“Seriously white people”
Reblogged from youngbadmangone
You don’t get to decide what’s not racist.
Never. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever.
The same way men don’t get to decide what’s not sexist, cis people don’t get to decide what’s transphobic, and straight people don’t get to decide what’s not homophobic.
This is complete bullshit, and a very dangerous idea. What you’re saying here, whether you know it or not, is that only people who are affected by a certain issue are entitled to decide what that word means. It only seems to make sense because you’ve chosen words that are in some ways abstract.
Let’s pick a word that isn’t abstract. Let’s say you’re suffering from cancer. Despite how awful that is, that does’t mean that you get to define what “cancer” means. It doesn’t mean that you’re more in control of your suffering because you want to decide that cancer means something else. It’s complete bullshit.
Cancer means something, no matter how you personally feel about that meaning. And so it is with racism, and homophobia, and so on. It doesn’t matter how a gay person or a straight person “feels” about the definition of homophobia - it means the same thing anyway. If you’re gay and you feel something has happened which you regard as homophobic, you’re probably right, but you might be wrong. We can talk about all that. What we can’t do is assume that you’re always right all the time about homophobia because you’re gay. No one’s always right all the time about anything.
Maybe in an ideal world this would not be true, but that’s just not how language and logic work on the ground. Anyone with the slightest training in linguistics will be able to tell you that.
tl;dr QUESTION EVERYTHING
