Recognizing Bamar Buddhist privilege
Preview of a transcript of my upcoming podcast release with Thaw Htet. Given the recent news, I think this is urgent to release this part of the conversation now.
“I just found out that these ethnics have been kind to us all along. They have been in front of me all the time.”
Thaw Htet: I'm going to be really honest here. When I was 14 and in eighth grade, a new student came into our class, who was Kayin Christian. And somehow, I really hated him, because I had feelings of superiority over other ethnicities and religions. As Bamar Buddhists, we are taught that we were a kind of separate species in Myanmar. Actually, I was one of those who was brainwashed.
But how I came to realize that we were actually being brainwashed so deeply, it was when I went to Kalaymyo to help the victims after a dam had burst. When I went to that town, I met a lot of other ethnic peoples, and somehow the rumors I had heard of them are not right! Actually they are a lot more welcoming, and very hospitable, actually more so than any other people that I've met in my life.
I'm actually from Mandalay, not from Yangon. So in Mandalay, the Burmese themselves have colonized that place. You might say that we didn't know, but actually, we had a lot of chances to know that, and we just ignored it! And I was one of them. I was one of them. So I was shocked.
Another time, I was in need of money. I tried to ask for help from my Burmese friends who I had been friends with for many years, but no help came from them. But that one Kayin Christian friend who I just knew for only three months, he offered to give this money to me anytime I wanted. It touched me. Because my whole life, I thought that those ethnicities hated us. They actually should hate us! Because the army in power is Burmese. So it's not wrong to hate us! But his kindness enlightened me, and I tried to reach out more to different ethnic friends after that.
I just found out that these ethnics have been kind to us all along. They have been in front of me all the time.
So I had a good talk with one of my ethnic friends. The ones who are educated and have been friends with those Burmese youths like us, they don't hate us, because actually we are like them, with no difference really. But the ones who don’t have a single Burmese friend, they look at all Burmese as the same as the Burmese army. They hate all Burmese. But it's not their fault.
And as Burmese, we actually haven’t done enough to acknowledge the hardships and killings that our Burmese military has encountered during the last many years.
Host: That reminds me quite a bit about what's going on in my country with the Black Lives Matter movement, where there was this growth in consciousness among many Whites, the majority here in America, and so have a sense of privilege, which some never realized before. Last year, many began to understand how difficult the minority experience was in America, and the kind of biased treatment and general unfairness that minorities in this country had faced for years. So many of these Whites who were in the majority just simply did not realize this truth, and so were therefore not sympathetic to it. And the BLM protests and movements that happened in the course of the last year, it really opened the eyes of many Whites about some of the bias and privilege they have had in the system, and many people and companies were confronted with having to explore and to investigate this. Getting back to Myanmar, sounds like at least as far as Generation Z goes, and I wonder how much that's going on in the rest of society, but it seems that in this movement in your country, there's really been a reckoning among the Bamar, who are the majority and who are privileged in Myanmar society, who are privileged in many ways that they might not have realized before this, and many are exploring how the ethnic experience is so much more painful and that they're faced with. There are so many more problems, discriminations and biases that they never wanted to or were able to recognize before. Now through recognizing this, and now they're confronted with their own bias in the system and their own privilege in the system.
Thaw Htet: The majority of Burmese population were ignorant to what was happening before the coup. To overcome ignorance, it takes a lot of courage and self-reflection. I was ignorant before, and it took me like two years or more to realize what has been happening!
These days, some Burmese people like to say that the Ethnic Armed Groups are the ones who have guns, and that it is the Burmese army who is killing us Bamar Buddhists. So right now the table has turned and we are the ones who have nothing, while those EAOs have been rebelling against the military for 60 years.
But even with that, many Burmese people still don’t accept that they are not still superior!
If you could read Burmese, you would see that sentiment from a lot of online comments. For example, the Arakan army refused to join the and NUG and to be part of the Federal Army. So as a Burmese, as a response I should say, ‘Sorry for the ignorance we have shown to the Rakhine people for many years.’
But instead, what many older Burmese people said online was that this means that the Rakhine people and army must be on the same side of military. They said that the Arakan army should be with us Bamar protesters, not with the military. But I think we have to respect those minority decisions! Now we are trying to correct our elders and reminding them that it's their decision as a minority, who has been suffering under military atrocities for many years. Just be thankful that they didn't join the military to kill us Bamar people!
I think the majority of Burmese people now accept that they have been ignorant. They want to help those ethnicities from across the Myanmar, but even so, many can't let go of this feeling of being superior… because it's a good feeling.
Actually I have had that feeling, and it’s hard to totally erase, and I am still reflecting if I have that superiority inside me today. So I think we Burmese people still have to take more time to actually accept that we have this ignorance, and that we really need to accept those minorities. I think there's a lot of steps forward left for the majority of Burmese people to actually see what most young people are seeing right now.
Host: On one hand, it can definitely feel good to feel superior, and one doesn't want to lose it. But on the other hand, sometimes people don't even want to recognize that they're privileged in the first place, because I think many would rather see oneself as working for everything you got, and not getting anything easy, and feeling that society has been just as hard on you as has been on anyone else. To actually recognize that you do have a privilege in the system, that the system privileges you and your kind of people, no matter what country it is you're talking about and what the majority group is… that could be a very painful realization to come to and to realize, that you are privileged in ways that others are not. And that's something that can be quite a journey for people to come to accept.