This only works if you are privileged. If I judged all taxi cabs by how they act and not the likely fact that they will leave my black ass in the street, I would be 45 minutes late going everywhere.
If brown people trusted cops/courts/juries by how they acted individually and not the likely fact that they will pull any charges they possibly can, my cousin would’ve been satisfied with his white public defender that was fitting to get him convicted of a crime he never committed.
If every queer person trusted every individual Christian by how they acted and not the likely fact that they could get lit on fire and strung up a tree, I’m sure many more of us would be dead today.
It is a PRIVILEGE to be able to judge others individually. It is a privilege to know that in general, the world will be kind toward you except for the straggling assholes. The OPPOSITE is true when you’re marginalized. If we DON’T count on assholery, we can’t protect ourselves from it. We can’t avoid situations in which it is more likely to happen, which, since the legal system couldn’t give a shit about helping us after it’s already happened, we unfortunately have to do.And if a woman doesn’t treat every man as a potential rapist, she’ll get blamed for her own rape.
Yes, yes, yes.
That last line is something a lot of men seem to get offended by: but I’m a nice guy, I’d never rape somebody, it’s a woman’s own fault if she’s scared of me for no reason, that’s misandry! Please. As a woman I do not have the PRIVILEGE of assuming you are a nice person who will not harm me, especially if you’re spewing other anti-woman / anti-feminist rhetoric, because I would rather be afraid of a kind man for ‘no reason’ than trust everybody and get raped and then blamed and shamed for it (“maybe she shouldn’t have been wearing that skirt”).
As a white person in Canada I will never experience racism, but I try to use my feelings in regards to feminism to open my own eyes about racial experiences. It seems like a lot of white people get defensive in that same vein. I never know what to say to them, especially if I am alone in a group of nodding heads. Like this one batshit old lady (a family friend) who was over, complaining that they can have “black history museums” but we can’t have “white history museums”… I just don’t even know where to start with that.
