I don't even understand what "privilege" means anymore. I used to, but it now just seems to be a word that gets thrown down to try to end the conversation, whenever someone's arguing with a white guy. How did we get to this point where you can't even have a valid opinion about something if you're coming from some position of privilege?
It seems to be the result of a multi-dimensional formula taking into account every possible variable you can imagine.
Is kind of like a Credit Score, but determined by Twitter. The process is opaque and you cannot dispute it. You also can't get your Privilege Score beforehand, but you WILL be told your relative Privilege Position compared to other people if you say something wrong.
Your opinion is valid regardless of your privilege. When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face, however, you should defer to the experts in the area who have lived their entire lives being in the seat of discrimination. Hope that made sense.
> Your opinion is valid regardless of your privilege. When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face, however, you should defer to the experts in the area who have lived their entire lives being in the seat of discrimination. Hope that made sense.
It doesn't make sense. You are essentially if you are non-minority, your opinion should be ignored unless its in-line with the opinion of those in the minority. How is that respecting an opinion as "valid"?
You can put words in my mouth all day but here is exactly what I wrote.
> When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face, however, you should defer to the experts in the area who have lived their entire lives being in the seat of discrimination.
We all appreciate attempts to understand and empathize with us. You can go very far by talking with us and trying to place yourself in our shoes, but we don't appreciate it when you talk over us, attempt to silence our voices, or, case in point, put words in our mouths and exaggerate our points beyond recognition.
Please try and engage this topic in good faith and not through pedantics and wordplay. If you fundamentally disagree that the victims of discrimination should have the loudest voice in the matter, I'd love to talk further.
There is not always such a thing as "the experts".
People who look the same, grew up in the same place, have the same parents, can still have the opposite opinions.
Then, who is the expert -- when they disagree with each other, the complete opposite.
(Real world example from where I live.)
I'm not in the US though, actually things seem a bit weird over there. The history looks quite different here where I live.
> put words in my mouth all day
Not sure what you have in mind, I still think that what you wrote, sounds weird (I hope you don't mind). As if someone who got bullied in school, automatically should know better how to mitigate such problems in school. (Be an expert?)
When you form a student-led committee on anti-bullying but mysteriously exclude all the victims, the bullied kids will beg and plead you to reconsider and listen to their voices instead. Not because everyone else's opinions are invalid, but because they are the ones who can speak the clearest about issues that others are blind to.
I'm playing along with your analogy here, but I actually think it's a terribly weak analogy. Racial discrimination is often so ingrained in the culture that its perpetrators aren't always hulking bullies menacingly taking lunch money from people. They are more dangerous because they often see themselves as kind, empathetic and intelligent - often believing that they can detect and solve deeply complex, emotion-rooted problems such as racial discrimination simply by thinking about it for a bit when it's convenient for them. They can't fathom that the experience of the discriminated may be so vastly different than their imagination permits, simply because they haven't experienced it firsthand.
Too many of us have been silenced and told to shut up both explicitly and implicitly. When it comes to racial discrimination, we will not go unheard. In this instance, in this matter, our voices do weigh much more than yours and that's simply the fact you'll have to live with.
> When you form a student-led committee on anti-bullying but mysteriously exclude all the victims
That's, what's the right word, changing the analogy into madness.
I said like this: "Not only group X can have good ideas about something"
and you seem to believe that that means: "X must be silenced" -- that's weird, to say the least.
I never said that, and I don't think that, and I feel surprised, maybe a little bit ill, that you somehow misinterpreted what I wrote, that much.
> They are more dangerous because they often see themselves as kind, empathetic and intelligent - often believing that they can detect and solve deeply complex, emotion-rooted problems such as racial discrimination simply by thinking about it
I suppose there are such people.
> have been silenced and told to shut up
I feel sad for the cases when that's happened to you and others
> our voices do weigh much more than yours
That's odd, you start writing "our" and "yours" as if you now believe that I'm in some antagonist group, just because I said "not only X can have good ideas".
I'm happy that my friends who look different than me, different skin color for example, don't think like that. We think about each other as "we" together, not as "us" and "them".
I think it's good to end the conversation here. In any case I'm probably not replying any further. And if you did reply to this, I think that that reply would misinterpret something I wrote, but I wouldn't reply and point out what that misunderstanding was about.
As long as you aren't trying to refute the fact that historically silenced people are the de facto authority on being "historically silenced", we're on the same page.
And for the sake of clarity - Yes, anyone can and will conjure up great ideas and solutions. No, I'm not calling for such an ideas to be discarded just because the source is "wrong".
For your convenience, let me paste my original comment that you had a beef with:
> Your opinion is valid regardless of your privilege. When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face, however, you should defer to the experts in the area who have lived their entire lives being in the seat of discrimination. Hope that made sense.
I thought it was clearly implied that the voice of the discriminated be priotitized over others 'in the events of clashing opinions'. If that wasn't the case, then I apologize for my weak writing. English is obviously not my first language.
Lastly, when you engage in a discussion with a minority person in matters regards to treatment of minority groups, do not be surprised that terms like "we" "us" and "your" get thrown around. It's simply how conversations naturally flow around such topics, and not indicative of the speaker's bias towards identity politics. You might be shocked to find that my close friends of diverse backgrounds don't see me as the strawman you described. And that's not even mentioning my wife and her family.
> As long as you aren't trying to refute the fact that historically silenced people are the de facto authority on being "historically silenced", we're on the same page
Ok, I definitely agree with you about that
> No, I'm not calling for such an ideas to be discarded just because the source is "wrong".
Oh ok. I first got the impression that you did, thanks for replying and explaining
About the quote:
> When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face,
I read that as having ideas about what to do about it, whilst you seem to have referred to what has happened to minority people in the past.
I'm thinking that "discussing" here is a bit ambiguous and I'm sorry that I didn't realize I had interpreted it differently from what you meant
> English is obviously not my first language.
Not my first either :-)
(btw I'm a bit surprised, I was guessing that you had grown up in the US in a primarily English speaking part of the country)
> You might be shocked to find that my close friends of diverse backgrounds don't see me as the strawman you described.
It's possible for person to be more of an expert on issues "minorities" face than a single member of a minority. If it's their area of expertise and they have information from and exposure to wide swaths of those minorities. A third generation Asian American graduate from Sandford working at a startup in SF isn't having the same experience as a Vietnamese immigrant chicken farmer..
