Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/I like you, Godot, but I'm going to have to call bullshit on that/reply (12)

It depends how far you want to go with the "not as bad as..." card. I've had a lot of abuse thrown at me for looking "alternative" (though where I grew up, this meant anyone not wearing a tracksuit and reebok trainers) and my brother once had a beer can thrown at him from a moving car for wearing the wrong football shirt. I've been called scruffy for having long hair despite being far more cleanly presented than the person saying it, I've been called stupid for being working class even though I have a demonstrably more powerful brain that the prat talking to me. No one would ever recognise this as "discrimination" - in fact, after the murder of Sophie Lancaster it was specifically said they wouldn't introduce lifestyle or appearance into hate legislation - yet if we swapped a few nouns and categories around it clearly would be. And as for the atheism, well, no one really gives a shit in this country but I have had at least half a dozen abusive Facebook messages over the last 5 years about it, that's about it.

Thing is, we've probably all felt this sting at one point or another for one reason or another. It would be a very high order fallacy to start talking about it with only the largest paintbrushes in our set, and dismissing a person's individual experiences as not worth bothering about. When you use far too broad categories like "men" and "white" and say they all have some privilege you're effectively ignoring the more nuanced problems that can exist, such as class, disability, sexuality, religion and so on. The eventual product of all this chopping into "discriminators" and "discriminated" is that you start alienating groups. So you end up with a case of white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, middle-class Christian (or default) males who's experiences don't count, who's views are disregarded, who's problems are deemed irrelevant, and to top it off are blamed by implication for being the problem - all because they're the wrong colour, gender, sexuality, religion and class. Put away your big wallpaper brushes when describing people, otherwise all you'll see it a "black man" rather than, say, "Adrian, aged 34, lives in London with a girlfriend of 5 years, will probably get engaged soon, drinks at the local Black Bull every Friday but not too late because he plays football on Saturday morning, parents separated when he was young, he rarely gets to talk to them because they live in Manchester, got a 2:1 from Leeds University, did amateur dramatics at school, would really like to own a Ferrari but can only afford a Ford Focus for now..." Of course, that's far too much fucking effort for people, so let's just call him "black".