The “Wages of Burman-ness:” Ethnicity and Burman Privilege in Contemporary Myanmar

The “Wages of Burman-ness:” Ethnicity and Burman Privilege in Contemporary Myanmar

Ethnicity is one of the primary lenses through which scholars view conflict in Burma/Myanmar. In this paper I examine the dominance of the majority ethnic group in Myanmar, the Burmans, and the ways in which Burman-ness functions as a privileged identity. I draw from the theoretical framework of Whiteness and White privilege in critical race theory to argue that, although there are important analytical differences between race and ethnicity, we can conceptualise Burman-ness as a form of institutionalised dominance similar to Whiteness. I support this argument by documenting the ways in which Burmans are privileged in relation to non-Burmans, while still, in many cases, seeing themselves as equally subject to government repression. This analysis of Burman privilege (and blindness to that privilege) is particularly relevant given the fact that the political reforms implemented by Myanmar's new, partly civilian government since 2011 have opened new opportunities for (mostly Burman) activists while c. 
  

အခွင့်ထူးခံဗမာနဲ့ တိုင်းရင်းသားပြဿနာ

Wednesday, 27 February 2013 10:29 သျှမ်းသံတော်ဆင့်

အမေရိကန်မှာ လူဖြူကြီးစိုးပြီး အခွင့်ထူးခံစားရသလို မြန်မာပြည်မှာလည်း ဗမာလူမျိုးကြီးစိုးပြီး အခွင့်ထူးခံ ဖြစ်နေပုံကို လေ့လာဆန်းစစ်ထားတဲ့ အမေရိကန်နိုင်ငံ George Washington တက္ကသိုလ် နိုင်ငံရေးသိပ္ပံ ပညာရှင်၊ Dr.Matthew J.Walton ရဲ့ စားတမ်းကို အကျဉ်းချုံးတင်ပြပါမယ်။ ------- (ဦးအောင်ခင်ရဲ့ စာအုပ်စင်)

http://www.burmese.panglong.org/2008-08-01-03-24-54/87-2008-08-01-03-23-29/3908-2013-02-27-03-34-47.html