Meerabelle Jesuthasan| Translating social justice

You speak English? | The American model for social justice isn’t a one-size-fits-all

By Meerabelle Jesuthasan 04/03/16 10:30pm

Politics are finding their home online nowadays. Facebook groups, Tumblr communities and Reddit threads provide virtually unlimited space for people to be immersed in supposed political utopias from Bernie Bro-ism to revolutionary anarchy to white supremacy.

“Social justice” is one particularly strong platform which has grown infamous online and in real life. The core tenets of this ideology are usually rooted in American academia and civil rights-era discourse. At its most basic, the ideology holds that society is based on a historical structure of institutionalized privilege and oppression that exacerbate each other.

Terms like privilege, people of color and institutionalized racism all stem from this understanding. Overall, the principles of the ideology are fairly clear and are accepted by many young liberals, and in particular, the typical East Coast college kid who, say, is interested in combating institutionalized oppression and firmly espouses the beliefs of Bernie Sanders.

With online activism now coming into focus, the social justice movement is by no means constrained to American shores. And that may have its pros and cons.

A pertinent aspect of the social justice movement is its commitment to paying equal attention to — and calling out — gross injustices overseas that are connected to the same issues that young people here feel strongly about.

For example, a recently circulated boycott list enumerated beauty companies that sell skin-brightening products in Asia, lamenting the pervasiveness of Eurocentric beauty ideals. Only a Westerner could find such a boycott feasible, because really, every beauty company — at least in Singapore — seems to offer these kinds of products.

For me, moving here meant meeting the kinds of people whose discourse I read online, whose ideas I had seen transposed to concepts in the country I was living in. For example, I saw the term “Chinese privilege” being used online to discuss the systematic privilege Chinese citizens enjoy in Singapore’s multiracial society. The discrimination has been pointed out before — Mandarin is often required in jobs and pale and delicate Chinese features are more advertised than darker, broader Malay and Indian ones. Malays and Indians are also stereotyped as lazy and dirty.

Using an American social justice framework in this context makes sense. It helps to make visible a phenomenon that people have observed without naming or synthesizing it in a mainstream way. The most appealing part of the social justice framework is that it allows for an understanding of radical politics to seep beyond academic texts and into mainstream online conversation.

But the benefits seem to end there.

Because at its core, the American social justice movement relies on an understanding of oppression as institutionalized — in an American context. Despite the global nature of things like colonialism and capitalism, a country’s history is inexorable from its present.

An issue I grappled with before I had adequate understanding of either side of the issue was that of “affirmative action” in Malaysia, which has a similar multiracial appearance to Singapore. To a Western liberal, the policy is appealing in name, especially when coupled with statistics of Chinese economic superiority over Malays in the country. But of course the situation isn’t that simple. In the United States, white privilege is clearly embedded in a history of oppression through slavery and discrimination.

But Malaysia’s history is colonial in nature. Until recent urban migration, Malays lived in rural villages while Chinese were typically involved in business. To make up for this today, Malays are favored in the Malay constitution and hold extensive political power. To explain the situation in all the nuance it deserves would require going into historical detail that can’t be as easily established as by simply drawing a parallel to some story in the West. The political and racial situation in Malaysia is not analogous to the one in the United States, and the same solutions do not apply.

We shouldn’t be so bold as to think that social justice operates the same way worldwide. Like all models, its ability to be used the same way across all cases is limited. Rather, it should be used as a lens through which we can effectively explore and seek to explain more about the societies in question.

At some point, our Penn education asks us to look at social and political problems beyond these shores. We are expected, at least in theory, to see ourselves fitting into a larger, global narrative and to challenge ourselves. For even the most left-wing American student, that may mean changing the point from which they view things. At some point, grappling with foreign axioms will mean abandoning our Western ones.

MEERABELLE JESUTHASAN is a College freshman from Singapore, studying English and cognitive science. Her email address is jesum@sas.upenn.edu. “You Speak English?” usually appears every other Monday. 

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