Culture in the Blender

A few days back, I found out in my cultural psychology class that it is true that those expats who believe in essentialism (with respect to either culture or race) have more problems integrating. A study was done at Bei Da of foreigners in Beijing (by sending out researchers to talk to foreigners at Sanlitun, […]

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Something that I rarely hear mentioned in the West regarding xenophobia and discrimination is the existence of China’s minorities, except for Tibetans. (張惠妹 (A*mei) is a Taiwanese minority.) Especially in the US, people seem rather unaware that 汉族 (Hànzú) or Hàn nationality people, who are the ‘ethnic Chinese’ people, have been busy conquering and oppressing […]

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One of the most obvious differences between the United States and Europe is how racism is structured. In some ways, racism in Europe seems rather simple. Perhaps it seems simple to me in part because I’ve seen it so much more than in the US, but the key concept seems to be xenophobia. The people […]

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I’m reading an interesting book called Culture Moves about black identity and culture and how competing visions of it are expressed. It’s very interesting, because the US is unique in that it has ‘built-in’ racial tensions like very few other places. In most other places, race lines conincide with nationality lines, which radically alters the […]

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An opinion article in yesterday’s Aftonbladet by Jan Myrdal argues that holding people who are not informed of what they are accused and against whom the government has no proof prisoners has no place in a civil society with rule of law. He mentions some old examples of when rule of law has not been […]

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Ferdinand Celine was an anti-Semite. This may be a bit surprising, because his estate refuses to reprint his book on facism, Bagatelles pour un massacre. Celine derived his racist and fascist beliefs from the idea that civilization should be founded on the differences between groups or individuals.
I am re-reading Nichlas Fraser’s The Voice of Modern […]

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I just finished reading a book called How Race Is Lived In America, a complication of an article series in the NYT. It was very interesting and well-written, and of course prompted thinking on my part. However, I realized something tangential as well: for me, the elephant in the room isn’t race as much as […]

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