Benedict Anderson came up with the word Indonesians use for white people. Apparently this was taken from a life beyond boundaries.
-derp
How else we gonna refer them? Note that Benedict Anderson himself is a white man. From the second picture:
I was very amused, more than ten years later, when a ‘white’ colleague from Australia wrote me an innocent letter complaining how racist Indonesians were, and how he hated being called bule. So I asked him to take a look at his own skin in the mirror, and see if he really wanted to be called Tuan. I also told him I had invented the new meaning of the term in 1962 or 1963.
Tuan = master.
-derp
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-derp
we were talking about this on twitter the other day! There’s a really good article that sums up why “bule” don’t like being called “bule”
Other expatriates’ irritation might be that they are not used to being categorised as a ‘race’ at all. The term ‘race’ was mostly related to being black or coloured; white people, it seemed, had no colour, and therefore did not count as a ‘race’. For many expatriates, it is therefore a new experience not to be invisible, but being a ‘racial Other’. For the first time, they are different with respect to an 'Asian racial norm’. Expatriates’ anger about the term bule might therefore a sign of their discomfort with being 'racially deviant’, a label which they are not used to, and feel they don’t deserve.
the writer also mentioned how most white expats feel Indonesia is the most racist because, and I quote “I don’t think its more racist than other places, but that it is probably the only place where expats (who are mostly white) have experienced racism personally directed at them. You have probably lived with racism all around you but until you moved to Indonesia and became a victim of it you just didn’t notice it.“
