I get why it pisses you off, but please realize that people who are not as sensitive to the things you are are evil or racist.
Did you just … #NotAllWhitePeople me?
Wow. I’ve never personally had someone online say this to me, even in so many words. It is, indeed, more than a bit tone-deaf.
So many things I want to say… .
First: I note that a lot of “evil” and “racist” people love heroes of the Confederacy. Perhaps that correlation that isn’t causation, but until I have numbers that say otherwise — and absent all other evidence — I know which way I’m leaning on the matter.
Second: Much like the desperately impoverished and not-so-desperately impoverished don’t tend to cheer on billionaires who blow money on going into barely-beyond-orbit. But you know who digs billionaires who do that? Other billionaires, and likely at a higher ratio than non-billionaires like it.
So, please don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, and I’ll spare you the same insult, as a matter of common courtesy.
Third: People’s reasons for liking a movie or other media — or disliking it — are their own. I see we agree on that. Where we part shared territory is, the sharp divide between which groups like what media content is always a telling bit of data, to me.
Fourth: I never claimed in my response that people who aren’t as “sensitive” as me are “evil or racist.”
Fifth: Yes, it DOES piss me off with good, HUMAN REASON. That’s not a ME sensitivity or even a BLACK sensitivity. That’s a HUMAN sensitivity, for humans in/of that subset of the society who live and have lived that. And for humans who can truly empathize with other humans who are in that subset of humanity. Admittedly, the pool of truly empathetic humans is always relatively small. Even on the diaspora, it’s smaller than I’d like.
Sixth: I don’t require pandering from a white person, on this subject or any other, as a salve for my feelings or for their own. (You COULD have simply quietly acknowledged to yourself that each person’s feelings about a genocidal group are their own, and moved on. But you chose this hill to make your stand, as it were … which is telling, as well. As we all know, “hit dog gonna holler.”)
Seventh: I also very much don’t need claims of “getting it.” You really DON’T get it and never will. You don’t have cultural or lived experience to get it and never will. That you THINK you get it show how much you really, really don’t. You don’t know it from the inside and you never will — and secondhand experience is no substitute. You, claiming to “get it” is, to me, a toddler sharing its reflections on growing older with me. I mean … okay? Free world. But just because one can do/say a thing, doesn’t make that subject one’s wheelhouse.
Eighth: Thinking that you ever could or would “get it” without any cultural or lived experience strikes me as hubris, which makes the pandering seem like what it is. YOU don’t remotely get where I’m at on this and your response says that louder than ten glowing review of John Carter could. You LITERALLY stepped over my point to #NotAllWhitePeople me, as if reminding me of that useless sentiment isn’t the HEIGHT of selfish pandering and non-empathy. The IMPORTANT PART of what I SAID, is that YOU THINK I should know that Not All White People.
Can’t say I’m feeling that sentiment nor can I claim to see its veracity evidenced here.
Ninth: This is response typefies of so many problems that so many white people have and create when it comes to ANY minority, be it racial, sexual, ethnic, whatever. And I don’t mean because of skin color. I mean the HEADSPACE of it. That folks that live in and benefit from, and see the world through a LENS of WHITENESS that obscure all else. Whiteness is toxic as hell and lacking in almost all empathy. That’s simply what and the way this world is for a lot of reasons.
Your response is simply an incarnation of so many similar responses I’ve witnessed and received. The phrasing changes but that lens of whiteness never does. Reminders of this and of why the struggle is ongoing but important are certainly energizing … but also tiring, even after my short lifetime living it.
Tenth: Suffice it to say: No, I have no interest whatsoever in mining for heroes from the from the ranks of the Confederacy. Or from enslavers, colonoizers, and imperialists. I don’t care about the redemption arc of fictional racists who’ve killed fictional folks of color because they weren’t fictionally human.
In conclusion: What you like and believe is, of course, your own business. The same is true of everyone — at least, until the point that it impacts others (say, in a response to a response on a website). And that line can be thick and blurry. But there’s a reason this saying exists in some form among literally every Black (and some Latinx) group I’ve ever met:
“Can’t tell white people nothin’… .”
But, I’m sure that’s … #NotALLWhitePeople
