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White people have unearned advantages. So do men. Both have a tendency to do whatever they can to keep it that way, including pretending they’re being treated as badly as they continue treat others, and it’s insulting as fuck. White men double down. Thats why you get singled out.
I don’t get offended about criticisms of white people because they’re true. It’s not about me. Just because I work to check my engrained biases doesn’t mean others aren’t affected by the biases - institutionalized - of a racist system. Facts don’t offend me. Not fixing it does.
But see, you aren’t struggling as much as the next person - and that *doesnt* mean you aren’t struggling. Lots of white people - lots of white men - are struggling; but they aren’t facing the additional institutionalized challenges of racism and sexism.
That matters to marginalized people for the same reason your frustration with what you perceive as a failure to recognize your own struggle matters to you, and more importantly, it matters because white men have the greatest ability to fix it.
When white men pretend the playing field is level, it becomes easy to blame marginalized people for their own marginalization, because you assume they have the same ability to improve their circumstances that you do — and by the way,
that’s true even if your own ability to elevate your status is quite limited. That doesn’t change the reality that it’s even more limited for women and POC (POC women especially, for example).
If white men who suffer stopped getting angry at everyone who has it even worse than them and started channeling their anger at the causes of marginalization - and using their privilege as leverage - they could affect changes that would help us all...If they would just LISTEN.
