Americans: It’s Time to Stop Culture-splaining Online
One of the amazing things about our inter-connected world is the ability to engage with content creators in different countries. As someone who enjoys traveling and learning about other people, I personally love TikTok and Instagram as platforms where I can keep up with friends who live in other countries and learn more about other cultures and their daily lives.
One thing I don’t love is seeing my fellow Americans attempt to “educate” content creators in other countries about things they deem offensive or incorrect, or even simply mislabeling creators’ identities.
The United States is a newer country in the history of our modern world and because of that, many of us spend a lot of time researching our ancestry. We are quite naturally, I think, interested in where our ancestors originated from and when they got to the U.S. For some of us, we count only a generation or two back, but for others, it may be a couple of hundred years.
So many people find a sense of pride in the origins of their ancestry, and there is no doubt in my mind that communities like Italian-Americans, have their own cultural foods and ways of doing things here in the U.S., but we need to keep in mind that regardless of whether we hyphenate our identities, we are still Americans at the end of the day.
There’s a palpable air of entitlement and condescension I see on social media sometimes from Americans who comment on content from other countries. Time and again I see comments such as one man lecturing a Scottish creator that because of his Scots-American heritage, he understood more about the Scots language than most Scots.
I’ve also seen African-American commenters trying to force that label onto black Brits. It can’t be done! You cannot force an American hyphenate identity onto someone who isn’t American!
I’ve seen some commenters go a step further, trying to shame other social media users for cultural appropriation when it’s clearly not. I even saw one woman lecture an Irish man, explaining to him that as an Irish-American, she was offended by his name…Paddy. Imagine having the audacity to try and convince someone in a country you’ve never set foot in, to change their name because your 6th great-grandfather was born there?
I like seeing my fellow Americans learn more about other countries. The U.S. is a big place and we can’t all afford to travel internationally, so social media is a great way to learn more about other cultures and places, but we should approach it with the right mindset. Commentary is fine and interesting conversations can happen when we engage with people from other countries, but we don’t have the right to apply American standards of political correctness, nor to mistake our hyphenated identities for authority in dictating the authenticity of others’ cultures.
