It is a good piece, i like her writing style.
There’s one part though, that highlights a major component of the breakdown of discussion on a lot of these issues.
“Nobody cares about white men,” is a sentence I hear far too often. In facebook comments, tweets, article responses, emails, the op-eds of major national papers. Nobody cares about the white men left behind. Nobody cares about the white men who are collecting unemployment, or working middle management, or not getting regular blow jobs. Nobody cares about the white men whose hair is thinning and dad-bod is settling in and they never got to walk into a party with a hot girl on their arm and now it’s too late. Nobody cares about the white men who have to learn new terms like “privilege” or “cultural appropriation” or “social justice” — terms that don’t do anything to explain why they aren’t rich or powerful or happy.
I think that understanding the experience of other people is hard. It takes effort. In a lot of ways, this piece is good because the author kind of does go to the effort of trying to understand the perspective of these folks. And i think that understanding, or at least a willingness to try to achieve that understanding, is critical to solving a lot of the troubles our society has.
Society is, on some level, based upon politeness. Upon some desire to treat each other with respect and dignity, and have that reciprocated. When the goal becomes just beating everyone, things breakdown.
For a white guy, understanding the inherent privilege that comes with his skin color is hard. Because our lives are not easy. We have our own troubles, because life is hard, and not fair for anyone. It takes effort to see beyond that reality and understand that non whites have those troubles, plus more.
All too often, the discussion breaks down because to doesn’t get to the level necessary to convey any real empathy between the different parties.
People like Tucker Carlson tell people that the bottom of white privilege means an assumption that whites live the easy life, and since so many know that’s not true, they immediately reject the idea.
But then on the flip side, such terms are often used to simply silence someone in a privileged position. If they express skepticism, perhaps stemming from ignorance, they may receive a dismissive answer like “check your privilege”. And a lot of the time, this is thrown it by someone who, unlike the author of this piece, really never bothered to think about what that other person’s experience may have been. Sometimes they are just as intellectually lazy as the guy who refuses to think about how a black person’s experience is different from theirs. The laziness is common on both sides.
If you want to convince that guy to have empathy for someone else’s plight, you need to let him know that you understand that has life hasn’t been all roses either. He’ll be more receptive to your argument, because it’s less antagonistic. And really, building up empathy on both sides is what breaks down the crap that leads to folks supporting stuff that ultimately hurts them, just because it hurts the other guy. It helps get them to help each other out, because it’s easier to give a crap about someone else when you understand something about their experience. But it needs to go both ways, because if someone feels like you are dismissing their experience, they aren’t going to be inclined to give a crap about yours.
