As if a social worker could only help out with problems s/he had experienced him/herself already.
> Hope that made sense.
A bit, not that much
> When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face, however, you should defer to the experts in the area who have lived their entire lives being in the seat of discrimination.
We all appreciate attempts to understand and empathize with us. You can go very far by talking with us and trying to place yourself in our shoes, but we don't appreciate it when you talk over us, attempt to silence our voices, or, case in point, put words in our mouths and exaggerate our points beyond recognition.
Please try and engage this topic in good faith and not through pedantics and wordplay. If you fundamentally disagree that the victims of discrimination should have the loudest voice in the matter, I'd love to talk further.
There is not always such a thing as "the experts".
People who look the same, grew up in the same place, have the same parents, can still have the opposite opinions.
Then, who is the expert -- when they disagree with each other, the complete opposite.
(Real world example from where I live.)
I'm not in the US though, actually things seem a bit weird over there. The history looks quite different here where I live.
> put words in my mouth all day
Not sure what you have in mind, I still think that what you wrote, sounds weird (I hope you don't mind). As if someone who got bullied in school, automatically should know better how to mitigate such problems in school. (Be an expert?)
I'm playing along with your analogy here, but I actually think it's a terribly weak analogy. Racial discrimination is often so ingrained in the culture that its perpetrators aren't always hulking bullies menacingly taking lunch money from people. They are more dangerous because they often see themselves as kind, empathetic and intelligent - often believing that they can detect and solve deeply complex, emotion-rooted problems such as racial discrimination simply by thinking about it for a bit when it's convenient for them. They can't fathom that the experience of the discriminated may be so vastly different than their imagination permits, simply because they haven't experienced it firsthand.
Too many of us have been silenced and told to shut up both explicitly and implicitly. When it comes to racial discrimination, we will not go unheard. In this instance, in this matter, our voices do weigh much more than yours and that's simply the fact you'll have to live with.
