Wally Longwell,
USA
I don’t think white people/racial majorities, including myself, truly grasp that they won’t ever feel how it feels to be a truly marginalized group. I’ve seen ignorant people say racial slurs in passing and justifying it by saying it wasn’t meant to be offensive. But that’s not the point. We cannot truly understand the power a word can have with long history of context. We won’t ever know how it feels to hear that word from someone part of a group that was historically their oppressor. So we shouldn’t act like we know it’s okay to use. I’ve also seen people claim they have had people be racist towards them as a white person in a white-predominant country such as USA. This just isn’t true discrimination. We weren’t historically oppressed, tortured, conquered, enslaved, and discriminated. We aren’t the victims here. So it isn’t true racism. We will never experience true racism on the receiving end. So think about how you use words, whether it be slurs or descriptive words pertaining to how others treat you. Because we just don’t get it. So we have to GET that we DONT get it.
