Question for everyone. I made a lengthy post yesterday but forgot to ask y'all somethign. As I mentioned yesterday I'm a black guy and I'll be 40 in a few days. I have a very large extended family and on Facebook there is always an endless stream of messages from my cousins going on and on about how "oppressed" they are and how hard it is to be black in America. Ironically, these cousins live in nice suburban neighborhoods and have good jobs. Then they spout off about these recent police cases.
Should I bother to debate them? I am so tempted sometimes to do my best Thomas Sowell or Milton Friedman impression and just hammer them with facts. Although I am so outnumbered and I have come to the conclusion that people who have a desire to find racism/oppression everywhere will see it everywhere. Same with modern day feminists who are "oppressed" for being women in the west on a daily basis according to them but can't lift a finger to help women in countries that truly have draconian laws against women.
Thanks. I honestly don’t understand. It seems like today the trendy thing is to show how oppressed you are.
Neither do I, the world is not perfect, but I don't know how sitting around crying "waaah I'm opressed give me money" makes a difference.
It is. I'm a different "marginalized group" than you, but I've been running into the exact situation you are with some of my friends and extended family. They saw someone promoting an oppression narrative on TV or social media and suddenly it's part of their identity. For some of them, it really is just a trendy brand they're wearing and I have no doubt that they'd completely drop it and deny they ever believed it if it suddenly fell out of fashion with their favorite celebrities. In the meantime though, they're all in some sort of virtue signal arms race, posting grandiose statements and obviously fake stories about oppression, trying to see who can top each other.
My signaling that I haven't bought into the narrative like they have just means I'm not as cool as them, or I'm just not as enlightened as them. Nothing I say has any meaning outside of that. Like the other poster said, might as well be talking to a wall.