What I have learned about the liberation of USers

[Posted to the RC jews list on February 2015]

The hard core of opperssor patterns that USers carry is US-centrism, the unaware assumption that they are the norm, that they are the center, that they are the baseline upon which others are evaluated. The US is the general case, whereas other nations are unique specific cases, for better (in which case they are labeled as “exotic”) or for worse.

Here are several examples to how that comes out:

• USers say “the elections”, as opposed to “US the elections”, or “the constitution”, as opposed to “the US constitution”.
• USers use idioms that are specific to their culture, without bothering to explain what they mean. A USer might say “I am a NYC boy” or “I am a Texan ranch girl”, and assume that the listener knows what this means. Or, they illustrate their rethorics with examples from the world of commercialized sports, that are not well known globally.
• USers base their perspectives on what they learn from the US media (including the alternative media). To stress their written viewpoints, they include links to US sources, or quotations from them.
• USers may think that it makes sense to send to the RC lists flyers to events that happen on their soil, flyers that indicate specifically that the target constituencies for the events are USers.
• In closing circles of international workshops, when asked to state when they return to, USers might ommit the “US”, and just say “Berkely, California” or “Portland, Oregon”. It is assumed that everyone knows in which country these places are.
• And then, there is the oppression that is enforced by the English language.

I have learned that learning a foreign language, preferably one that is not widely spoken in the US, is a helpful contradiction to US-centrism.

I have learned that similar patterns are also widespread among others nations that have empires, or used to have them for centuries. I’ve noticed them in my encounters with Russians and UKers, in and out of RC. I would not be surprised to learn that Chineese people have them too. Before a counselor from such a nation counsels a US client about US-centrism, the counselor may want to fully discharge distress recordings like “our empire has been finer that the US, we had more style, our tradition was way more valuable to humanity”.

I have learned that US Jews have hard times to tell when they are operating under US-centrism and when they are operating under internalized Jewish oppression. And indeed, thinking “we are the center, we are the norm” is not all that different from thinking “God chose us to be the ones who tell others what is right and what is wrong”. I’d assume that it would be useful for US Jews to compare their thinking about US-centrism both to that of USers who are not Jews and to that of Jews who are not USers (or UKers or Russians for that sake), so as to eradicate it from remnants of both US centrism and internalized Jewish oppression.