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rb84's picture

Respectfully, I think a converstation around PC Culture and microagressions is incomplete without acknowledging privilege and white privilege specifically.  If I might share a quick anecdote...  

One of my best friends (we are both white guys) recently became a police officer.  It was his lifelong dream and obviously a great achievement.  I was and am extremely proud of my friend.  However, after he started the job I started to notice a few more off-color comments he made when we hung out.  Some mildly offensive jokes toward minorities and women, that sort of thing.  I guess what lots of people would call microagressions or just being politically incorrect.  But sometimes I would hear one and say "hey man, that's not cool!" or something like that, and he'd just laugh and tell me he didn't really mean it and don't be so sensitive.  "All cops have an inappropriate sense of humor, deal with it snowflake!"

But then I see reports and video of Michael Bennett being threatened with a gun to his head and harassed by police in Las Vegas just for being a black man in the vacinity of a reported shooting.  And I think back to my friend, and his friends on the police force, and their jokes, and how all these little comments might just slowly start to change the way they view the citizens they are supposed to protect, especially people of color.  Microagressions that very slowly and subconsciously manifest into physical agressions. 

I guess what I'm saying is your "microagression" or silly joke or "don't be senstitive buttercup" comment might feel like or even become a real agression to someone who looks different than you, prays differently than you, even uses a different bathroom than you do.

And so I'm curious to know if those who have a problem with our alleged microagression culture stop to consider their own privilege, or consider an alternative society where the rules of polite society were made by people who don't look like you?  Do you wonder what it would feel like if you heard a co-worker laugh about the words you use or your hairstyle or even the birthplace of the first president of your race, and then found yourself in handcuffs later that night b/c you "fit the description"?  As a white male I will never know how this really feels, but I bet I'd be pretty resentful if I was just told to not be so sensitive about it.

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