Oddbean new post about login | logout When I was in college (before victimology was a big deal like now), a black girl wrote an editorial complaining that she was mistreated because of her race. Her example was that someone on the bus grabbed their backpack, swung it onto their back, and it bumped her. She said it was because of her race. I can pretty much guarantee that it was an accident and the person responsible was so self-absorbed, they had no idea she was hit. I wouldn't have thought anything about it. Some people are oblivious. Some people are rude. Some people are both. It doesn't mean they are racists or personally attacking someone. If you want to find a grievance, you can find one, but that doesn't make it real. I am so over the victimology culture. They need to grow up.
I would say that the person who wrote that article is even more self absorbed than the person who accidentally hit them with their backpack. It’s extremely easy to do that entirely by mistake, especially on a cramped bus. The person who went out of their way to judge, paint this innocent person as full of hatred and evil, is a potent level of arrogance and total concern with dragging anyone they can through the mud for their own benefit. That’s exactly what a shitty (and funny enough, racist) person does, they project hatred and guilt onto entire histories, personal judgements, and the meaning of someone’s very existence over tiny interactions or completely arbitrary characteristics of that person. It would be similar to me claiming you abuse your children by your profile picture because of some historical connection to sunflowers and abused children. It’s literally that fucking stupid.
i'm so acutely alert to these things i have a whole repertoire of ways that i move in certain situations of confined spaces and public transport people are so infested with blindness and fixations it's like being awake walking through a crowd full of sleep walkers