The problem of White Supremacy - Spinoff from Buffalo Shooting thread

guidomerkinsrules said

why wouldn't the metric be one side has experienced both personal and institutional racism and the other has not?
would you feel confident you could weigh in on what is a female orgasm or what is excessive period pain?
i would hope your answer is something like "i don't have the perspective to weigh in on such things"
but here you are having never experience institutional racism (not talking hardship or someone was mean to you in middle school - real documented institutional racism) imagining that there's such a thing as an objective take on race or there is some middle ground - that's trying to get to the 'color blindness' thing that everyone knows is a canard, but exists as some rhetorical device to try to bandaid chasmic divides

believe black people

now the kneejerk reaction to this might be something like "well, that's not fair, they can cry wolf whenever they want to"
to such a person, I would REALLY ask them to check their notion of fairness and why they want to apply it in these instances and not for the millions of instances on the 'other side'

Click to expand...

I appreciate trying to head off the knee-jerk reaction as to not try to appear to bait me, but that wasn't the reaction I had reading your post. Rather a question about you in particular popped in my head. I've always assumed you as white & I apologize if I am wrong. I thought I remember you saying you were before. So, being white, I wondered if you felt like you had a finger on the pulse of racism and if you felt like you would, in most cases, know it when you see it. You seem to, to me. But what is it about you that might make you feel that way, yet you say that I am incapable of having that perspective?

And BTW, I was not talking about someone "being mean to me in middle school." I grew up from a very poor family in one of the poorest parts of Biloxi. Most of my friends and many of my relatives, including my grandmother, lived in the projects and we had quite a large population of migrant Vietnamese and blacks intermingled with us. I didn't grow up in some fabled ivory tower where I was protected and sheltered from the ugly parts of society. So yes, I do think that I have some perspective on the subject or at least enough to know it when I see it in a lot of cases.