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What really causes harm is when you divide people up into groups based on arbitrary characteristics (like skin color) and treat those characteristics like they'
by Ajedi32 4y ago
What really causes harm is when you divide people up into groups based on arbitrary characteristics (like skin color) and treat those characteristics like they're the sole defining aspect of each person's identity, like you're doing right now.
Framing this as "non-black people speaking for black people" carries the implicit assumption that all black people have the same/similar opinions; that an arbitrary black person would be able to meaningfully "speak for [all] black people" in a way that an arbitrary non-black person can't. That's wrong.
The previous commenter making an educated guess based on personal experience with zero concrete data points is only slightly worse than making that same guess based on one concrete data point, and neither situation would be justification for telling anyone to "shut it" or "do better" in my opinion.
- jrm4 4y agoWrong. Just wrong. And to people who look like me, harmful. Now to be specific, I didn't make any generalizations about black folks, I was telling others not to. But, even if, I'm still pointing out a specific issue that I can observe and give other examples of, and you cannot "both ways" it. White people making presumptions about what black people think is more harmful than black people making presumptions about what black people think. This owes to the fact that frequently -- said white person will only be talking to other white people and now you've cut black folks out of the conversation. Black people talking about each other is much different. Skin in the game.