Original post here: https://www.facebook.com/jg/posts/10100265608855158

While I was running tonight, I had a thought about the extremely negative reaction so many privileged people have to being called sexist or racist or <insert thing here>-ist. It occurred to me that this group of people probably hates being unfairly labeled as something they don’t see themselves as and don’t want to be.

Then I thought about every black person I know who has been pulled over for driving while black. Or every woman I know who has been mansplained by someone who just assumed a woman wouldn’t know something. Or every gay person I know who has had to deal with homophobes who are convinced the evil gayness is going to rub off them and their children. People in this group constantly have to deal with people labelling them and applying a set of expectations to them that may not have anything to do with their identity.

Everyone dislikes having someone assume something of them unfairly. One curious thing about people in the second group is that most of the people I know who would fall into the second group actually have some compassion for the people in the first group. They don’t expect the people in the first group not to put labels on them. They deal with dozens of small instance of this every single day. It’s as inevitable as breathing.

Interestingly, the people in the first group can’t stand the idea of anyone putting labels on them. To them, it’s a hateful and unfair dismissal of some or all of their humanity. It’s bigotry and ignorance. An outrage! Maybe when you don’t regularly face it, you don’t build up any thick skin towards it. I still find it fascinating that so many people (and if I’m being real, I mainly mean white men here) don’t see how similar the natural emotions are from group A to group B or how dissimilar the contexts of those emotions are.

I’m guilty of this left and right. I complained relentlessly about how terrible it was getting into and out of the Tel Aviv airport because I was treated badly. They singled me out as a young(ish) guy traveling alone and grilled me. I griped relentlessly about what a shit show it was trying to get my visa to go to China. In both cases, a friend of mine who happens to have relatively darker skin just laughed at my frustration because he faces that kind of treatment every time he flies. He also comes from a country that doesn’t have a great political status relative to the US, so he has to play the “please can I have a visa” game for almost every country he visits.

For him, it’s a day to day pain in the ass. He reminds me of this every time I get indignant about the injustice. To me, it’s unthinkable. It’s outrageous. I suppose really, it’s just new to me. Now, I can understand where he’s coming from in a way that I couldn’t before.

The same applies when being called out for being sexist or racist or anything-ist in a way that doesn’t feel fair. It might be, it might not be — I’m not trying to answer that question. However accurate it is or isn’t, if you’re a privileged person, you might be feeling that sting for the first time. Rather than knee jerking away from it, take a minute to consider that it’s a day to day reality for people around you. How much shittier would it feel if that was the way people treated you all the time?