test that assumption at your earliest convenience

Me and every autistic gay man in the distance:

YOU KNOW WHAT NAH YOUR RIGHT!

The same thing happens with hispanic and indigenous cultures. It's especially bad where I live. People complain about the latinos (re: 80% of the population) taking up the jobs and sitting on welfare checks, when we wouldn't have any of our cultural staples without them. They talk about the lazy, entitled natives. Then they line up for their white-washed western movies, they buy their Temu dream-catchers, they talk about spirit animals. They fry up tack-os on the barbecue and complain about how mindless and stupid reggaeton is while Taylor Swift is blasting.

And then I log onto social media and all I find is kiwifarms hunting of POCs, the degradation of black art to being "overstimulating" and only about "sex, drugs, and violence", the whitewashing of every fictional character. The complaints of making everything "political". About people being too angry and not being able to just "enjoy things" - a position of privilege from people who don't *have* to think about the hateful images in media they enjoy.

And when you point this out, hoards of white liberals that have never thought critically about race complain that you're mean for calling them racist, that they have to add their two cents, that they have to be "one of the good ones". If you can understand that axes of oppression often occur as the subtle denigration of a group - an often unconscious-bias that may present itself as "not agreeing with the lifestyle" or the like - then you can understand racism.

For example, some of you may remember an advertisement campaign from Dr Pepper from the early 2010's that "Dr Pepper is not for women!". A friend of mine wrote a very lengthy, yet calmly and rather academically written essay on why this wasn't harmless fun, and actually quite damaging and misogynistic. She posted it on her blog and shared the link over social media, and everywhere people tore her to shreds for committing the cardinal sin of being offended by something.

That was it. They had no other argument on why her essay or points were wrong or bad other than "she's offended aha!!" and then acted like they totally just owned her and put her in her place by pointing this out. Am I missing something? Why is it worse to be offended than to be offensive?

For example when I was taking a media class here at the University of Iceland, I had a few French classmates in that class, and one time for class we had to watch something were there were ableist jokes about a man with cerebral palsy, and one of my French classmates said "I'm not American and don't want to sound like a whiny American who gets offended at everything, but I thought it was insensitive how they made fun of and beat up that man with cerebral palsy and we were supposed to find that funny, sorry to sound like an American!"

When I lived and worked in Finland for about half a year I heard from multiple Finnish colleagues how ridiculous it was that Americans are so sensitive and uptight they actually get upset when you use the r-slur around them, what a bunch of uptight whiny babies!

When I worked retail at a souvenir shop in central Reykjavík one of my Australian co-workers asked some of our other co-workers from many various countries across Europe to stop saying racist things about customers of color, to which more than one responded something along the lines of "Oh come on you're not American, are you? Oh don't act like a sensitive American who has to cry racism at every little thing!"

When I worked an office job in the tourism sector, several of our tour groups coming from the U.S. in 2023 still had mask mandates while on the tour bus, especially when most of the people in those tour groups were elderly and/or disabled. Or many tour groups coming from the U.S. required the group to start wearing masks if someone in the group tested positive for COVID while in tour. And again, most of the people in these tour groups were elderly and/or disabled. None of our tour groups from other parts of Europe had policies like this.

My (all Icelandic) co-workers laughed and made jokes about this non-stop, things like "I can't believe Americans are so crazy and uptight that they're still afraid of a little germ in 2023! Come on it's Iceland, we're not still doing ridiculous things like that here because we're not still scared of a little germ in 2023!". One of my co-workers would specifically say things like "Well I'm a viking so I'm not scared of a little germ! Come on, they should come and cough and breath on me because we're vikings here, and vikings aren't scared of a little germ!", and generally endlessly talking about how still requiring (elderly & disabled) people to wear a mask in 2023 is proof of how ridiculous and uptight USAmericans are.