I feel compelled to write about race issues because I am a person of color. The issues directly impact my life. But I'm afraid because readers might be pissed off enough to get me fired. :/
They wanted me to add the word "more" to the title of the second point. Which makes sense, but that's literally a one minute conversation. My boss was like "Sorry for going behind your back. I didn't realize you were going to find out."
https://www.redfin.com/blog/2014/10/why-i-work-at-redfin-kev...
So really "Sorry you found out I went behind your back".
If you don't want to take the time to do that, that's fine. But don't churn. And don't blame other people.
I'm a white male and I feel totally confident expressing my opinions on race and gender, including opinions that go contrary to mainstream feminist and anti-racist positions. You might be surprised to learn that women and people of color are not unified in their beliefs about race and sex.
But that's only because I've taken the time to listen very carefully to criticism, to listen particularly carefully and gently when someone is telling me something that seems wrong, and do my own research. It's not just a matter of watching the world go by and having an opinion.
This is why there's a lot of avoidance of the topic. Frankly most people don't know what they are talking about. I frequent a forum that's filled with "PoC" and we have a lot of arguments in our ranks too.
When that happens, most of us respond with empathy and because we understand, support and activism to make it better and have one another's backs.
Progress happens, and things get better. I believe in all of that deeply. I've paid hard to stand for it too. More than once.
Some of us respond with rage, hate, and all manner of emotions, and that sucks. It's not like any of us actually picks these things, so how does it make any real sense to be held to account for them? (Color, gender, gay, etc...)
It is, like you say, a contact sport with very real implications for us all. To me, that contact is good. It helps to understand others and it can help to keep the worst in check for fear of consequences too.
But there is a lot of difficulty in that quiet response one just can't quite pin down... fired one day, for example.
I'm an ordinary white guy, and I've had this sort of thing happen when I've gone to bat for someone who needed it.
Making things better is expensive in this way, and I'm not entirely sure we can avoid it. We may blunt it some, but people remain exposed all the same.
I understand your fear. It has a real basis and all of us must weigh these things. At some points in life, maybe we can take the hit. At others, it may cost too much.
I don't have answers, other than to say there are a lot of us who get it.
Doing that hurts and it's scary, but it also rewards one with security and empathy needed to understand just how completely unacceptable bigotry, racism, etc... really are too.
The triggers for that so very often happen by another person, a target, sharing.
I know that university admissions PoC don't include Asians, in fact most admissions standards are stacked against them.
Edit: There is a long explanation of why Asians are sometimes excluded. The short answer is racism against Asians.
He thinks I'm racist for quoting wikipedia. I've met people like him at work. Overly sensitive people is exactly why I don't want to write about race issues.
I mean, I think you buy into and identify with a concept that is explicitly, by definition anti-white..
Is that not racist?
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>This is exactly why I don't want to write about race issues.
Because everyone needs to agree with you about them 100%?
Sorry, what? Considered by whom? Because we should have a word with these people about how unimaginative they are.
For one thing, there are plenty of ways a member of group X could experience institutional racism in an X-majority country. Perhaps they live in a Y-dominated region of the country, or work for a Y-owned company, or group Y has more political/economic/cultural power in society despite being a minority, or they work for an organization whose policy is to hire and promote Y preferentially.
More generally, I don't see the purpose of desperately insisting that institutional racism can never affect group X. To say that group X can be harmed certainly doesn't mean that group Y isn't harmed more. It's a weird and pointless linguistic game that harms the purpose of achieving equality of opportunity by gratuitously driving away allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
The fact is, the occasional inconvenience on whites in America (as a convenient example) from occasional pockets of bigoted blacks is fundamentally different from the regular impact on blacks from the institutionalized racist tendencies in society.
White people can certainly experience this in countries where they are the majority. As an example taken directly from the wikipedia article, white people significantly underperform Asians on standardized tests, they are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, have worse health, and are disproportionately likely to be "targeted" by police (also they commit less crime).
Can you cite any piece of evidence in favor of institutional racism by whites against blacks that doesn't also support institutional racism by asians against whites?
There are contexts where Asians are underrepresented; political representation comes to mind. In those places "people of color" makes more sense.