[Despanan]

I've seen that before, it's heart wrenching.

However, you mistake me. I know that we can't know certain things viscerally until we've experienced it. However, It's still a useless point to bring up in this sort of a situation because once again, you're taking an individual experience and making it into a monolith.

Versus, you have not had the exact same experience as another person of color. I have not had the same experience as a white male that Kontan has, nor have I had the same experience as Gothicus or JCC or any other white male on the planet.

To extrapolate this and make a blanket statement that white people cannot understand the minority experience on any level other than intellectually presupposes a uniformity to both the white and PoC experience that simply doesn't exist. The best we can posit is that white people as a general rule have often not had the experiences of people of color and thus generally have difficulty understanding how it feels to be marginalized in that manner.

Taking it any further than that however, gets us into dangerous waters, as the number of unfounded presumptions increases exponentially.

It would not be appropriate, for instance for Versus to say that he, as a black American Soldier stationed in Afganistan understands Alan's situation as a Mexican in Juarez. He can draw parallels but so can anyone. Generally the parallels will be stronger, than say the parallels I could draw from my own experience, but this isn't something that you can make into a hard and fast rule.

The point is that you can't presume someone else's life experience beyond the general, based solely on their ethnicity. You need more information after that because it's hard enough knowing what's going on in our own heads, let alone someone else's.