> Surely, if this pain is something only black people can understand and they are so united in this movement, then it suggests that their grievances ARE legitim

> Surely, if this pain is something only black people can understand and they are so united in this movement, then it suggests that their grievances ARE legitimate. Please don't stop here - please try to understand where their grievances are coming from. College is when a lot of people are at their most radical, and on top of that, a lot of nuance is lost in soundbites. There's a lot of noise out there. I think something especially important that's lost on people here is how emotionally exhausting it is to live in a place where you're constantly denigrated (I mean it's the root of that word, lol). It's especially hard to draw an empathetic picture when there's no common personably relatable situation to draw a comparison to. Like at best you could say "it's like getting picked on for being a nerd," except that misses the hundreds of years of American slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, media representation, and a hundred other small issues. And then that's multiplied by the fact that when you try to explain it to a single person, you face a mountain of resistance every time, and the rest of your society doesn't really want to hear your complaints. Most people in this thread won't even acknowledge that they MIGHT have a point! Imagine that every day in every interaction for your entire life!