Native informers are professionally marginal yet white-identified in the adopted country
Evidence
The typical native informers, born and raised in places such as Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, and Pakistan, move to Europe and/ or the United States for their higher education. They may come from modest or opulent backgrounds; their financial means may be either inherited, the result of advantageous marriage, or payment for services to their American employers. They rarely hold a stable job with professional accountability, remaining rather on the professional margins of the society whose interests they serve. Whether or not they have made a career in their native land, they have always felt alienated from it, but they are no more at home in the country they have adopted just because it is where they can sell their services best. Their image of the adopted country, however, is very much white-identified; they are thus angry and baffled to find many other brown immigrants like themselves, rude compatriots who watch them closely and occasionally even have the audacity to expose them. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 94
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The portrait of marginality-plus-white-identification is a dense, generative character sketch that unpacks the psychology of comprador intellectuals.
- STORYSTEM: This character type—marginal, alienated from both home and adopted lands, white-identified yet angry at fellow immigrants—is a ready-made protagonist with inherent tension.