Oh, the hoary old "white man can't know, he WASN'T THERE" trope. Honestly, Rex, I like you and I agree with many of your posts, but this is intellectually dishonest at best and disingenuous at worst. Shame on you for saying that we aren't allowed to have a considered opinion on this topic, that we can't be thoughtful enough to know the landscape. That as much as anything is responsible for the sorry state of racial politics. Everyone has the right to define what is offensive to them, but that doesn't have any larger meaning. The gulf between what someone finds offensive and an actual offense can sometimes be as wide as the ocean.
Since you said you'd bow out of the thread, I'm not sure if you'll get a chance to read this, but I think you're a cool guy, so I hope you'll read it with the knowledge that I'm trying to help in a friendly way:
Everyone is privileged, somehow. There's always some kind of privilege bias, and people who are privileged often are not very aware of their privilege, especially compared with those who don't have it. For example, I'm female, and am often rudely made aware of my lack of male privilege, usually by men but also by women on occasion -- and those who remind me usually have no idea that they're doing it. On the other hand, I'm white, and have definitely said stupid entitled shit, because, since I'm white, and since I wasn't raised in an environment where my white privilege would be pointed out to me very often, I sometimes forget that that privilege even exists. That's normal for any type of privilege, be it related to race, gender, mental health, or what have you.
Yes, everyone is offended by different things. Yes, it's easy to argue about what's offensive and what's not, and not everyone has a higher tolerance for "dark" humor. But what was being responded to, here, was the fact that the meme was racist and people thought it was funny because they didn't realize it was racist. It would be a whole different ball game if people were laughing at it with full awareness that it was racist, and thinking of it as a racist joke. But what's been happening here, has been repeated denial of the existence of racism in that meme -- with the logic of "I didn't see any racism there, and therefore it's debatable that it exists." There's also the possibility that the racism
is there, and you didn't see it because that sort of thing doesn't offend you
personally, because it isn't making fun of
you.
(I don't think any less of people for occasionally forgetting their privilege, because I do it all the time, and pretty much everyone does. Which is why I said at the beginning, and will say again: Don't take this the wrong way.)
I mean, it's fine to be ignorant of racist connotation, but to be that defensive about it when the idea is proposed to you?
