From a comment I left on Alas
It’s useful to criticize categories, but I don’t think it’s useful to erase them. I’m an American… not because it’s my nationality and I’m proud of it, but because I was born in that country and bear a share of its stupidities, current and past, regardless of the fact that I’d like to opt out.
No American is automagically nationality-less because their nationality is based on colonialism — any more than white people are automagically colorblind.
I think being a world citizen is a distinction one must work towards — and I’m still trying to articulate exactly what it means, exactly what kind of comprehensive education I need to undergo to be able to say, even, “I’m trying my best to be a world citizen,” much less to claim the identity. Living in a country where I’m one of three white faces I see in a week, and where, although my living conditions are urbanized, about a mile from me people carry water in buckets — that’s definitely part of the education. But only a fraction of it.
Oh, in case anyone was wondering: this is me, currently off hormones, teaching English in China. I have much more to say, but have been refraining from it due to the spam problem on this blog — I’m going to need to wipe the whole thing, install filters, and restart it because the software times out when I try to delete existing spam.