[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Solumina

Okay I'm trying my best to figure out just how to word this because I feel like I, and others, have already said it multiple times and that isn't meant as a shot at you Desp, just that if this seems like I'm just repeating myself then well I kind of am a little.

The thing is I will never know Saya's life, I will never know what it is like to grow up in Canada or go to her school or be involved in the organizations she gives so much of her time and effort but we do have a shared set of experiences. We both know on an almost instinctual level that elevators are scary places. We both understand how catcalling can make you feel. We both know what it feels like to have to shout in hopes that maybe then people will listen.

To go back to depression, it is the same. No two people experience depression in exactly the same way but we can understand each other's experiences so much more deeply than anyone who has not been there.

No offense taken.

However, I'm compelled to point something out, as someone who has been diagnosed with and treated for major depression:

We do not KNOW that we can understand each other's experience more deeply than someone who's never been depressed, we FEEL that we understand each other's experience more deeply than anyone who has not been there. We FEEL that we have a deeper bond due to this experience, but there is absolutely no way to quantitatively measure this.

Depression manifests itself in a variety of different ways, for instance, it often manifests as sadness in women and anger in men. Is this because men tend to have a different mix of chemicals in our brainpans? Probably, but also society is more receptive to male anger and less receptive to our tears, so we also feel more comfortable expressing these feelings in a rage.

I'm not going to begrudge you the commonality of the mutually oppressed, but again, you're dealing with internal feelings. The only way to confirm that you share a special bond with someone else who's been de/oppressed is to feel it emotionally when you communicate with them and our emotions lie to us constantly.

There are more kinds of bias that must be accounted for than simply the bias created by white priviledge. Humans deal with conscious and unconcscious bias constantly, in every aspect of our thoughts and interactions. This is why I compared what I was seeing earlier in this thread to religious though - not just because it's one of my pet issues, but because there is a direct correlation between the two thought processes.

Kontan and I actually differ somewhat on our approach to anti-theism - Kontan viscerally hates religion in a way that I do not. I hate it, deeply, but mine is a cooler, more analytical hatred, not just for the explicite effects of religion, but the implicite effects that magical thinking plays on our non-religious interactions. The results are, if anything, more horrifying because they are so subtle.

I don't mean to pick on Saya here, but I took note when she described her feelings of realizing and struggling against her white priviledge as a spiritual experience.

The fact of the matter is that we're dealing with a huge number of unproveable emotionally-driven suppositions when we approach the sensitive subject of race relations. Both society, and our own minds are constantly twisting the world around us, and we cannot afford to make hard and fast rules without knowing beyond a reasonable doubt that all of our biases have been accounted for and corrected. Unfortunate implications aside, this is too important of an issue to let ourselves behave otherwise.