You don't have to understand others' experiences for them to be real. You are just one person. Your understanding and experiences are limited, and that's okay.
The extremely obvious truth that one person or even one group's knowledge and experiences are limited becomes somehow short-circuited by social dominance, it seems. People in dominant groups become trained to think their experiences and the world they know are, and MUST be, the only way, and start actively enforcing this conviction on others. What a narrow, limiting way to live, to shrink acceptance of the world and its peoples down to the tiny bounds of themselves and people like them.
@ljwrites I’ve thought about this before, in the context of movies & books about straight white men are advertised to everyone while a book about a woman, or a black person, is assumed to only be of interest to members of that group
Like, for some reason we’re training this particular fragment of society to deaden their empathy, that things are only relatable if there’s a literal stand in for them on the page. That’s gotta fuck you up
@ljwrites and it starts so young they don’t even know the deal they’re making. It’s just the toys their grandparents buy them for christmas, the books their parents read at bedtime
@Satsuma yuuup no one gave them a choice, either. They can make a different choice when they are more responsible for their paths, but they're going to have to go against so much of what they were taught by beloved adults as children and that makes it so much harder.
@Satsuma Yeah it looks like another way to train people, straight white men in this context, into dominance :/ cutting off their capacity for imagination and fellow feeling in exchange for promises of power and privilege.