It's sort of tautalogical to say "People in power don't live like the rest of the world." And this fact has been a problem in terms of creating policies that work well for the masses since time immemorial.
It's an important distinction as it sets the parameters by which we engage in conversation and debate. If you begin the conversation by accusing the other side of being inherently bigoted then there is no civil or useful exchange of ideas to be had. It puts the other side in a defensive posture from the get go and only leads to more tribal group-think.
Both sides need to give a little here if we aren't going to remain stuck on such topics. And expecting all that giving to come from women, people of color, and other underprivileged groups is merely entrenching white male privilege in a really ugly, toxic manner.
Because I don't believe it is valid. Class/color/gender are not the only influencers on someone's decision making process, yet you two seem to think that's all we need to consider.
Where is the evidence that these people don't care about abuse and harassment because of their class and color? I see a pretty damning statement which includes zero evidence, just what someone believes to be true for <reasons>.
So no, I won't accept your premise or the GP's until I see evidence. If there is no evidence then fine, you and anyone else are free to believe whatever you like, but don't pretend it's a logically defensible position.
>This is a perpetual problem where one group feels unheard, unserved, left out, etc and then they complain about that and then are told their complaints aren't valid because they said them in a not nice enough fashion or something. Both sides need to give a little here if we aren't going to remain stuck on such topics.
Not every complaint _is_ valid, and we have no idea what the GP's motivations were. I'm not going to give any ground. You and the GP are taking a complex issue and boiling it down to something absurdly simple. All that I'm saying is that it's not simple and, if we're ever to have a reasoned debate, it needs to be predicated on facts, not "feelings". If you're going to attribute someone's actions to their gender and race then you had better be able to back it up.
It's telling that you believe _I'm_ the one doing harm when I have made no accusations at all and the GP was inarguably expressing a racist view.
If you really can't get over your feelings of personal insult and your need to defend white men, then please go back and substitute "part of the socially dominant racial group" for "white" and "part of the socially dominant gender group" for "men". In US history, those terms are equivalent. If you don't like that, talk to the founding fathers who set it up that way.
The reason it's material here is that a large portion of Twitter abuse is related to this. You can look at famous incidents, for example. Leslie Jones received a giant wave of racist, sexist abuse: https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/a-timeline-of-leslie-joness-h...
And the company admitted they had failed massively: https://people.com/movies/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-speaks-out...
You could also look at the differential experience of white men versus others on Twitter. E.g.: https://www.theroot.com/twitter-has-a-serious-harassment-and...
Note also your standard here. You, a white man, refuse to accept that race or gender could be relevant to a social problem until other people take the time to spoon-feed you. Why isn't it your job to know something about American history? Why isn't it your job to learn about the problem of online abuse before deciding that the privilege afforded to white men couldn't possibly be the relevant? Answer: because you were raised to believe that whiteness and maleness were the default and were good. So you choose that as your supposedly neutral stance, and require others to prove you wrong.
The true neutral stance would either be "I don't know about this problem and would like to learn" or "let's assume that online culture has some relationship to the existing offline social dynamic".