A part of US centrism that I think most people don’t even realize is happening is that when a US based minority reaches a fairly arbitrary concensus on what language they prefer (like ‘autistic people vs people with autism, transgender people vs. transgenders, plural or singular verbs when using singular ‘they’, people of color or any other term people could have invented, person with a disability or disabled person etc etc) that preference eventually gets translated in most languages and pushes out whatever consensus existed in that language.
Like ‘you have to use the word people when refering to members of a minority’ just sounds really really weird in some languages, but it’s the US standard for humanizing minorities so it pushes out all local alternatives. To the point where we can’t use the language we have used for ourselves for decades without being accused of being bigots ourselves. It’s really nasty.
And it’s more than just words. When you can’t get a grant, or a refugee status, because your story doesn’t conform to the US idea of what your minority story should be, that has material consequences. It literally results in a world where our minority experiences need to conform to the US narrative about what our experiences should be, to be considered real.
There’s a whole interconnected set of problems tied together by this need folks have to solve challenges of diversity with a Single Standard Narrative for things.
The right way to be trans, the right way to be gay, the right way to be a man, the right way to fight for justice, the right way to use inclusive language, the right way to…
Truuuueee. US centrism is just one of the ways in which we’re pushed into a Single Standard Narrative and in the international scheme of things Eurocentrism does the same thing a lot.
‘Coming out’ and ‘identity’ etc etc doesn’t make sense in every language and culture and ‘born this way’ and ‘love is love’ shit doesn’t make sense to a lot of queers in every place but the moment you tell your stories your own non-americanized, non-europenized or in some other non-standarized way, nobody listens.
Fuck all that shit.
QueerAnarchism 