General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is" [View all]Hortensis
(58,785 posts)If that was accidental, please note that what I said is that people of all colors can be significantly biased, or not. Bias, religious bigotry, racism, whatever form of bias is being discussed at the moment -- that irrational fear and hostility toward what is seen as "different" -- is in all of us to various degrees but is strongest in conservatives.
Roughly half of all humanity, including of all POC, are conservative by personality, half of those strongly to extremely, most of those latter social conservatives. Social conservatives are the world's biggest troublemakers because of their tendency to strong biases and to acting them out. They love to act their hostility out and typically grab every opportunity they think they can get away with it. See a hate glare from any color to any color, or someone behaving angrily toward a stranger for speaking a different language or wearing different clothes, you can be pretty sure that's a social conservative. Social conservatives come in all colors, religions, geographic backgrounds, ethnicities. Those are the people we all need to stand united against because they're hurtful and dangerous.
But for right here on DU, any biased statements against people on the basis of anything, including race, should be recognized for what they are, and no one, regardless of skin color, should be granted special privilege for abusing others. Especially here on DU, for goodness' sake. The great diversity of our party means we have Democrats of all political personality types, but that doesn't mean we should condone Democrat-on-Democrat abuse from anyone.
Or be eagerly useful idiots for enemies trying to energize racial hostility to divide our party.
When someone claims to be unfairly stigmatized, we should at least respect that person's right to speak up, listen to develop our own understanding further, and certainly not tell a person objecting to being stigmatized as racist that he or she is. If an apology is not felt appropriate, just move on.
Btw, I've explained to Effie before my feeling that that her explanations of how POC like her feel and how she thinks POC see and experience white people are valid and valuable (presuming they do reflect the feelings of many POC), but that telling white people how they all feel are not and that these broad negative generalizations about what white people think by definition have to be wrong in too many cases to count and should be carefully avoided.. That's what's causing most protests and also a big part of what has caused many to avoid these threads.