Since it is relevant, I am 40 years old and black. I have a very large extended family and pretty much all of my cousins have drunk the "racism is everywhere" kool-aid and especially this past year. I have gotten into plenty of arguments with them and I finally realized it was just pointless. As well as with some friends. I think I have gone over police statistics, actual crime stats, and the world history of slavery so many times that I talk about it in my sleep but it is pointless. One of my cousins was talking about reparations and got mad when I asked him if he was going to hold the African leaders who sold our ancestors to the Europeans accountable or if he is so anti-slavery why doesn't he donate to organizations who fight modern day slavery instead of obsessing over slavery that ended over 150 years ago.
A white friend of mine has turned super woke since George Floyd and he got really pissed when I told him that he was so brave to condemn racism and thanked him because I didn't realize I was oppressed until I read his facebook posts. He then told me that he couldn't believe I would work so hard against my own people. I had a good laugh about that one, although being called a white supremacist was the best laugh, followed by when my relatives and I did our DNA/Ancestry test. I am about 20% European and also have a little Native American and Asian. One of my more militant cousins told me that i may have brown skin, but I inherited a "white personality" from my white ancestors.
Sadly in my early teens I went through a brief "everything is racism" period so I can understand how that sucks you in, plus I think it is human nature to a degree to want to be a victim about something. I remember complaining to my mom about my school not having any black history lessons and she told me that I was free to pick up a book and read on my own. My mother was big on reading and my parents taught me to learn about your culture/history and then learn about other cultures. That was eye opening because it was then I learned that every race/ethnic group has been oppressed or has been oppressors and that land conquest was as old as time along with slavery. Another thing was the fact that my grandfather never had any sort of grudge along with my other elderly relatives so I felt stupid and realized that if you look for racism everywhere you will find it.
Honestly if I had billions of dollars my reparation plan would be to buy land in any non-white majority country of their choosing and ship everyone of any race who can't shut up about how evil America and the west are. America is not a perfect country but to act like zero progress has been made (I actually heard a lady say that very little in regards to race relations has changed since 1776) really pisses me off. A little research will show anyone that if you are born in a western country you are in the world privilege group.
Sorry for the long post, but I decided from now on I can't talk to people who have that victim mindset or can't shut up about racism.
That's rough buddy.
And there's no "sadly" to being an SJW in your early teens. Most of the heaviest propaganda efforts are aimed at early teens, and you've got other concerns like hormonal changes going on at the same time leaving you emotional and easily swayed by arguments about emotion. It happens. Look at it instead as "luckily it was JUST in early teens".
I had a stint as an SJW too. It isn't uncommon. Right through until my Masters' degree. My studies and research did not back up the mainstream propaganda, and I had been rightly taught that an experiment that does not produce the result you expect isn't a failed or flawed experiment, it's an interesting one. Don't discard it, investigate it. Why wasn't diversity training in the workplace leading to increased productivity in any example?
You can make people buy specific types of wine in an alcohol store just by playing with the radio: One of the most well-respected and well-regarded marketing studies out there, endlessly repeated and re-proven. It shows that humans are easily manipulated fools easily parted from their money for spurious reasons. So if humans are so easily manipulated... Why isn't formal training doing anything good? In fact, it normally causes active harm... IF your goal is social cohesion. Throw out that assumption, and do the research again, and you see a clear picture. The leaks from big business giants about how they use diversity to weaken the commoners, to stop unions and ruin interpersonal relations in the office to reduce in turn the risk of them asking for raises or benefits, reduce the risk of them turning on the ruling class, merely confirmed what I learned there.
A lot of really rich people have a lot of money invested in making sure the average person HATES every other average person, for as many reasons as possible. To that goal, they gaslight, they propagandize, they censor, and they lie.
So keep your channels of communication open with those "walls". You may not wish to talk politics with them, that would suck, but you never know what might lead them into realizing a bitter truth of their actual abuse by power.
Great points. That is the reason I’m not too hard on teens or college students who spout the trendy virtue signaling stuff. They may wake up when they get older.
I was a full-blown Marxist in my early teens, and a fiscal conservative by the time I left high school. I actually credit that early "infection" with mostly inoculating me from most leftist nonsense.