you make them legally or economically relevant in *material* ways, the more "real" and prominent they become in people's minds. This is a pretty well accepted account of identity formation that I remember learning about in cultural studies and critical classes as having significant progressive implications, implications that today often seem completely lost on the very activists who claim they are trying to move past these divisions.
Today's antiracist activists often seem to advocate policies that, if the end goal is to move past racist thinking, are the opposite of what you'd do if your policies were informed by the most persuasive theoretical and empirical work on the social construction of identities, and how they do or don't shape behavior.
I agree with most of Phil’s comment. The unanswered question is to what extent “civic liturgy” nationalism promotes or enables meaner forms of nationalism. Gun manufacturers enable homicide without intending to. The effects of civic liturgy nationalism are an emperical question that cannot be answered by simply by examining the intentions of respectable nationalists.
I would imagine just due to the downstream policy/philosophical conflicts between civic nationalism and racial/religious nationalism, that there is not a lot of overlap or exacerbation. They seem mutually exclusive.
To me the greatest advantage of civic nationalism to offer a national story and sense of identity to broader populace before racial nationalism swoops in and fills the void.
Civic nationalism is a recent vintage. Maybe you are right, but let me ask this. Was US participation in the Vietnam War an expression of civic nationalism or ethnic nationalism? We certainly weren’t fighting to keep Vietnam a white man’s country and we fought with a racially integrated army. Our army was more integrated than our schools. And yet the nationalist impulse spawned excessive deference to generals and DOD intellectuals and their war mongering, and this killed a million or so Vietnamese for nothing.
History is messy and the categories you posit do not neatly track reality.
Yeah, the OP is obviously using “whiteness” as some sort of bizarre term of art that is extremely confusing and imho pointlessly provocative. I don’t know, but I think that Harris or Obama would be deeply confused at best to hear themselves referred to as white.
Nationalism is simply the process of constructing a national identity and shared sense of community. If you think the United States should have a national identity and shared sense of community that unites Americans, then you believe in US nationalism. And if you don't, well that's a whole other set of issues.
The specific values and content of it are up to us though - will it be racist and exclusionary, or open and inclusive, joinable by anyone? Better angels or darker angels, to paraphrase Lincoln. There's no shame in consciously engaging in the work of imagining and constructing a US national identity we can all be proud of - and being proud of it. In fact, it's a naive dead end to think you can simply recuse yourself from the project of nation-building, because without a national identity we won't have a country - or someone else's darker vision of what our national identity should be will prevail.
> Nationalism is simply the process of constructing a national identity and shared sense of community. If you think the United States should have a national identity and shared sense of community that unites Americans, then you believe in US nationalism.
Nationalism is not just about creating an identity and community. It's also about the superiority of that identity and community above other identities and communities. That's what is disturbing about the ad above. It's about directing that community in an antagonistic direction towards an evil other.
I don't agree that nationalism inherently means that one's identity is superior to other identities, just that it offers unique and irreplaceable value. I don't think that the American democratic identity is in some way better than the British one—there are things I think they should do more like us but there are things I think we should do more like them. But I still take national pride in certain American accomplishments, traditions, etc. that are unique to us, just as a British person does with their own national accomplishments, traditions, etc.
That said, sometimes one nation really is behaving worse than another! I think China is being worse than the United States right now, and it's being *way* worse than what I see as the American ideal (that is, while America needs to improve a *lot,* almost all the ways I think it should improve would make it less like the Xi regime—more tolerant, more focused on human rights, more altruistic). If there's anything in the ad above that you think suggests that there's something bad about the Chinese national character, then I would agree that's bad, but I don't see it that way (though I'll certainly listen to arguments).
Also, it’s possible to believe something is “the best” while acknowledging that that’s your subjective opinion and entails no normative consequences at all. I reiterate what I said above: people who can’t handle this idea (and consequently think that nationalism *entails* racism or jingo-ism or WWI or WWII or any of that) should consider growing up.
> I don't agree that nationalism inherently means that one's identity is superior to other identities, just that it offers unique and irreplaceable value.
I mean, you can of course use the word nationalism to mean whatever you want, but that's not what most people mean when they use the word or understand when they hear it. The primacy of the national identity is a core part of what the word means in common usage.
Certainly nationalism can entail a sense of outright superiority over other nations, but I don't think that's inherent in the core definition—otherwise we wouldn't need words like jingoism, chauvinism, etc. Our host is someone who espouses American nationalism while also criticizing a lot about America and pointing to ways in which we should be more like other countries. And again, I would be interested in your take on how the Biden ad evokes a sense of inherent American superiority (if that's what you're claiming) over the Chinese national identity.
I don't think I've ever seen MY claim the label of nationalism. (I also don't read everything he writes)
> otherwise we wouldn't need words like jingoism, chauvinism, etc
Jingoism specifically refers to an aggessive foreign policy that arises out of nationalism. American nationalism tends to be kind of jingoistic, but nationalism is not inherently jingoistic. You could go the route of isolationism where you try to cut yourself off from the inferior outside world.
Chauvinism is not specific to national identity. It refers more generally to a prejudiced in-group view. So nationalism is a form of chauvinism, but not the only one. For instance, a man believing that men are superior to women is a form of chauvinism.
As I said, you can use the word however you want, but you should be prepared to then spend a bunch of time explaining that you don't mean what people will likely understand by it. This person here makes a big chunk of the argument I am making coming from an unexpected direction: https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/the-problem-nationalism
> And again, I would be interested in your take on how the Biden ad evokes a sense of inherent American superiority (if that's what you're claiming) over the Chinese national identity.
Looking at it again, I think it is there, but it's not as bad as I originally thought. (I think the ad is just choke-full of bad takes which probably made me amplify how bad this one aspect is.) But basically, the ad seems to be an attempt to associate Trump to China in order to exploit negative associations people have with China. Nationalism is not the only reason for having negative associations with China, but it is an important part of the package.
Like all isms, in practice, it ends up being more about the direction given the status quo. So given that Xinjiang is not an independent country, most Uyghur nationalists are going to be mostly about Xinjiang deserving autonomy from China. If Xinjiang became independent, I expect a lot of nationalists would stop being nationalists. But the ones who remained nationalists would be the ones who think Xinjiang is superior to China.
Adults can handle appreciating something without declaring that it is OBJECTIVELY INFERIOR to all other forms of that thing. You should try growing up.
Also, I'm curious, were you born here? How do you deal with the possibility that you might believe America is the best only because you were born here and it's just been a part of your upbringing that it is?
I'm originally from France which has always had a very assimilationist policy. Yet, people often consider themselves as being from the country their families come from. For instance, it's not entirely uncommon for a soccer match between Algeria and France to feature just as many French citizens on the Algerian side and the French side. I recall a conversation in particular where someone whose family had been in France and French citizens for generations talk about me as "French" in contrast to them. Basically, assimilating people is hard and it's not entirely surprising the US system stopped working at some point...
Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "the best". On one thread, you seem to be saying that America is the best because of something about its history, art, culture, writing, etc... And here you're saying that if you were born French, you would think France was the best. But all those facts about American history, art, culture, writing, etc would still be true if you were born French. So are you saying that if you were born French, you would be wrong about which country is best? Do you think French people who believe that France is the best are wrong?
I like the people in my life and they live in the US. I like my job and it's in the US. I like some aspects of the culture of the bay area which is in the US. Basically, living in the US is nice for me and since I live here, the government gets to affect me and so I think I should get a say in what the government does.
It's also not as though I can think of another country whose identity and political community I would consider superior to other communities and identities and I have to live somewhere...
First I would say I was mostly using self-deprecating humor to signal that my own lack of attachment to patriotism is just that. It's a thing I do and if you do something different, then that's fine.
Second, the bay area stereotype is profoundly weird by national standards which is what I was referring to.
Third, blue tribe membership is not controlled exclusively by attitudes towards patriotism.
If you do think that America's current political identity/community is the best, doesn't that imply that we should allow very few immigrants, so as to avoid tainting our superior culture with that of foreigners? (To be clear, I don't agree with this viewpoint at all, but immigration restrictionism seems like a logical outgrowth of nationalism, and empirically the two have historically been strongly correlated)
I both believe America is the best and we can allows lots of immigrants without seriously compromising that fact (in fact they go together). Because the immigrants who come are also firm believers in it. While I know some may not like Cato, here's the first thing I found on google that shows immigrants make as good or better Americans in terms of patriotism and support for institutions: https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/immigrants-recognize-american-greatness-immigrants
Nationalism and racism both share the belief that some people are more important than others. Furthermore, the in group often looks similar in skin color and/or dress. Relatively few pan-ethnic nationalisms have lasted long. It’s instructive that Austria divided its monarchy to let two locally dominant ethnic groups rule rather than build a cult of personality around Franz Joseph II or the battle of Leipzig.
You are aware that the United States is a nation-state, right? Are you saying it shouldn't be one, or that we shouldn't give priority to the needs of US citizens over those of people elsewhere when the two conflict? Or that the US as a nation won't last unless we make it only for one ethnic group? Not sure what your point is.
Ok - but at the end of the day you still have to have a place in the public discourse for criticizing China, or criticizing Israel or the Palestinians. It's never going to be the case that every country across the globe is getting along perfectly with the US, and we can't shut off all our international criticism because it **could** be linked to racism in some way.
Although racism is still around, it's just as true that we, as a country, our capable of acting in non-racist ways. That is one of the things that the election of Obama and Harris showed and it's one of things the cheering for black athletes example shows. So fair international criticism of countries that aren't "white" by an American definition is also possible, and we should be careful to do our best to distinguish that fair criticism from times when it actually is racist. That's the way I read Matt's post and I agree with it
I’m not saying I’m not naive to think so. But I read this:
“The logic of nationalism can inspire racist whites to cheer for black athletes because they are American.“
And think “well...that’s good isn’t it?” So why am I wrong to think that? Is it that the racist’s sense of unity would begin and end with sports? That this unity excuses the rest of the racism in their life? I think if something small like sports could unify and bring national harmony among races beyond just sports, that this would be good. But you might be seeing something I’m not.
I think it's hard to overestimate the impact of Bear Bryant's efforts to integrate the Alabama football team on the course of race relations in the South. It hardly solved everything, but the cognitive dissonance of white racists rooting for Black football players did act like an acid on long-held cultural attitudes, and even power structures.
And of course he did this out of self-interest, in the desire to keep the team competitive, rather than out of good will. But, as Adam Smith so ably laid out, that's a very very good thing.
I think it's pretty easy to overestimate the impact, actually. The vast majority of white Alabamans voted for an explicitly racist president, twice, so their commitment to racial equality seems pretty thin. There's a tendency among the civic nationalist crowd towards excessive optimism about race relations; it's worth resisting.
"Whiteness" is not a reference to the race of specific individuals but to the unifying theme of a political project to privilege white people and disadvantage others. White abolitionists were not abolitionists because they were white. If the purpose of abolitionism was not only to eliminate slavery and give black people full citizenship rights but to create black hegemony, then "blackness" would have explanatory power in this counterfactual brand of abolitionism
But there were also (free) black abolitionists and it's not clear how many saw themselves as superior - perhaps those who advocated repatriation to Africa (although that may have been a political calculation to disarm racist arguments against abolition
“‘Whiteness’ is not a reference to the race of specific individuals but to the unifying theme of a political project to privilege white people and disadvantage others.”
Are the “white people” not “specific individuals”?
"Whiteness" in this context is not referring to race per se but to the political project of racists. That the project aspired to promote the interests of white people over others does not mean that all white people were in favor of this project or were responsible for it. The Nazis were devoted to the project of Aryan superiority and considered most other Northern Europeans to be Aryan. The fact that many "Aryans" opposed the Nazis doesn't mean that the Nazism was not built around "Aryan-ness".
But no one talks about "Aryan-ness". They talk about Nazis and Nazism. In the same way it's much clearer to talk about racists leading this political project rather than this abstracted and obscure notion of "whiteness".
"Whiteness" is about creating a white identity. Strictly speaking, it's not racist per se, but it's a necessary predicate for white supremacy. It's how the sausage gets made.
Where do you see Barack Obama and Kamala Harris as "edge cases" for whiteness? I think I read a lot of opinions all over the political spectrum and I have never come across any hint that they're white in any way.
Yes, as far as I could see, much was made both by themselves and others of their respective race(s), with a lot of commentary (much of it positive) centred around them being specifically *non* white.
Well, yes, but mixed-race people are not at all a new phenomenon and I don't think they've ever been considered white in America. And I don't see where Obama or Harris have changed that at all.
“However, the correlation between nationalism and racism is pretty strong, strong enough that those who preach nationalism should admit that their policies will activate and enable racists.” You do realize that the entire thrust of the post is that this shouldn’t be a barrier right? Like Matt wrote this whole post to explain why this shouldn’t stop someone from preaching nationalism, and it’s just fine straight over your head.
Upthread you said “ Nationalism and racism both share the belief that some people are more important than others.” Is that meant to suggest that believing that some people are more important than others is a morally neutral stance?
Matt is arguing that nationalism isn’t racism. Until he says something like “nationalism is a close cousin and sometimes cause of racism” I’ll disagree. He’s too determined deflect charges of being racist adjacent to admit to being racist adjacent. But nationalism is racist adjacent in any coherent world view. Both share the key premise that some people are more deserving of help and protectin than others, indeed possibly somehow better than others. This is not just a definitional matter, it is empirical. I am describing constellations of belief.
The flaw I was really arguing against is saying that racist is a binary category mainly so that every last instance of racism can be bad. Many things are a bit racist and good/acceptable because they have virtues which more then offset unfortunate racial implications. See, eg prisons, policing and private property.
I wonder. I mean yeah, that's probably right, but the *really* hardcore racists like to venerate other states (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy) and cultures (the whole Celtic/Norse runes thing) in what seems like a deliberate disdain for one's actual nation. Though I guess Orwell would say that's just another sort of nationalism.
I think the background issue, and one that Matt has discussed at length before, is the totalizing force of racial concerns in the US. I don't have a tally, but it seems like most issues get sucked into the racism/anti-racism conversation and can never fully escape. Then we have levels and levels of conversations about the conversations.
I want to add an anecdote from my DC NGO job perspective. Some think tanks and NGOs are in a mini arms race to copyright language around growing tension with China. Sharp power, corrosive capital, malign influence, etc. They're trying to control the IP and branding for what they see as a long term funding opportunity.
Through my little window, I see management (usually people with some life experience during the cold war) tending to want to use slightly more inflammatory language and frame these terms around china specifically. I also see the younger employees at orgs, often the people who will have to do the bulk of the work on drafting reports etc, using the leverage they have to soften the terms and make them focused of authoritarian governments generally. Management had usually conceded and defined the terms more generally. At least one former colleague quit the industry over this issue though.
It all makes me a bit leery about this sense of building tension and cynical about the small skirmishes over branding. NGOs sense that there's a carrot waiting for them if they start to produce reports that use language that rachets up tension rather than describes reality in clear terms.
None of this is to say that China has played nice, but I'm just feeling angst over the language.
One interesting thing about this whole debate is that people seem very fixated on the concept that being anti-China translates into anti-Asian American. There certainly may be backlash (plenty of Koreans went to internment camps during WWII), but most Asian countries are super hawkish on China (eg https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/poll-most-south-koreans-are-wary-china-175989 ). Probably because the grandparents that Nina Luo referred to were soldiers in the army (or contemporaries of soldiers in the army) that threatened Korea and other Asian countries in the 50s and 60s.
To the extent I get angry about incorrect discourse, it's when Chinese Americans claim to speak for all Asian Americans...
A bit more data on this: both Japan and South Korea are more "unfavorable" (Japan is net negative 77%!!!!) on China than the US. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-in-many-countries/
I live in Vietnam where anti-Chinese sentiment is extremely high. To the point where there are no "Chinese" restaurants. They will go out of their way to say they are a Cantonese restaurant or a Shandong restaurant or even "We serve a variety of Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, and Sichuan food". Anything but "Chinese".
It's true that the politics of East Asia among East Asian people are actually nearly incomprehensible to the discourse. Then I see my School's few Asian students who are almost entirely Filipino taunted on the school yard over the course of the year when kids think adults aren't listening.
I don't quite know what to do with the fact that it's really quite hard for most people to distinguish between the nation and the state. Once you release those furies it's very hard to make any sense of anything.
yeah totally. I think it's super ironic that a bunch of Koreans were interned because the US was at war with Japan, when Japan was simultaneously committing terrible atrocities in Korea.
But I think the point here is not "pretend that there is no racism against all Asians as a result of anti-China discourse." I think similar to Matt's evergreen point that "don't assume Asian American activists are representative of all Asians," there is also "don't assume that Chinese Americans are representative of all Asian Americans" or, similarly, that an anti-China policy position is inherently anti-Asian.
Anecdotally, Asian Americans joke a lot about how their parents are probably more racist towards other Asian ethnicities than white Americans would ever understand...
or even, if you believe that not all prejudice is racism... for decades my US-residing Korean grandparents refused to buy Japanese cars (and I am sure would have done the same had there been a widely-available Chinese car in the US).
I'm glad you have a picture because otherwise i'd be thoroughly confused by 4 posts in a row that all seem like an Andrew talking with himself. There are two Dan S commentators without pictures on this forum and sometimes they get into discussions with each other; it's confusing.
There are 2 Dan Ss? Damn, this explains a few things.
I totally take your point. I was an English teacher in Seoul and Shanghai for years. The name Asian American is weird considering how raw feelings are between pretty much all Asian nations with China and Japan.
Where it bothers me is some of the anti-Chinese stuff doesn't seem to have any clear point but being rude.
yeah absolutely. btw, I don't want any of the above to come across as justifying any kind of prejudice. I don't think it is a good thing that a lot of Koreans really hate Chinese (my wife is Chinese!). I just think one shouldn't react to warrantless OR "warranted" (not the right word, but I think you get the point) discrimination by saying "don't criticize China"
Where do you teach?
Outside Orlando Florida. My school is only like <10 % Asian and pretty close to zero Chinese.
The idea may be that the kind of people who make racist attacks on others just don't know or care about the distinction between people of Chinese background and other Asian-Americans. It's the same kind of thing as casually referring to Hispanic people as "Mexicans" or people from the Middle East as "Arabs".
well, or maybe a better example is the progressive pundits who were shocked that "Latinos" shifted towards Trump, a topic on which Matt has written quite a bit
One thing that would help a lot is simply to talk about "CCP" or "Chinese government" human right abuse and cover up of the COVID-19 outbreak, not "Chinese," "Israeli government" policy of allowing settlements in the Occupied Territories instead of "Israeli" policy. Of course the CCP and the parties forming the Israeli government WANT everyone living in those countries to support government policies. Our rhetoric should not assume much less promote their success.
One way to do this is to refer to the government as “Beijing” instead of “China” though this gets a bit complicated with Israel.
I'd keep the focus on the CCP. A competent, honest 'government" in China is no threat to liberal democratic countries at all.
Came here to comment something to this effect! I’d guess outside the Beltway most regular voters have zero trouble distinguishing between the people of a country and its government - especially when it’s an unelected authoritarian regime like the PRC. It’s only the actual racists and the people most neurotic about accidentally appearing racist who assume that criticism of a bad government must mean condemnation of its people. But it would cost politicians and media figures $0.00 to say “the Chinese government” instead of “China” when it would be more accurate to do so, and I think it’s worth being careful about that so as not to grow the ranks of the racists.
I disagree. Most people don't want to distinguish between the people of a country and its government. Most Americans like to suggest that government action is fully representative of all the people who live in different US states and they live in the same country! Its not different than all the people who like to lump together all the BLM protesters with the rioters or want to lump together all whites as being fundamentally racists.
People like to disparage groups - especially others. They will happily use whatever excuse is available to do so.
Interesting debate between a view of "most people" that's glass half-empty versus class half-full. I've met plenty of people with views that fall on either side - one of my last co-workers refused to travel to red states since trump's election, for example. I guess my take is that both of your descriptions correctly describe a lot of people, but I'm not sure which one describes "most" people.
I think people can be amazingly thoughtful and generous, especially in person. I also think people love to knock other people whether it be because of sports, location, style (or lack thereof), etc. Our host is a great example of both.
"[M]ost regular voters have zero trouble distinguishing between the people of a country and its government" -- I hope you're right about that! Even if that's true, though, another reason to be careful about this is that if I see a random person criticizing "China" when they mean "the Chinese government", I'm not a mind reader, *I* can't be sure that they aren't one of the small fraction who are confused about the distinction--and it only takes a little uncertainty to create a lot of nervousness.
Completely agree with this! I understand that "country X" is fewer syllables than "the government of country X", but I still loathe it when people use the former as shorthand for the latter in contexts like this, for all the obvious reasons. If you always say "China" when you mean "the CCP", how can I be sure you have a bright line in your head between the government and the ordinary humans who are stuck with it?
Criticizing China (for good reasons like human rights abuses or bad reasons like ‘Kung Flu!’) may have spillover into creating prejudice against Asian Americans as a whole, particularly the large population of Chinese people who come to the country as graduate students, high skilled workers, or both.
This is obviously, a bad thing. Yet I agree with Matt that it’s unavoidable if you want to have serious conversations about the wrongdoing of nations.
Nevertheless I have never encountered an immigrant graduate student, professor, or high skilled worker from any country who moved here thinking that there would be no bigotry. It’s something that is kind of known negative about the United States. It’s also, not really that easy to remove. What some young activists have gotten so right about this new push for equity is the idea of removing “systemic” barriers to equity.
If we want to make life in America better for recent Chinese immigrants/visa holders, then look at what can be done tangibly to remove systemic barriers that they face. These people deal with what is essentially a nightmare of alphabet soup in terms of getting a student visa, getting a temporary work visa, a permanent work visa, then like forever later a green card.
This makes them take grunt coder/quant jobs long after most have been promoted. They work long hours, and are overly dependent on their employers just to stay in the country.
When they finally make it, if they wish to use their high stable salary to move their parents closer to take care of them in their elder years, this is once again very difficult.
Look more closely at stuff like this. It will go a lot further to help Chinese people in this country than chasing down someone who said “Kung Flu” while drunk.
Re the idea that bigotry is a known negative of moving to the United States:
I can't imagine anyone planning to move anywhere in the world to a culture other than their own who would not expect to feel, at a minimum, somewhat alienated and "left out".
This would be the case with, say, a white American moving to Japan.
"Nevertheless I have never encountered an immigrant graduate student, professor, or high skilled worker from any country who moved here thinking that there would be no bigotry. It’s something that is kind of known negative about the United States."
FWIW, I live in Vietnam. A lot of Vietnamese emigrate to America. Even more want to. American bigotry is essentially completely unknown here. (Well, at least until the latest round of anti-Asian violence in the US made it into the news here.) So there's a data point. America, and living in America, is hyper-idealized and the ones who make it there send back a *very* whitewashed version of their lives. (Everyone is rich. Everyone has great jobs. Everyone is happy all the time. Everyone can buy everything they want. Everything is perfect in America. Don't you wish you could be here, too?)
The first time my (Vietnamese) wife went to the US for a 3-week holiday to visit my family, she was there three days before someone in a supermarket told her to stop stealing "our" jobs and go back home. Before that she had no idea that America was racist. She also doesn't understand TV shows like Lovecraft Country or the HBO Watchmen. She keeps asking "I don't understand, why are they doing that to him?" And I have to keep saying, "Because they are white and he is black."
Wow that’s new information. Hadn’t encountered that kind of “pure positivity” before.
I guess I will just say in defense of my nation.... That yes America has racism. But nothing like what happens in Lovecraft Country is happening today. No people of color in 2021 are sitting down at a diner only to be instantly chased out of town by a gun toting militia because they wanted a cheeseburger at the wrong place.
Some amount of proper criticism of CCP human right policies may rub off on Chinese grad students, but with carful use of language, this side effect should be minimizable.
I'm not really sure I agree with you about the power of carefully chosen language. It seems to me that people are going to draw the associations and implications that they have set up in their brains even if you carefully avoid giving them strict textual excuses.
(This is a general criticism I have of people's attempts to police language.)
>>>based on the (to the best of my knowledge, false) idea that bat-eating is some incredibly widespread Chinese practice<<<
I believe Matt is correct here. It's incredibly rare, I'm pretty sure. I've never seen it on a menu, and I've been all over this country. I've never even heard of people eating bat.* I'd bet my life bats are occasionally used as a food source *somewhere* in China (it's a big country!), but that's true of literally dozens of nations: bats have been an important source of meat for humans forever.
*I've never lived in a Western-bubble here, and thus haven't been spared exposure to some of the more exotic-seeming protein sources. I'm personally eaten wild boar, donkey, frog, snake, bamboo rat and (I was punked, and didn't know I was eating it!) dog in my near decade in China. I really do believe I'd have encountered bat by now were it a common foodstuff.
Also, forgot to mention: I think the consensus still holds that, if a natural zoonotic spillover was the source of the virus, an intermediary species was more likely than not involved, right? Or is that no longer the case? Anyway, if so, it would seem to coincide with the uncommonness of bats as a marketplace item for sale in China.
Coronaviruses don’t need an intermediate species.
True. But apparently the bulk of scientific community hold that an intermediary species was involved in this case:
https://www.bioworld.com/articles/503405-intermediary-host-species-likely-introduced-sars-cov-2-virus-says-who
I got cajoled in Hong Kong into eating chicken testicles. Pretty un-tasty.
Duck tongues for me in HK. I also didn't care for them. The donkey I had there was fine though.
Yeah we did a game once at dim sum where we ordered a few things we couldn't read off the menu. Ended up with boiled duck tongues. Not great.
The idea of unconscious bias is described as a “mindbug” in the book Blindspot. While the psychological phenomenon they’re describing is real, I can’t help but think the *idea* of unconscious bias in *others* is the more pernicious mindbug. It has totally warped our ability to interpret someone else’s claims or ideas on the merits, and instead motivates a certain set to be constantly on the lookout for evidence of other people’s latent bigotry.
It helps that if you can cast someone as racist, unfairly or not, lots of people will feel they don't have to engage with the merits of the person's argument.
Similarly, I have long noticed that there are some people who engage in discussion forums who have a shallow (and, ultimately, wrong) understanding of the Dunning–Kruger Effect and try to use it as a cudgel.
All sound points, but worth a reminder that some criticism of Israel involves delegitimization of Israel, which in my view is antisemitic. There is no "China isn't a county; it's a settler-colonial entity" comic circulating on Instagram.
I don’t think that anyone should delegitimize Israel, and I often speak up to defend Israel’s right to exist when my fellow Leftist friends speak in ways that suggest that Israel shouldn’t exist. (In fact, it *really* bothers me that so many people have strong opinions about Israel and Palestine despite knowing little-to-nothing about the last century of that region’s history.)
That said, I’m not sure that delegitimizing Israel is necessarily antisemitic. Like, I think my friends are being stupid and ignorant and simplistic—but not necessarily prejudiced. But I could be wrong about this, so why do you think delegitimizing Israel is necessarily antisemitic?
Not the biggest fan of Israel here, but I'm trying to think of another example where it might be at least somewhat okay to say that a nation shouldn't exist. That seems to me to be particularly disturbing in the case of Israel critics.
Is this because Israel looms so large in the US political discourse? Serbia, Kosovo, South Sudan, etc all have or recently had some contested status. None of them are very important to US domestic politics, but some people in the respective regions would probably say that those countries shouldn't exist.
The U.S. has fought mini-wars over Kosovo, which is far more direct military involvement than we've ever had in Israel!
Yes, which makes it pretty wild that Israel is prominent in the US political discourse than Kosovo
The Serbia-Kosovo issue has been mostly resolved, so it's less of an issue than it once was. Also, Israel isn't just a big political issue in the U.S., it's a big political issue in many countries in the world that have few if any Jews or Palestinians living there. Probably a combination of Zionism being a legitimately unique national-political movement, the U.N. being heavily involved for its entire existence, and Jerusalem mattering to a lot of people for religious reasons. Also a bit of oil diplomacy, Cold War politics, and antisemitism.
Well, during the 90's wasn't it an acceptable position to say that Yugoslavia shouldn't exist? (I'm thinking out loud here—I'm not trying to justify the "Israel shouldn't exist" claim and there could certainly be problems with the analogy.)
Was it really? In the US? Why?
Isn't that what the wars were over? Yugoslavia was a one-state collection of different Slavic nations. Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo wanted to leave Yugoslavia, reducing it to Serbia & Montenegro (which is what happened). So supporting the separatists (which I think was the liberal consensus) meant supporting the end of the nation. Or, on the flip side, as Maggie points out above, people argued that Bosnia, Croatia, and especially Kosovo shouldn't exist as independent countries.
So, the liberal consensus was that having an entity for multiple ethnic groups can’t possibly work? I was expecting that to be the nationalist view, particularly given that there were no clean lines to separate different people within Yugoslavia, so displacement would definitely be needed.
Seems reasonable but worth noting that’s the opposite view of the Israel delegitimizers.
(I realize my use of "different Slavic nations" might be confusing there, since in that case I'm not using it as synonymous with "countries" but elsewhere I have. There I mean "nations" in the sense of "ethnic groups.")
I'd say that no nations should exist. The obvious best-case solution is one worldwide state, with total freedom of movement and universal democratic governance (this is very unlikely in the foreseeable future, of course, because most people have a really unfortunate degree of nationalism and don't favor unlimited immigration, and a bunch aren't fans of democracy either, but it's still the solution we should have in our heads as the ideal)
It's antisemitism against Jews as Jews (Communist-style) rather than antisemitism against Jews as people (Nazi-style). Delegitimizing Israel involves asserting that Jews have no historical rights or ties to the Land of Israel, which is delegitimizing Jews as a people. I believe that some people do this without believing that it's antisemitism, but it still is. Just like people who aren't prejudiced toward individual BIPOC people but have issues with distinct nonwhite cultural identities are expressing a form of racism, even if not intentionally so.
Would you describe a one-state solution where Israel/Palestine was a secular state (possibly with an Arab majority) as anti-Semitic? What if it recognized a right of return for Jews (and Palestinian Arabs)?
A good and fair question. In theory I don't think that a binational state that recognizes the legitimate, non-colonial historical ties of both Jews and Palestinian Arabs to the land is a problem from that standpoint. The main objection to a binational one-state solution is that it's highly impractical -- Belgium is probably the most successful such state in the world and even they have serious issues. But a one-state solution is often used as code for a single Palestinian state that might allow some Jews to stay as a former colonial minority of sorts, and in that case it has the same problem as delegitimizing Israel.
A federation like Bosnia might be a better model. There are some striking similarities: the Serbian portion is in two parts (like the West Bank and Gaza) and there's a district that belongs to both but is governed by neither (Brcko/Jerusalem?)
It would be hard to sell many Israelis on a binational peace plan of "be like Bosnia," even though it is true that Bosnia is doing relatively well compared to what one might have expected in the 1990s. I think most Israelis and Palestinians would prefer full sovereignty over parts of what they consider their homelands to limited sovereignty over all of the land. But the biggest problem is that neither side really believes that the other side wants peace, and without that neither a binational one-state nor a two-state solution will work.
It would depend on the details. If your reasoning is that “ethnostates” are bad, then you can start with dismantling every European country (to say nothing of China) and once you’re done with that we can discuss Israel, the one ethnostate serving an ethnicity that actually has been persecuted everywhere they’ve ever been.
If the reasoning is “because two states don’t work” then it’s more of an empirical discussion. In that case you're not anti-Semitic, you’re just very confused.
I can’t think of any other popular reasons.
Yeah, so a kind of systemic antisemitism. Not totally sure I agree, but I appreciate the thought and will continue to mull it over.
"delegitimizing Jews as a people" — I'm not sure what "people" is supposed to mean here. Is it roughly synonymous with ethnicity (or the nation in "nation-state")? Because, if so, then I would say:
As a Jew, the claim that Jews are not (or should not be) an ethnicity does not strike me as particularly antisemitic. In particular, it seems reasonable to define Judaism in terms of religious belief instead (even if this is not the majority view among Jews).
People = ethnicity, yes. And I'd argue that it's systematically antisemitic in the same way that it's systematically racist to like racial minorities as individuals but oppose or deny their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness (and that's a view that members of those racial minorities themselves can hold).
I don't want to mischaracterize your opinion, but it sounds like you're arguing that it's antisemitic to reject a claim along the lines of "Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state because of the historical kingdoms of Israel and Judah"
If so, why? If not, what am I misunderstanding?
I think it's a misunderstanding to characterize the Jewish historical claim to the Land of Israel (which, to be clear, does not negate the Palestinian historical claim to the same land -- two peoples can both have legitimate historical claims to the same land) as based on the Bible or the Davidic kingdoms. The Bible is obviously a matter of faith, and there are historical questions re the precise nature of the ancient Davidic kingdoms. But it is historically and archeologically quite clear that the Jews were the primary occupants of the area during the Greco-Roman eras, until the Romans expelled the Jews. So the Jewish right to a national home in Israel (not to be confused with a theocratic state, and not to be confused with exclusive rights to all of the traditional Land of Israel) is based on more recent, historically-verifiable ties and the lack of a national home elsewhere.
I would say roughly 98% of Zionists do not base Israel’s right to exist on ancient history. (Some will talk about it but that’s not their basis for Israel’s legitimacy). And I know a lot of Zionists, including a lot of fully crazy ones.
It gets really dicey really quickly. What standard can you possibly apply that would only fit Israel but not 100 other countries?
Now it’s entirely possible that you (the putative israel delegitimizer) are just not thinking this through, and are stubborn enough that you won’t back down even when this is pointed out to you, and you are comfortable with the fact that this talking point of illegitimacy was invented by actual genocidal Arab nationalists. And I mean that - it really is possible, with decent probability, that someone is like that. People are stubborn and don’t think things through and are generally flawed.
But… at that point it’s also reasonably likely they are uniquely opposed to Israel existing for less savory reasons.
TBF, some people have tried to use a similar logic to delegitimize countries such as the USA and Australia, arguing that they should be "given back" to their native inhabitants.
Not to derail but the "We acknowledge this event is on Tongva land" thing progressives like to do now bugs me a lot and I've been trying for a while to think about whether there's a rational reason or if it's just a reaction on my part. I guess "delegitimization" is a good word for it—it seems like just a hollow rhetorical gesture that is both radical in what it implies and safe in what practically follows from it. But I acknowledge I might just be a grumpy white guy about it.
It's all performative. The folks who hold (correctly!) that the US stole all the land from the indigenous folks aren't rushing to hand over everything they own to those folks and go, I don't know, somewhere else.
My company, the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, sold its land to the city which built the very lovely Tongva Park, you know. because the Tongva people once lived there. It's very nice to hang out in and see lots and lots of people with not a Tongvan in sight.
Give Europe back to the Neanderthals!
I acknowledge that there is some academic disagreement about whether or not war and territory annexation is a thing back to prehistory, but my read is that all land in the world has been violently taken many, many, many, many, many times. If the most recent time it was violently taken is illegitimate, the previous owners were almost certainly just as illegitimate.
I don't know if I'd say "just as illegitimate"—I think it makes sense to say that as civilization develops, so does our sense of morality, continuous ownership, etc. If we decided to conquer Newfoundland or something today, that would be to my mind less legitimate than whatever primeval first conquest happened there. But your general point is well taken (and of course my framing runs into problematic "what do you mean 'more developed civilization,' Kemo Sabe?" territory).
Yeah, I don't know where the cutoff exactly is, but I agree, if we decided to conquer Newfoundland today, it would be less legitimate.
I was remembering when my wife was trying to build some affordable housing in San Jose and the meeting started off saying that we acknowledge that this is Ohlone land, which caused me to roll my eyes. So apparently my cutoff for not caring about legitimacy is somewhere between "right now" and "250 years ago."
I've been joking to people for a while that the next wacky leftist activist movement in the same vein as "defund the police" will be the "rename America" movement, since Amerigo Vespucci was a white colonizer.
If that ever happens IRL and if politicians actually start nodding toward whatever the proposed alternate terminology is, we'll have reactionary domination of government for the next 50 years.
That's not a "progressive thing". Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister of Australia, is the head of the Liberal part (i.e. right-wing) and leads the Coalition with the Nationals (even more right-wing).
He's not a progressive.
He *always* starts by acknowledging the traditional owners. See here a transcript of a speech he gave about Israel which starts out with:
"Thank you very much. Please be seated. Shalom. It’s wonderful to be here with you all this evening.
"I want to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we gather, the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation."
I think with places like the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia you just have to properly acknowledge that we are in fact settler-colonial societies, and you mitigate this as much as possible by recognizing the rights of native political entities to the extent they still exist (a big deal at least in the U.S., Canada, and N.Z.) and treating the country as a multi-ethnic society rather than a nation-state of one settler people.
China is a settler-colonial entity, they just got started a lot sooner. That's what's happening in Tibet and Xinjiang, that's why a bunch of peoples live in Southeast Asia, etc.
Well one can certainly argue that portions of China involve Han Chinese colonization of other peoples (this also applies to a number of countries in Europe), but no one argues that there shouldn't be a legitimate nation-state of China within at least a large portion of the territory of the current PRC. Can't say that about world opinions re Israel. Saying that Israel is a legitimate nation-state that is wrongly colonizing Palestinian parts of the West Bank is different than saying Israel is an illegitimate settler-colonial entity.
It’s a ridiculous talking point invented by the losers of Israel’s many wars against Arab countries who turned to activism when they realized 1948 was the high water mark of their relative strength. I don’t understand how anyone says this stuff with a straight face.
That meme was unadulterated brain cancer in meme form, wrapped up with a nice picture of two ladies drinking tea, and it deserved more explicit condemnation than it got.
>>>If we give visas to people who’d like to depart post-democratic Hong Kong, many of them will take us up on that offer.<<<
As I'm sure some of you heard, this idea was floated on Capitol Hill and and true stand up guy and heroic opponent of Communism Ted Cruz shot it down.
A real profile in courage, that Senator Cruz.
He was just being consistent with the long history of right-wing Republicans claiming to deplore Middle Eastern regimes but simultaneously rejecting the idea of letting in any dissidents from those countries. The Don Jr. Skittles episode being a particularly egregious edition of that.
He was being careful not to cross the anti-immigration wing of his party (that's like, 90% of the base these days) is what he was doing. I have to say he handled his craven decision perfectly, from a messaging standpoint: A) he avoided any potential charges of being insufficiently restrictionist in his immigration politics and B) he managed to blame the Chinese Communist Party. Well-played!
You'd think the Republicans would be thrilled for America to add a bunch of new voters that hate socialism, after 2020.
Matt, of course, is right that's the there's nothing intrinsically racist (in the least) about criticism of the actions of the government of the PRC. I do think it bears mentioning, though (not that there's much that can be done about it) that, flowing from white privilege in the US is the notion that some people are "visible" minorities. Americans of Russian heritage, for instance, never came in for much abuse during the Cold War. German-Americans caught some grief during the First World War, but they weren't interned, and during WW2 as far as I know their ethnicity was barely a thing. (I mean, Eisenhower was German-American!). Something very different was experienced by Americans of Japanese heritage. Anyway, this is a long-winded way of getting up to my main point, which is: Chinese-Americans (and Asian Americans in general and Asian residents of the US who aren't citizens yet) probably are pretty vulnerable to various kinds of ugliness because of their non-whiteness. I'm glad the current administration in Washington seems sensitive to these concerns. The previous administration appeared to think lack of sensitivity on this score was a net vote gainer for them.
There was a good amount of hysteria against German-Americans in WWI, including a mass killing of dogs of German breeds in Columbus, OH, I think. (There is a good WWI documentary series on PBS which I recommend.) There were also people interned in Fort Oglethorpe, GA (and other places I think) for crimes like being the conductor of a symphonic orchestra that played songs by German composers.
I think there's something to the point though, that by WW2 times nothing like that happened with Germans but did happen with the Japanese. That may be partially because German-Americans spent the inter-war years accelerating their assimilation by shutting down German-language schools, clubs, radio stations, etc...and a much larger percentage had been born in the US than had the Japanese-Americans. But it's unlikely that that explains all of it
I agree with you about WWII and the different treatment towards people of Japanese ancestry vs people of German/Italian ancestry. I just wanted to point out that German internment existed during WWI.
Germans weren't interned? Don't be so America-centric https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-05/world-war-i-germany-fighting-the-huns-on-the-home-front/5638066
In case you don't have time to scroll down in that link, here's how Germans were portraed in many propaganda posters (including some American ones). Sure looks like they got off easy by being white... https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/56c57142c064e11ba1f0451eeaa98649?src
WW1 vs. WW2
And?
Some China issues are pretty one-sided, but the lab-leak virus possibilities bring the extra difficulty that the Wuhan researchers are well-integrated with American colleagues, and have received NIH and other American assistance and funding. Several of our famous names are involved. So if we discover that millions of deaths and trillions of lost income are the results of a little scientific hubris, we're in it together. And, although this shades into conspiracy stuff, the line between biowarfare at Camp Detrick and medical science at NIH has never been entirely clear. This will have to be unpacked with great care, which is probably why Biden asked the intelligence agencies to be responsible for the unpacking.
To start off with, I'm just going to shill and say that this is an excellent piece.
There is a lot to unpack here, but beyond any specific policy positions on China, Israel or whatever else, the injunction to ignore the intent behind any argument does not help the discourse move forward in a productive fashion; intent is important, and differentiating between good faith arguments and bad faith ones makes it easier to differentiate between good arguments and bad ones.
Liberals like me are probably more prone to falling into this trap, which leads to self-censorship or hypocritical-seeming positions on things like far from progressive religions ideals and practices.
*religious ideals and practices.
Are we ever going to get an edit function around here?
Thanks once again for a well-informed voice of sanity. I hadn't known about the goofy WHO disease naming rules. Most of the rest is unsurprising if sad; thanks for putting it all together.
Are those rules goofy? I don't know. When I was young, all hurricanes had female names. Then they switched to names from both genders. A bit odd at first, but now it's totally fine.
"COVID" is a perfectly useful name. Why would we insist, or desire, to apply a name that could cause unnecessary difficulties?
(However, being a California resident, don't get me started on wildfire names. "LNU Lighting Complex Fire" "SQF Complex Fire" "Camp Fire" (*Camp* Fire?!?) Sheesh.)
I see from Matt's posting that WHO objects to the universally-used terms "Chagas Disease" and "Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease" despite their virtually universal use among practitioners and researchers. It objects to "Lyme Disease" and "MERS," both of which are in general use, and "Legionnaire's disease" (caused by the Legionella bacterium); are we now to rename the bacterium to humor the WHO?
Meanwhile, the WHO waited until March 11 2020 to declare COVID-19 a pandemic. Indeed there may be some cases where the WHO nomenclature guides might be useful or appropriate, but I'd say the naming rules exemplify an apparent focus on cosmetics over proper execution of their core task. "Goofy" is the word that came to my mind. Perhaps fairer would be to say instead that "likely for political reasons linked to the nature of the WHO, it devotes unreasonable amounts of time and energy on trivial issues while executing its core tasks inefficiently and sometimes poorly."
Letting hurricanes have names from both genders was good because it creates a natural experiment that shows that female hurricanes are deadlier https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8782 (this paper is mostly about the lab experiments though)
...except that the paper you cite is crap: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212094715300517.
(/ht Andrew Gelman: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/04/02/himmicanes-and-hurricanes-update/. If you're going to cite a psych paper, make sure Gelman hasn't already pointed out all the flaws in it first.)
Yeah the paper is crap
The rules aren’t goofy; it doesn’t make any sense to name new diseases based on an early hypothesis about its origins or initial infected cohort since these turn out to be wrong almost every time: the Spanish Flu wasn’t from Spain, swine flu doesn’t necessarily come directly from pigs, etc. These folk names often spur useless folk practices that compete for people’s attention with real public health recommendation - how many people stopped drinking Corona in 2020?
I don't disagree but I do find it humorous that I haven't seen any fervor the other way over labeling mutations as the "UK variant" or "South African variant". They're not official monikers but they are used in the media all the time.
You'll never guess what I saw today on Facebook, posted by a seemingly unhappy Greek person: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/1/22462774/covid-19-variants-greek-alphabet-alpha-delta-country-names
It’s actually something we’re talking about in the community, a lot of virologists have stressed the loci codes over geographical names, and the WHO’s new guidance is to assign new variants one of a sequence of Greek letters.
The NextStrain team wanted to use bird names.
I can't tell if that last line is a joke. But demand for Corona beer in 2020 was the "strongest it has ever been" according to their CEO.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/no-coronas-beer-sales-did-not-suffer-from-the-coronavirus/
I’d heard the opposite, but even if that was an urban legend it’s still proof of the concept: we’re wasting attention on Corona beer for reasons entirely and only due to the coincidental name of the disease.
Agree governments should be criticized for bad actions and that doing so is not racist but disagree that Trump bears no responsibility for antiAsian attacks. He did not focus his criticism on the Chinese government- he repeatedly threw out taunts directed at Chinese people, signaling to all the bullies that it was okay to attack that group. Like January 6, he stirred up hate among the weak minded and then pointed them in the direction he wanted. That’s how he works.
“American Nationalism isn’t Racism.”
Many of thorns are hidden here. MY gets to this position because 1) he wants America to pursue its national interest and 2) he can’t admit to being racist. (These days, anyone who doesn’t want to get cancelled must pretend that racism is binary and all racism is bad. MY would totally get slammed on Twitter if he admitted racism is a spectrum and that he doesn’t care to sit near the non-racist poll because he likes markets, academic and professional competition, and order). Accordingly, MY denies that there is an American race so he can have it both ways.
Unfortunately, this ignores a lot of history.
Through the 1980s, almost all American political, military, and foreign policy elites were white. The boundary of whiteness is fuzzy and has expanded over the years to include not only Wasps, but those of Irish, Polish, Italian and Jewish extraction. It is expanding today to include many Latinos and Asians. Edge cases include Barack Obama and even Kamala Harris.
Whiteness has explanatory power. It explains the ethnic cleansing of native Americans on the frontier, the internment of Japanese (but not German) Americans during world war two, most of post-reconstruction Southern politics, and the stark polarization of the electorate after Obama’s election. Collective effort to perpetuate a hierarchy between white and non-white (and to tweak these categories in convenient ways) is a core theme in American politics.
It is naive to say that this continuity has ended merely because we have had a mixed race president and vice president. Race still explains a lot. Most voters, not just a handful of deplorables, view the world in somewhat racist terms. The logic of nationalism can inspire racist whites to cheer for black athletes because they are American. It can inspire racist whites to laud the sacrifices of black GIs (while hating “those people). Nationalism is not strictly or necessarily racist. However, the correlation between nationalism and racism is pretty strong, strong enough that those who preach nationalism should admit that their policies will activate and enable racists. The question is to what degree.
No one disputes that racism is at the core of one version of nationalism, and that this version of nationalism animates one thread of American history; that's what the mention of Horatio Seymour's campaign was about.
I think Matt's point is that there is another nationalist narrative available for us to activate if we so choose, viz. the narrative of America as an idea and not a nation. Pace the determined counter-reading of anti-racists, this narrative holds the mainstream place in American life, which is why it's embedded in the civic liturgy led by every modern president except the shitty orange one.
Its a good narrative, not least because it's often true! Not only is it an entertaining trope of war movies that the cohesive fighting unit starts out as a ragtag band of ethnic stereotypes, it's actually a more-or-less accurate description of the American military! My rifle platoon in Iraq literally included a Dominican b-boy from the Bronx, a teetotaling Mormon kid, an Iowa farmboy, a Korean-American from LA, etc.
As someone on the left (at least in my head), that is one reason why I find the new anti-racism so annoying and wrong-headed. Injecting "ACKCHYUALLY America is about white supremacy" into the normie discourse only increases the salience of race in politics, when what we should be doing is decreasing it.
The strange property of socially constructed constructed identities, like racial/ethnic categories, is that the more attention you pay to them and, most of all, the more you make them legally or economically relevant in *material* ways, the more "real" and prominent they become in people's minds. This is a pretty well accepted account of identity formation that I remember learning about in cultural studies and critical classes as having significant progressive implications, implications that today often seem completely lost on the very activists who claim they are trying to move past these divisions.
Today's antiracist activists often seem to advocate policies that, if the end goal is to move past racist thinking, are the opposite of what you'd do if your policies were informed by the most persuasive theoretical and empirical work on the social construction of identities, and how they do or don't shape behavior.
I agree with most of Phil’s comment. The unanswered question is to what extent “civic liturgy” nationalism promotes or enables meaner forms of nationalism. Gun manufacturers enable homicide without intending to. The effects of civic liturgy nationalism are an emperical question that cannot be answered by simply by examining the intentions of respectable nationalists.
I would imagine just due to the downstream policy/philosophical conflicts between civic nationalism and racial/religious nationalism, that there is not a lot of overlap or exacerbation. They seem mutually exclusive.
To me the greatest advantage of civic nationalism to offer a national story and sense of identity to broader populace before racial nationalism swoops in and fills the void.
Civic nationalism is a recent vintage. Maybe you are right, but let me ask this. Was US participation in the Vietnam War an expression of civic nationalism or ethnic nationalism? We certainly weren’t fighting to keep Vietnam a white man’s country and we fought with a racially integrated army. Our army was more integrated than our schools. And yet the nationalist impulse spawned excessive deference to generals and DOD intellectuals and their war mongering, and this killed a million or so Vietnamese for nothing.
History is messy and the categories you posit do not neatly track reality.
Yeah, the OP is obviously using “whiteness” as some sort of bizarre term of art that is extremely confusing and imho pointlessly provocative. I don’t know, but I think that Harris or Obama would be deeply confused at best to hear themselves referred to as white.
Nationalism is simply the process of constructing a national identity and shared sense of community. If you think the United States should have a national identity and shared sense of community that unites Americans, then you believe in US nationalism. And if you don't, well that's a whole other set of issues.
The specific values and content of it are up to us though - will it be racist and exclusionary, or open and inclusive, joinable by anyone? Better angels or darker angels, to paraphrase Lincoln. There's no shame in consciously engaging in the work of imagining and constructing a US national identity we can all be proud of - and being proud of it. In fact, it's a naive dead end to think you can simply recuse yourself from the project of nation-building, because without a national identity we won't have a country - or someone else's darker vision of what our national identity should be will prevail.
> Nationalism is simply the process of constructing a national identity and shared sense of community. If you think the United States should have a national identity and shared sense of community that unites Americans, then you believe in US nationalism.
Nationalism is not just about creating an identity and community. It's also about the superiority of that identity and community above other identities and communities. That's what is disturbing about the ad above. It's about directing that community in an antagonistic direction towards an evil other.
I don't agree that nationalism inherently means that one's identity is superior to other identities, just that it offers unique and irreplaceable value. I don't think that the American democratic identity is in some way better than the British one—there are things I think they should do more like us but there are things I think we should do more like them. But I still take national pride in certain American accomplishments, traditions, etc. that are unique to us, just as a British person does with their own national accomplishments, traditions, etc.
That said, sometimes one nation really is behaving worse than another! I think China is being worse than the United States right now, and it's being *way* worse than what I see as the American ideal (that is, while America needs to improve a *lot,* almost all the ways I think it should improve would make it less like the Xi regime—more tolerant, more focused on human rights, more altruistic). If there's anything in the ad above that you think suggests that there's something bad about the Chinese national character, then I would agree that's bad, but I don't see it that way (though I'll certainly listen to arguments).
Also, it’s possible to believe something is “the best” while acknowledging that that’s your subjective opinion and entails no normative consequences at all. I reiterate what I said above: people who can’t handle this idea (and consequently think that nationalism *entails* racism or jingo-ism or WWI or WWII or any of that) should consider growing up.
> I don't agree that nationalism inherently means that one's identity is superior to other identities, just that it offers unique and irreplaceable value.
I mean, you can of course use the word nationalism to mean whatever you want, but that's not what most people mean when they use the word or understand when they hear it. The primacy of the national identity is a core part of what the word means in common usage.
Certainly nationalism can entail a sense of outright superiority over other nations, but I don't think that's inherent in the core definition—otherwise we wouldn't need words like jingoism, chauvinism, etc. Our host is someone who espouses American nationalism while also criticizing a lot about America and pointing to ways in which we should be more like other countries. And again, I would be interested in your take on how the Biden ad evokes a sense of inherent American superiority (if that's what you're claiming) over the Chinese national identity.
I don't think I've ever seen MY claim the label of nationalism. (I also don't read everything he writes)
> otherwise we wouldn't need words like jingoism, chauvinism, etc
Jingoism specifically refers to an aggessive foreign policy that arises out of nationalism. American nationalism tends to be kind of jingoistic, but nationalism is not inherently jingoistic. You could go the route of isolationism where you try to cut yourself off from the inferior outside world.
Chauvinism is not specific to national identity. It refers more generally to a prejudiced in-group view. So nationalism is a form of chauvinism, but not the only one. For instance, a man believing that men are superior to women is a form of chauvinism.
As I said, you can use the word however you want, but you should be prepared to then spend a bunch of time explaining that you don't mean what people will likely understand by it. This person here makes a big chunk of the argument I am making coming from an unexpected direction: https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/the-problem-nationalism
> And again, I would be interested in your take on how the Biden ad evokes a sense of inherent American superiority (if that's what you're claiming) over the Chinese national identity.
Looking at it again, I think it is there, but it's not as bad as I originally thought. (I think the ad is just choke-full of bad takes which probably made me amplify how bad this one aspect is.) But basically, the ad seems to be an attempt to associate Trump to China in order to exploit negative associations people have with China. Nationalism is not the only reason for having negative associations with China, but it is an important part of the package.
Like all isms, in practice, it ends up being more about the direction given the status quo. So given that Xinjiang is not an independent country, most Uyghur nationalists are going to be mostly about Xinjiang deserving autonomy from China. If Xinjiang became independent, I expect a lot of nationalists would stop being nationalists. But the ones who remained nationalists would be the ones who think Xinjiang is superior to China.
Adults can handle appreciating something without declaring that it is OBJECTIVELY INFERIOR to all other forms of that thing. You should try growing up.
Where did I say otherwise?
Also, I'm curious, were you born here? How do you deal with the possibility that you might believe America is the best only because you were born here and it's just been a part of your upbringing that it is?
I'm originally from France which has always had a very assimilationist policy. Yet, people often consider themselves as being from the country their families come from. For instance, it's not entirely uncommon for a soccer match between Algeria and France to feature just as many French citizens on the Algerian side and the French side. I recall a conversation in particular where someone whose family had been in France and French citizens for generations talk about me as "French" in contrast to them. Basically, assimilating people is hard and it's not entirely surprising the US system stopped working at some point...
Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "the best". On one thread, you seem to be saying that America is the best because of something about its history, art, culture, writing, etc... And here you're saying that if you were born French, you would think France was the best. But all those facts about American history, art, culture, writing, etc would still be true if you were born French. So are you saying that if you were born French, you would be wrong about which country is best? Do you think French people who believe that France is the best are wrong?
I like the people in my life and they live in the US. I like my job and it's in the US. I like some aspects of the culture of the bay area which is in the US. Basically, living in the US is nice for me and since I live here, the government gets to affect me and so I think I should get a say in what the government does.
It's also not as though I can think of another country whose identity and political community I would consider superior to other communities and identities and I have to live somewhere...
First I would say I was mostly using self-deprecating humor to signal that my own lack of attachment to patriotism is just that. It's a thing I do and if you do something different, then that's fine.
Second, the bay area stereotype is profoundly weird by national standards which is what I was referring to.
Third, blue tribe membership is not controlled exclusively by attitudes towards patriotism.
If you do think that America's current political identity/community is the best, doesn't that imply that we should allow very few immigrants, so as to avoid tainting our superior culture with that of foreigners? (To be clear, I don't agree with this viewpoint at all, but immigration restrictionism seems like a logical outgrowth of nationalism, and empirically the two have historically been strongly correlated)
I both believe America is the best and we can allows lots of immigrants without seriously compromising that fact (in fact they go together). Because the immigrants who come are also firm believers in it. While I know some may not like Cato, here's the first thing I found on google that shows immigrants make as good or better Americans in terms of patriotism and support for institutions: https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/immigrants-recognize-american-greatness-immigrants
Nationalism and racism both share the belief that some people are more important than others. Furthermore, the in group often looks similar in skin color and/or dress. Relatively few pan-ethnic nationalisms have lasted long. It’s instructive that Austria divided its monarchy to let two locally dominant ethnic groups rule rather than build a cult of personality around Franz Joseph II or the battle of Leipzig.
You are aware that the United States is a nation-state, right? Are you saying it shouldn't be one, or that we shouldn't give priority to the needs of US citizens over those of people elsewhere when the two conflict? Or that the US as a nation won't last unless we make it only for one ethnic group? Not sure what your point is.
that nationalism is racist asjscentvand those who want to defend it should admit as much
Ok - but at the end of the day you still have to have a place in the public discourse for criticizing China, or criticizing Israel or the Palestinians. It's never going to be the case that every country across the globe is getting along perfectly with the US, and we can't shut off all our international criticism because it **could** be linked to racism in some way.
Although racism is still around, it's just as true that we, as a country, our capable of acting in non-racist ways. That is one of the things that the election of Obama and Harris showed and it's one of things the cheering for black athletes example shows. So fair international criticism of countries that aren't "white" by an American definition is also possible, and we should be careful to do our best to distinguish that fair criticism from times when it actually is racist. That's the way I read Matt's post and I agree with it
I’m not saying I’m not naive to think so. But I read this:
“The logic of nationalism can inspire racist whites to cheer for black athletes because they are American.“
And think “well...that’s good isn’t it?” So why am I wrong to think that? Is it that the racist’s sense of unity would begin and end with sports? That this unity excuses the rest of the racism in their life? I think if something small like sports could unify and bring national harmony among races beyond just sports, that this would be good. But you might be seeing something I’m not.
I think it's hard to overestimate the impact of Bear Bryant's efforts to integrate the Alabama football team on the course of race relations in the South. It hardly solved everything, but the cognitive dissonance of white racists rooting for Black football players did act like an acid on long-held cultural attitudes, and even power structures.
And of course he did this out of self-interest, in the desire to keep the team competitive, rather than out of good will. But, as Adam Smith so ably laid out, that's a very very good thing.
https://www.sportscasting.com/legendary-coach-bear-bryant-heard-no-for-2-decades-before-he-was-able-to-integrate-alabama-football/
I think it's pretty easy to overestimate the impact, actually. The vast majority of white Alabamans voted for an explicitly racist president, twice, so their commitment to racial equality seems pretty thin. There's a tendency among the civic nationalist crowd towards excessive optimism about race relations; it's worth resisting.
"Whiteness has explanatory power. It explains...most of post-reconstruction Southern politics..."
Does whiteness also explain the Abolitionist Movement? If not, why not?
"Whiteness" is not a reference to the race of specific individuals but to the unifying theme of a political project to privilege white people and disadvantage others. White abolitionists were not abolitionists because they were white. If the purpose of abolitionism was not only to eliminate slavery and give black people full citizenship rights but to create black hegemony, then "blackness" would have explanatory power in this counterfactual brand of abolitionism
Not so sure about that. Wouldn't most (white) abolitionists have absolutely seen themselves as being white, and seen whites as superior to blacks?
There was a "White Man's Burden" quality to the abolitionist movement, perhaps.
But there were also (free) black abolitionists and it's not clear how many saw themselves as superior - perhaps those who advocated repatriation to Africa (although that may have been a political calculation to disarm racist arguments against abolition
“‘Whiteness’ is not a reference to the race of specific individuals but to the unifying theme of a political project to privilege white people and disadvantage others.”
Are the “white people” not “specific individuals”?
"Whiteness" in this context is not referring to race per se but to the political project of racists. That the project aspired to promote the interests of white people over others does not mean that all white people were in favor of this project or were responsible for it. The Nazis were devoted to the project of Aryan superiority and considered most other Northern Europeans to be Aryan. The fact that many "Aryans" opposed the Nazis doesn't mean that the Nazism was not built around "Aryan-ness".
But no one talks about "Aryan-ness". They talk about Nazis and Nazism. In the same way it's much clearer to talk about racists leading this political project rather than this abstracted and obscure notion of "whiteness".
"Whiteness" is about creating a white identity. Strictly speaking, it's not racist per se, but it's a necessary predicate for white supremacy. It's how the sausage gets made.
"’Whiteness’ in this context is not referring to race per se but to the political project of racists.”
Then you are using the term in a very different way than the original commenter.
Where do you see Barack Obama and Kamala Harris as "edge cases" for whiteness? I think I read a lot of opinions all over the political spectrum and I have never come across any hint that they're white in any way.
Yes, as far as I could see, much was made both by themselves and others of their respective race(s), with a lot of commentary (much of it positive) centred around them being specifically *non* white.
Obama is half European by extraction and was raised by his white grandmother.
Well, yes, but mixed-race people are not at all a new phenomenon and I don't think they've ever been considered white in America. And I don't see where Obama or Harris have changed that at all.
“However, the correlation between nationalism and racism is pretty strong, strong enough that those who preach nationalism should admit that their policies will activate and enable racists.” You do realize that the entire thrust of the post is that this shouldn’t be a barrier right? Like Matt wrote this whole post to explain why this shouldn’t stop someone from preaching nationalism, and it’s just fine straight over your head.
you are too eager to be normative. my goal is descriptive accuracy, i never took a position on whether nationalism is good or bad
Upthread you said “ Nationalism and racism both share the belief that some people are more important than others.” Is that meant to suggest that believing that some people are more important than others is a morally neutral stance?
No, I am eager to emphasize that you claim Matt is brushing over some details when his entire post is premised upon those details. It’s absurd.
Matt is arguing that nationalism isn’t racism. Until he says something like “nationalism is a close cousin and sometimes cause of racism” I’ll disagree. He’s too determined deflect charges of being racist adjacent to admit to being racist adjacent. But nationalism is racist adjacent in any coherent world view. Both share the key premise that some people are more deserving of help and protectin than others, indeed possibly somehow better than others. This is not just a definitional matter, it is empirical. I am describing constellations of belief.
The flaw I was really arguing against is saying that racist is a binary category mainly so that every last instance of racism can be bad. Many things are a bit racist and good/acceptable because they have virtues which more then offset unfortunate racial implications. See, eg prisons, policing and private property.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM
Learned a lot from this wise presentation :-)
Nationalism isn't necessarily racist but most racists are nationalists.
I wonder. I mean yeah, that's probably right, but the *really* hardcore racists like to venerate other states (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy) and cultures (the whole Celtic/Norse runes thing) in what seems like a deliberate disdain for one's actual nation. Though I guess Orwell would say that's just another sort of nationalism.
most americans are racist and nationalist.
All humans are racist. Most humans are at least patriotic, if not full-throated nationalists.
Most Americans are humans.
And we can be sure that all Americans are Americans.
I need a Venn Diagram to follow this thread.
Most diagrams are not racist, but bell curves sometimes are.
I think the background issue, and one that Matt has discussed at length before, is the totalizing force of racial concerns in the US. I don't have a tally, but it seems like most issues get sucked into the racism/anti-racism conversation and can never fully escape. Then we have levels and levels of conversations about the conversations.
It’s a perfect storm of clickbait and deliberate propaganda
I want to add an anecdote from my DC NGO job perspective. Some think tanks and NGOs are in a mini arms race to copyright language around growing tension with China. Sharp power, corrosive capital, malign influence, etc. They're trying to control the IP and branding for what they see as a long term funding opportunity.
Through my little window, I see management (usually people with some life experience during the cold war) tending to want to use slightly more inflammatory language and frame these terms around china specifically. I also see the younger employees at orgs, often the people who will have to do the bulk of the work on drafting reports etc, using the leverage they have to soften the terms and make them focused of authoritarian governments generally. Management had usually conceded and defined the terms more generally. At least one former colleague quit the industry over this issue though.
It all makes me a bit leery about this sense of building tension and cynical about the small skirmishes over branding. NGOs sense that there's a carrot waiting for them if they start to produce reports that use language that rachets up tension rather than describes reality in clear terms.
None of this is to say that China has played nice, but I'm just feeling angst over the language.