He's making a legitimate point regarding previous posts, including yours. Please be more civil.
Really? I made a comment about how I appreciated someone's post.
The dude starts [x]splaining to me about the history of human bigotry--fyi, most people of color are pretty well acquainted with bigotry--as if the fact that Arabs have at some point discriminated against black people is at all relevant to my expression of appreciation to another poster
for their awareness of the fact that race plays a unique role in the history of US society, and how that unique role is relevant to a discussion about what might have happened if Lincoln wasn't assassinated.
I did not pompously step into the discussion with sarcastic declarations of "newsflashes."
Nor did I ever state that bigotry was something white people had a monopoly on.
So I was pretty confused when I was very much uncivilly chastised for that.
The notion that Chinese people may or may not discriminate against non-Chinese is pretty much irrelevant to the problem here in the US. And honestly, bigotry is not the main issue here in the US either. That's a common mistake, especially among (but
not exclusively among) white people. The problem is racism, and the fact that racism was the prevailing ideology here in the US for the better part of its existence.
Bigotry is actually a side issue. It describes an individual's prejudice against another groups. Those groups can be racial, religious, ethnic, gendered, sexual, or national. Many individual people can try and do eliminate bigotry from their hearts, which is good.
Racism--the idea that racial superiority and inferiority explain human history--is the problem here because our entire legal and social system was developed during a period of time when people thought race explained it all. This is emphatically not the case for most countries. Their histories stretch back into times when most people weren't even aware of the existence of other races.
We started off with more of a blank slate than a lot of places (partially because of our racially motivated genocide of indigenous Americans) and it means that our legal and social structures are far more influenced by racist thought than those of other countries.
Those disproportionate influences here are felt well into today.
And that is why Americans (and all the people of color like myself who are in such dire need of newsflashes) are not hysterical or obsessed with race. We are appropriately focused on race because race has affected us far more than it has affected other places.
And this conversation has spiraled way off topic to the thread. We (or anyone who would like) can continue it on a PM.