Lead on, oh Kinky Turtle

spiral-shark:

kinkyturtle:

spiral-shark:

kinkyturtle:

spiral-shark:

kinkyturtle:

spiral-shark:

kinkyturtle:

When I was in high school I was fairly progressive—I was into feminism and gender equality. In my small town that makes you something of an outsider; it’s full of unapologetic racists, sexists, heterosexists, cissexists and hardcore conservatives But I hadn’t learned about…

Am I the only one extremely insulted by the idea that being born white automatically makes you a racist?  Because for one thing, being ignorant of privilege is not racism, it’s just ignorance.  And for another, who’s to assume that every white child is raised to take these privileges for granted?

That said, taking privilege for granted while also being ignorant of it can very easily lead to oppression (not racism unless it’s malicious), and though it may be commonplace, it’s a completely different matter to therefore assume that all white people are born into it.

Also, I really don’t care how insulted you are.

Oh yeah, that’s how you bring change into this world, people.  By apathetically tossing aside other perspectives and viewpoints.

Oh wait.

“You need to stop trying to invalidate their opinions”

How is one group worth listening to and not another?  Sounds an awful lot how racism got started.

You’re a white dood. POC and women have to hear your opinion and your version of things every single fucking day of their lives because that’s what this entire country is (because of racism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism and so on). And you’re still over here trying to bitch about “wahhhh, they don’t want to listen to me”.

Also, you just proved to me that you have no fucking grasp on history if you think that “not wanting to listen to someone’s opinion” is how racism got started. Like…you seriously need to educate yourself.

Oh that’s cute.  MY version of things?  You think I’M the one who makes it so hard for people to get healthcare, jobs, and so forth?  Being born into white society does not mean I inherently embrace it.  That’s also assuming I was born into the white society that makes all the problems for PoC in the first place.

And uhh what?  ”wahhhh they don’t want to listen to me”?  What are you even saying here.

Also, racism got started when people took people of a certain group and sidelined them for no reason other than they had a different skin color.  And if you’ll look at what I said, I phrased it “sounds an awful lot like”, as in it had the function if not necessarily the form.  The function being that you sidelined what I had to say on the merits of who said it, not what I was saying.  This “who” being a vague impression of a white male who disagreed with you, and nothing more.

You’re whole “I’m not racist, I’m different, blah blah blah blah, don’t bash white people!” thing is pretty symptomatic of white privilege. Your whole rushing to defend whiteness is pretty symptomatic of white privilege. When you do shit like that, you are very much embracing the way things are.

You have no grasp of the history of this country. You just referred to imperialism and genocide and colonialism and the systematic enslavement, torture, rape, disenfranchisment, dehumanizing of entire races as simply “sidelining”.

Well, uhh yeah, you shouldn’t bash anyone without knowing them.  What you seem to not be understanding is that I get that white privilege exists and that many white people embrace it and take it for granted.  But what you’re assuming is that if the majority does it, then everyone does it, which is just false.  You should never enter an engagement with predetermined opinions, because every engagement is different.

And I generalized as sidelined to save space, I don’t think I need to write a 5 page essay on the horrors of colonialization to get my point across.  Congrats on the SAT words, I still stand by my point.

It’s not a matter of “embracing” white privilege. If you’re white, you have it. End of story. It’s not enough to just acknowledge that you have it and that that’s not good—if you’re not willing to really examine how whiteness operates as a crucial part of the system that works against POC, if you’re not willing to see how a majority of white people are still racist (and a lot of the rest are willing to run and defend other whites when they get called out on their racism), if you’re not willing to look at yourself and see how you fit into all of this as an oppressor then you are not helping anything. 

Save space? Do you mean “erase the experiences of POC in this country”? Because yeah.