Alexander Gieg
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Your points are very well made.

As can be seen from my picture, I’m white. As such, I haven’t experienced any form of systematic prejudice. At most, a little bit of moral “looking down” due to being fat, but that’s nowhere comparable. Thus, it’s difficult for me to even imagine what it’s like, even though I try. Evidently, I also interact mostly with other whites who also have no such experience, with the difference most of them don’t try. End result: I have a good idea where their blindness comes from.

This is what happens then, as I see it. When a typical male, one that doesn’t consider oneself racist but also has no idea of the many privileges they benefit from, reads about BLM and hears the BLM terminology, they don’t understand these terms the same way BLM activists mean them, and they don’t know they’re failing at understanding something. So they read the text, they understand the words as meaning something completely different from what was intended, and they react and answer to their faulty understanding of the text/speech.

I have the impression this linguistic gap is at the core of many of the difficulties. P says X, Q understands Y. Q then replies to this Y. P thinks Q’s replying is to the original intended X, and replies to this. Q think’s P is replying to his reply to Y and misunderstands even further. And so on and so forth.

I have no idea how that could be solved in any way that doesn’t involve additional burden to BLM activists. Ideally the whites who are ignorant would try to better inform themselves so as to actually understand what BLM activists are saying. However, they don’t know they’re ignorant, so they don’t feel any need to try and become better informed, so they don’t. Therefore, BLM activists themselves are the ones who would “have” to bridge the gap by figuring out how to explain things to whites, starting from whites’ own concepts and language, so as to tell them enough for them to begin understanding. Which plays straight into the “be twice as good to get half as much” all over again.

It’s a damn difficult position to be in, that’s for sure…

    Alexander Gieg

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    B.A. in Philosophy by University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil.