| I read and thought about your comment for a while because I am also a white male, mid 30's, low end of the socioeconomic status in my childhood, and at one time had a lot of the same thoughts as you. Here's what changed my mind. I'm speaking just about my own experiences, it may or may not be useful to you. 1. I realized that survivorship bias was clouding my judgement. This was tough to accept because I first had to philosophically accept that life isn't fair and random chance plays a meaningful factor in everyday life. 2. I realized that this movement isn't about me. When I get defensive over a statement that is statistically true about white men, I'm trying to find a place for myself in a movement that has very little to do with me. I realized that there is and will continue to be a wide gulf between what is true in general and true statistically. Both are important, but in different contexts. 3. I discovered that I had a very poor idea of what non-male and non-white people experience on a day-to-day basis. Even after hearing it I didn't understand until I found myself quitting a job over what were essentially microaggressions towards something I cared a lot about. For example, when I was in high school there were several different ways to go through school. You could be college-bound by taking the right courses to meet entry requirements. Or you could take a more vocational track through high school, and so on. My guidance counselor assume I would go to college -- it was just treated as fact. A female friend of mine that had a similar GPA to myself had to threaten to sue to get her counselor to schedule the right courses for her. She was successful in college. One instance of that is trivial, a lifetime of that bullshit weighs you down. 4. I understood that I cannot call for fairness in my own life because I'm way beyond what's fair already. Life isn't fair. It isn't fair that people die of cancer. It isn't fair that people can work themselves to the bone all their life and remain destitute. If I want to yell about fairness for myself, it only makes sense if I'm willing to yell about fairness for everyone else (because if life is "fair" for me, but not anyone else, it isn't really "fair" is it?). If we were to make the world a fair place in socioeconomic terms, given that there are 7 billion people on the planet, is is exceedingly likely that I would lose some privilege. Thus, if I lose some privilege over the course of my life, I choose to be thankful for the extra privilege I had when I was younger, rather than fretting about how much I can accumulate for the future. 5. I stopped engaging with people that were very angry or very toxic about the subject. Though I have a much better understanding now of where that anger comes from, I realized it was subtly affecting my own perceptions and thinking. There's value in limiting the noise a bit. |