transitioning ethnocentrisms

This is what I absorbed living in a Punjabi extended family network in the Lahore middle class and Sindh upper-middle class:
in this universe everyone is brown and Muslim
brown people don't drink, have sex, and they always put family first
the trajectory of history is towards the civilizational triumph/historic oppression of Muslim people/Muslim people civilized India and the creation of the Pakistani state is an triumph of historical inevitability
punjabi shia syed people from Sialkot, Faisalabad, Lahore or Dasca are the best and other people don't count
everyone gets married to someone punjabi shia and syed from Sialkot, Faisalabad, Lahore or Dasca of the opposite sex/women stay at home and men work/are political/artistic/intellectual
individual desires are legitimately subordinate to the larger needs of society
drinking is disgusting and dirty and people who drink are like animals, because animals are lower than humans
secular liberal humanism is a terrible western scourge

Freaky learning in canada with short intervals in the middle east and back in pakistan--first months, year, four years, ten years, fifteen years:
not everybody in Canada is white
people pronounce words from my language differently and look at me strangely when I say them right
pakistan is an impoverished third world country and people are embarassed when you bring it up
no one uses a lotah and you have to hide it because people will think you're dirty if you clean yourself
people use linen
they have 'linen closets'
white women's legs are different
there are two men in all of Canada who are punjabi shia and syed from Sialkot, Faisalabad, Lahore or Dasca and one of them is my brother and the other my dad but if you marry anyone else other than a punjabi shia syed then you're breaking fourteen centuries of bloodline and a spiritual chain that is supposed to last till the day of judgement plus your ancestors gave their lives for this truth-identity (which you commemorate for 40 days each year)
white people don't get what being syed is
not all Muslims are brown
not all Muslims know what a syed person is or think its important, and this unnerves me even, even though I don't think its important
not all Muslims think Islam is what I think it is
not all brown people are muslim, put family first, or avoid drinking and sex
I know as little about some regional south asian cultures as some white people
group interests usually stand for the interests of powerful older men within the group
people from other groups love pointing this out without realizing that doing so meets the interests of powerful older men in their group
sikh, hindu, and muslim fathers, brothers, husbands and lovers killed women of their own families to prevent men from the other groups getting to them first during Partition
sikh, hindu and muslims of certain regions, classes, genders, sexualities often have more interests in common with each other than their communal group
individual needs and concerns might be really important, even more important than the needs of the group, but you still need to defend against simplistic generalizations of your culture

grand narratives about civilizational tendencies in Islam are as bankrupt as those of European colonization

as a historical practice today drinking is a corporatized way to profit from workday exhaustion/need for escapism from a bureaucratized violent world--but it isn't inherently morally evil (this look a really, really long time) and people have the right to make their choices
nationalism is stupid, both canadian and pakistani
not all shia are persecuted minority where they've come from, in fact shia can persecute other people
there are other worldviews to choose from than just conservative tradional pakistani and secular western humanist, like anarchist or socialist or third worldist or artist/scholar/writer or global south asian diaspora in urban west, and having these values or identities do not make me less culturally south asian, they just clarify the type of south asian (think of the diaspora as a new region)
political power vested with spiritual authority inherited through blood is a bad idea

you don't have to be a liberal to be secularist

I would have learned all this had I stayed in pakistan as well, the way people do when they get politicized

so when I go out with someone who's recently come from where I came from and she's horrified by silk screened skulls, deconstructed stitching and pink dreads and gasps: "these people are crazy [sic]!" and I realize that even liberal multiculturalism would be a positive step forwards out of that familiar, familial, deep, comfortable sleepy bed of astoundingly socially conservative ethnic-religious-cultural punjabi nationalism verging on facism in its symbiotic relationship with authoritarian political power that relies on ableist, gendered, economic, raced, spiritual hierarchies, that's the history, the alternative telling of history-shitstory, the narrative of diaspor-izing histories of cultural nationalism that's going through my mind, diaspora even if you're still living at home. This is the history of 'where we are coming from'--not a simple matter of national citizenship.