A humorous, and not altogether deep, take on the “I don’t see differences between people we’re all just people and isn’t that the true equality of it all?” mindset:
In short, for better or for worse, differences like sex and race and age cause enormous differences in life experience. That’s the world we’re saddled with. Don’t make it right, but it happens.
In refusing to acknowledge those different starting points, it’s much harder to appropriate acknowledge and appreciate those different experiences. To grapple with the things in our world that make them the case, recognize the shortcomings where they are, and do the hard work to bridge those gaps and bring everyone to the table equally.
@Nesrie, for all her argumentation style makes me want to pull out my considerable amounts of hair sometimes ( <3 ), has lived a vastly different life than I have by bent of growing up a recognizably biracial woman in America. The things she’s heard and seen and been told and been kept from and pushed toward accumulate over years and decades and suffuse her in ways I can’t really begin to truly understand.
Like, man, I think people who fly Confederate flags in front of their houses are slope-browed fuckstains who should be dumped on a desert island and made to cannibalize each other, sure. She sees one pop up in her neighborhood and wonders if she’s gonna be the next hate crime victim to get ignored by the national news media every single time she passes by that house.
In our happy little gaming forum, the threats and stings aren’t usually that evident or that painful, but they’re there nonetheless. Again, one little joke in the vein of TITS OR GTFO isn’t gonna make or break the world. But 40 of them a year adds up over time, and figuring out who’s really safe and trustworthy and being ironic and who’s maybe actually sort of a sexist creep is tiring and scary and hard.
Places like BF (sorry, @WhollySchmidt) ease that mental load by making it really goddamned hard to say and do the things that pile onto various marginalized groups. They do a lot of things in that vein. Some of them are pretty extreme. I’m a fairly goddamn progressive guy, and I’m sure I’d run afoul of them with some of my beliefs and positions, so I don’t really bother visiting. But I’m glad for the folks who get something from that experience, and for the women and LGBT folks and etc etc etc who feel safer, happier, and more free there.
Qt3 doesn’t have to go to those same lengths, and there are lots of ways to skin a cat. . . but shit, as the child of a Guatemalan immigrant, I’m genuinely a little put off by the fact that we’ve got Wall-cheering Trumpistas on this board cuz hey, you know, Hispanic. Shit, my mom even took a white woman’s job when she got into her current one. Wuh-oh. And I’m lucky that I look white enough and have a white enough name that no one realizes I’m mixed unless I bring it up myself. People don’t shove my heritage in my face 24/7 IRL. So, you know, the psychic tax of knowing that there’s probably people here right now who’d have rather have seen my anchor-babying momma get deported before she achieved citizenship isn’t as high as it could be.
But it’s there.