My thesis, distilled

From zara­bee:

I have to stop buying into the frame of the racist elements.

So when someone says “The muslims are out-breed­ing us”
My first tempta­tion is to say “So what? I fail to see a problem.”
When really, I should be saying “Who the fuck is this “us” you’re talk­ing about.”

The frame is “us and them”. My first instinct is to decon­struct the “them”, and it should be to decon­struct the “us”. The whole point of a mul­ti­cul­tural soci­ety is that there is no ver­sion of “us” that does­n’t include “them”. My point should­n’t be to illus­trate how the con­struc­tion of “them” used is false (like the rest of us mono­lithic folks here in outer Mono­lithia, clearly all people des­ig­nated to a spe­cific cul­tural subset take on all ste­reo­typed char­ac­ter­ist­ics of that subset without excep­tion, dontchya know. ), but to point out that the con­struc­tion of “us” is false, and moreover, that the con­struc­tion of “them and us” is doubly false.

I don’t believe in “them”, and yet I still buy into the frame. I need to stop.

For the wanky, expan­ded ver­sion, see my thesis. or the paper I delivered at AGMC, linked at http://​www​.helio​trope​.net​.au/​m​o​r​d​w​e​n​/​a​r​ticles.