Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Textbook conservative gaslighting to downplay the prevalence of an issue that they find to be inconvenient. I think depending on your experiences, it may come off as gaslighting, but as a conservative (who loathes Trump and a lot of what Thiel champions), I can tell you that even the word racist is a heavy handed social weapon that has sometimes been used wrongly, or, and this is what triggers conservative anger, i…
>Again, I'm not saying there aren't racists and that there aren't institutional issues that stem from it, I'm saying that it's frustrating that it's often ignored when PoC exhibit the same behavior, and that it happens when the environment is setup to favor PoC and the white person is the one at the disadvantage. When do white people experience systematic racism anywhere near the systematic racism that PoC endure? Wh…
Okay, I can give a specific personal anecdote, but I have seen many other examples from friends who were even less fortunate than I was.
When I was in 8th grade, in the school I went to, the students were made up of 400 African Americans, 300 Latinos, 70 Caucasians, and 13 Asians. The teachers were mostly PoC, and the few that weren't, were incredibly activist minded in their feelings on race.
As a fat white kid, I was jumped or physically bullied more than once, 3 of those times in class, had a knife pulled on me, called a blue eyed devil and honky, and even had an African American English teacher make a joke about my weight to the entire class while I wasn't in class.
In the cases of getting jumped in class, there was no repercussions for those involved, both times with some implied statement that the reasons I was jumped were because I probably had it coming or that they would talk to the other students because they knew they had a hard home life (which applied to almost everyone at that school).
I don't mean to paint myself as an innocent victim (I hadn't yet learned how to keep my mouth shut and head down all the time, and would proffer an opinion even when not explicitly asked for) or that I even had it the worst.
But some of the kids of color, not even including the Asian kids, were from families who were in a higher socioeconomic stratum than many of the white kids. But income wasn't really ever a thing in that environment, at least not really amongst the kids themselves. Everything tended to be racially self-segregated for the most part.
I have seen similar situations in not just other schools, but even as I've gotten older in whatever bubble you happen to be in, such as an office, business, or any other group setting where there is a power differential between whoever is the majority and who is the minority.
We often speak of racism as if it were only an issue on a macro scale, and I don't even think what I experienced actually is racism, technically, but I think things like that are far more often what happen day to day in a million different ways, and what society describes as racism when the victim is a person of color, and the perpetrator not.
What I do think those all are though for sure is institutional effects of prejudice.
And when you say "anywhere near", it's a pointless metric. No one person experiences all of racism at once, they all individually experience it at varying degrees. I think trying to average it all out and comparing by quantity as a measure of validity is wrong because they all suck when they happen and they all harm the person on the receiving end.