For Context: I’m Chinese American, and I do not feel “ashamed” for my heritage, neither do I feel “ashamed” for being a US Citizen.
The CCP is not my fault. I do not feel any shame of saying I’m from China.
Similarly, the trump admin is not my fault, I voted Harris. I do not feel any shame for being American.
So what is the thought process of people feeling shame/guilt?
It’s not shame so much as deep embarrassment for the current state of our country. We look like fucking morons on the world stage. Thankfully we will move on from this stage in our history, but the stain may remain for decades to come.
We look like fucking morons on the world stage.
The only sort of solace to this, is that many other countries are clearly following the same path, so its not something inherent to just the US. Idiots are everywhere, and they vote.
Everyone is pointing to the US, but the same initial precursors are happening under their own nose.
i hate when people shit on the US but don’t acknowledge any sort of solutions to put in their own country to avoid this situation
Canada has voted against the populist right for the last decade. And each time the Conservative party chooses some one more right wing. And each time they get a bit closer to winning.
Trump galvanized people last time, scared them away from the right. This time he seems to be inspiring the right wing politicians, and people live it.
I don’t know if we can hold out much longer.
While agreeing for the most part, it’s painfully clear as someone in the EU how politics in the US empower far right rethorics everywhere else. While politicians in my country have condemned the actions of the US, the political landscape has shifted dramatically.
Everyone is pointing at the US because their politics trickles down into ours, not the other way around.
False equivalency.
How is it a false equivalency? It’s the same exact people astroturfing the movements in those places too. It’s literally the same phenomenon
Oh look a Canadian that can’t see their own descent into the far right fascist rabbit hole on the horizon. Somehow even watching the US, you seem to still be headed that direction as if it couldn’t possibly happen in Canada. Because… reasons?
China has been China-ing for a while, we get it. America’s actions are relatively fresh, and a majority of us DID choose him. While I’ll immediately reassure people that I didn’t vote for him, the fact that I have to separate myself from what’s going on comes from a sense of shame over that.
That said, if I met a Russian I wouldn’t necessarily hold the invasion of Ukraine against them… But I might have to ask if they really support that shit.
Considering voter turnout is ridiculously low in America the majority of us did not choose Trump. Just less than half of those that voted did which is 32% of the population. Also, Trump was not exactly the start of American decline, it is more like he is a symptom of it. A reaction to it if you would. American has been a violent an oppressive nation that we should be ashamed of for roughly 250 years. Trump is just very good at making that obvious.
Not voting is a vote for the winner by default. I highly doubt that every single person that didn’t vote did so due to being unable to.
China has been eliminating poverty for quite some time. In fact, over the last 70 years, China accounts for 80% or more of the entire global poverty alleviation gains. The US has created more poverty in that same time.
But also, the US has been racist, violent, colonialist, jingoistic, misogynistic, and white supremacist since it’s founding. You know those propaganda images DHS posts on Twitter? Those are from the US’s time of westward expansion. This isn’t new. What’s new is that we have given up on trying to hide it, which is something we did for for the last 70 years. But even in the 40s we had concretation camps, we had open racism in all of politics, we had the second largest Nazi group in the world.
And after WW2? Operation Paperclip? Operation Gladio? The US openly staffed NATO with Nazi officers. The US openly advocated for Nazi politicians to lead West Germany. There were literal Nazis running West German after the war.
And then of course the Korean War. The Vietnam War. The Irag wars. The Afghanistan war. The embargo against Cuba. The coup in Iran.
This is what the US is. Nixon banner heroin explicitly to imprison black people. We have slave labor producing billions of dollars in value annually. And we punish our prison slaves who don’t work by giving them solitary. All of that is massive gross human rights violations, things we’ve pretended to invade other countries for.
This is who we are. It’s not new.
America’s actions are relatively fresh,
At the risk of being annoying as shit, that is not true. The only fresh part is that Europeans and/or white people are feeling a small part of the heat too.
was just going to say this. anyone who thinks this is new didn’t pay attention in history class, or that history class conveniently glossed over or romanticized our many, many atrocities.
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Ok, a majority of voters, not a majority of us, but as another commenter said if you sat this one out you basically helped the winner and I’m absolutely going to blame you for it
I believe the shame stems from the moral injury we all suffer when we peacefully stand by in a democracy and let bad people control the government and inflict serious harm on innocents
So in some respect it is in fact all of our faults because we do in fact sit by and watch people die so we can respect the democratic process.
Because it collectively is our fault.
I feel that way but because I’m human.
We are not good people.
You don’t have to be at fault to be ashamed.
One word:
Tribalism.
It’s shaming to see people and institutions you were proud of and bragged about being the best, then devolve into something the rest of the world laughs at.
I don’t know about others but I imagine for a lot its just guilt by association. I’ve definitely been feeling it for a while.
I also think a lot of people feel bad about their tax money going into the pockets of so many evil people for so many evil purposes. One of the reasons I personally stopped paying taxes. I wish my fellow Americans would join me on that end, but it isnt easy.
I’m just embarrassed as fuck
To the point of being furious…
Speaking only for myself: because the American government has, for 250 years, claimed to act on behalf of the American people. When it was liberating concentration camps and sending people to the moon, that was something to be proud of.* When it was upholding slavery and winking at Jim Crow laws, it wasn’t.
It’s a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and so he purports to speak and act on my behalf. That’s deeply embarrassing and shameful, even if I couldn’t have done anything differently to prevent it.
* (Yes, I know that even those “good” examples are complicated. I’m just forming an example here)
Emotions aren’t entirely rational with a clearly thought out process to justify why one should feel them. In any case, its common enough for people to assign the general actions of people within a group to the group as a whole (which isnt really fair or a reflection of reality, but can be pragmatic at times and requires less thought and information than judging on an individual basis, so it makes sense that people’s brains are wired up to do it even if its not always desirable). This can get extended to the groups one is a part of oneself, to include those whose membership one did not choose. And the US at the moment has even worse than typical leadership, has a great deal of power for that leadership to abuse, still has free enough media for people within it to stand a good chance of knowing about at least some of it, and if youre here on lemmy youre probably running into people with a somewhat higher than normal awareness of a lot of the historical abuses previous Americans have perpetrated just because it leans left and anti-establishment and those things get talked about a lot in such spaces.
in my own case, it’s that I’ve (not intentionally but still) benefited from a system that subjugated others (natives, people of all colors, and women) to secure the national infrastructure I’ve directly profited from. Everything from education, clean water and housing, to medical care often shockingly focused on what ails and heals white males. And the sickening knowledge that the same ones who want to deport taxpaying workers who rarely benefit from the enormous amounts of money our country throws around are the same as me, living on land stolen from the people who lived here, who we basically exterminated. Finally, we use the trappings of a pseudo-democracy to declare all men are equal, but really, they mean wealthy heteronormative white men, because otherwise you’re the other and disenfranchisement should be expected.
That’s-just-the-way-it-is? only if you accept it.
Honestly, in this situation it’s likely more performative than an actual feeling people have. It’s a good way to acknowledge that someone isn’t happy with the impact our country is having on the world.
Similar question pointed at you. I now understand it’s wrong(though not sure why), but when asking an Asian American where their ancestors are from, they get offended and proudly point out that they’re American. Why would you be proud to be an American? Or was I just a few years early in thinking that way?
I mean, a person from the western world is not gonna view this the same as someone from a non-western less-developed country.
Like, I know people shit on the US a lot, and perhaps it might be “the worst” in the Western World. But compared to globally, it’s far from “the worst”.
Like, if you gave a North Korean PRC Citizenship (which does not really happen btw, just a hypothetical), then the Now-Former North Korean would probably be proud to be a Chinese Citizen rather than being in North Korea.
Because it’s relatively better by comparison.
So its the same with me. Sure, I know there are far better countries like Norway, but I mean like… Norway does not take many immigrants, and the best place I could be, given my circumstances, is the US. So, it’s less about “I’m proud of my government” or “I’m proud of the history of this country”, more like “I’m glad I’m here instead of [their ancestral country]”. And as to getting questioned, its the fear of getting “othered”, of getting rejected. So its natural to immediately declare their US Citizenship status as a defense.
I mean, I think nowadays, that’s even more so the case.
Like I didn’t really worry about this before. But especially nowadays, if someone, especially someone claiming to be a cop, is trying to talk to me, the first thing I’ll do is immediately declare my Citizenship status and then assert my rights immediately after.
I still have memories of China, and I do not like being there. Not every Chinese American is gonna feel the same way as I do, but, at least in my case, our life in China prior to emigrating was very poor, and it got better in the US. So there’s that.
When’s the last time you were in China? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a pushed social media post, but it seems like every city I’ve never even heard of in China looks even better than the best city America has these days. I get wanting to announce your citizenship in defense, but it does seem like it’s in, well, defense. Like how Cuban immigrants were cheering their love for Trump, then got deported anyway. Is it just thinking the leapards wouldn’t eat your face? This, again, bring me back to, why be proud of this? It does just seem like a forced defensive shut-up-and-smile kinda deal. Oddly enough, very much North Korean :/
When’s the last time you were in China? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a pushed social media post, but it seems like every city I’ve never even heard of in China looks even better than the best city America has these days.
Around 2010. Guangzhou.
The actual city part doesn’t look too bad, but I lives in a slum neighborhood of Guangzhou that most tourists don’t really see. It was very dirty and you go through narrow alleyways. Like, according to Baidu Maps, its a 10 minutes walk from the main street, in my memory, it always felt like a 20-30 minute walk for some reasons, it felt so distant, the walk was always boring af. It’s as if through through that short walk, you time travel back in time 20-50 years. The school I went to was the worst school I ever went to. Even worst than the shittist American school I went to with a rating of like 4/10 looked better.
Although, it could’ve be my Hukou issue. The school I went to was not a public school, it was one for children of migrant parents that parents have to pay for. Kids without Guangzhou Hukou were not allowed Guangzhou’s public schools.
So far, the worst places I’ve stayed at was the small apartment in Guangzhou, and the ancestral homes in parents villages in Taishan.
I mean, China looks so great? Sure, only if you are privilaged enough to live in the good parts, which my family wasn’t able to. In China, most people have homes in their villages, but if they wanma find work, they’d have to go to cities, and then they’d have to rent some shitty apartment. Landlords are still a thing, but they don’t call them 地主 (di4 zhu3), but instead 房东 (fang2 dong1), people “buy” (not really “buy”, more like 70 years permission to use, but you get what I’m saying) housing, then lease it, kinda profits off it.
In Guangzhou, we were second-class residents.
China isn’t really one united country when you really think about it. It’s a bunch of different countries with different internal passports in a trench coat. Y’all can leave your red state shitholes and go to a blue city, in a blue state, and you are treated as any other resident.
In China, my ancestors are from Taishan, so I’m always a 台山人 Taishanese due to Hukou, even though I was born in Guangzhou and speak both Cantonese and Mandarin.
There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of your Government’s actions and behavior and being ashamed of who you are/where you were born.
One is a valid criticism of the ruling class ignoring the people’s desire for peace and social responsibility. The other is a mental health issue much like some people who are ashamed of the race or gender they were born as.
I get attacked by people unable to separate this conflation because I encourage people resistant to our government to pick up the goddamn American flag and wave it. To have some measure of pride in the institution we live in so others take it seriously when we demand improvement.
There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of your Government’s actions
That’s not really “shame”, not really the right word for it, shame is something you feel about yourself, this is more like resentment.
I think it becomes shame because we recognize we’ve benefited from the system that has shit all over so many. Even indirectly, it’s hard to think about all the ways I’ve benefited from - just to say one thing - all the cheap open land (places like texas, nebraska, oklahoma, OR & WA) we got after putting the natives in concentration camps and murdering most of them.
Like, I try to enjoy a national park but then realize: this was someone’s home. Many peoples, in fact. We took it, put up gates, and charge people to harass the animals. And that’s the places we’ve saved from industrial pollution and factory farming.
