The context: i bought a shirt to embroider one symbol representing each book i read this year as my 2026 reading tracker!

The ask: i cannot think of a symbol that would easily fit Orientalism😭 i may just end up settling on a book or pen or something to represent narrative but hoping others are more clever than i am!!

i've become obsessed with the idea of self-indigenization ever since reading it in this chapter. not only that the concept is something i've never dissected before, but because the underlying effect of the concept is something that i see in sooo many different ways

if we think about self-indigenization as a form of erasure, a weapon in the arsenal of a settler (through the process of committing violence -> naturalizing presence -> narrating yourself as always having belonged -> erasing the underlying structure of dispossession), you can see this effect in so many ways.

especially what i became obsessed with is the connection between this concept and the concept of elite capture (the process by which identity politics are captured by vested interests as a form of diversion away from real structural change)

still sort of mulling things over but wanted to dump this out for discussion's sake. i'm thinking specifically about the modern era of especially online activism. how there's a certain subset of white people on the internet who will try to position themselves as "one of the good ones" by distancing themselves from their own whiteness. this often looks like reactionary politics, dedication to performative optics over actual structural reckoning

ofc it's not a one-to-one transfer of the concept of self-indigenization, these people aren't actually claiming an identity that doesn't belong to them BUT, the system beneath it is the same. the psychological maneuvering serves the same purpose; to assuage the individual's guilt over being complicit in systemic racism and settler-colonialism

it's an attempt to distance themselves from whiteness as a system. on the surface, it looks like "acknowledging privilege" but it can often come across as "my whiteness counts less than yours"

it's the same sort of narrativizing and mythmaking behind the concept of self-indigenization. a sort of moral escape hatch that allows white people to remain structurally white (benefiting from the same institutions, protections, and inheritance) but narrating themselves as morally and ethically external to whiteness as violence

it's continuous with the colonial history and imo this performativeness that we see today passes on the idea of settler innocence but repackaged into modern moral values