What does race have to do with this? Your average white male in the US is not a rule maker and suffers under the same arbitrary and often downright unfair consequences as anyone else.
I just watched a white male friend get punished for academic dishonesty because another student cheated off him, despite being able to prove conclusively with logs and other evidence that he had no part in it.
I also just watched another white male friend be discriminated against because of his race in receiving mental healthcare services. This made it necessary for him to change employers and move to another city so he’d have access to the mental healthcare services that up to this point had helped prevent his suicide.
Both decisions were unfair, unkind, and unnecessary, but were arbitrarily decided by a rules maker who had no oversight (a professor and a bureaucrat). In neither case did being white or male help my friends, and in the latter case he was denied limited services specifically because the bureaucracy prioritizes those services for racial minorities.
Seriously stop turning every damn thing into a racial issue with your empirically bullshit identity politics.
The person you're replying to didn't claim that only non-whites or non-males experienced these things. They claimed that white males experience them less frequently.
Your anecdotes are not substantial data, and the data do (empirically!) bear out the claim they were making, at least in many areas.
You're also right, of course, that this has to do with the power structures in place rather than being purely about race or sex. And in that respect, both you and the person you responded to are probably on the same team: you both think the power structures are unfair and ought to be challenged. Maybe focus on that possibility instead of reacting so critically?
In other words, if you're tired of "bullshit identity politics" focus on constructively guiding the conversation towards problematic power dynamics, rather than stomping off just because someone points out that those power dynamics are applied in a way that's disproportionate.
Correct, I was only stating that this same meta-game exists. It’s not about identity politics, it’s that white men have made the rules for a very long time. So from the perspective of a white man, it’s an attack on traditional values.
From the perspective of a black woman, it’s trying to claw out the same degree of freedom that the rule makers have while not pissing them off enough to get rebuked (or arrested, or whatever).
I feel the world would generally be a better place if we all understood each other’s point of view better. Sadly, most rulemakers have no interest in this.
