I’ll give you a rundown of what went through my head between reading the title of the post and getting to the thread:
- “Super Racist”? The Red Cross? Wow, I wonder what that could be.
- Ugh, they should have known better.
- @frauenfelder is right, dozens of people would have approved this before it went out
- Apparently the people who do communications for the Red Cross don’t understand the community the Red Cross serves at all
Here is what I imagine a lot of other people thought:
- “Super Racist”? There go those SJWs again, making shit up.
- That one kid looks white to me. Case closed. I’m so much smarter than SJWs.
I guess you read the conservation like this:
A - Isn’t that kid with the pop bottle white?
B - He reads as non-white to me.
A - Oh, it’s very interesting how different people can read different things from the same poster
B - YOU ARE RACIST SCUM
Reading the actual words used it was more like:
A - Isn’t that kid with the pop bottle white?
B - He reads as non-white to me.
A - You are lying, you know he is white.
B - [Baffled, no option but mockery]
Yes, young boys are definitely told they behave poorly compared to girls. I think it’s a really bad message to be sending to both girls and boys.
I see it as part of a larger issue of boys being protagonists and antagonists and girls being extras. Boys are definitely told they are more likely to misbehave than girls, they are also told they are more likely to be great than girls. I think in the end it leads to a lot of maladaption from men who grow up to realize that in the grand scheme of things almost all of us are extras, and we have to find meaning in our own lives instead of writing ourselves into a heroic narrative. So I see it as a source of feelings of entitlement. And if you can’t be the hero, the other narrative for you is to be the villain. We see a lot of that.
Oh, so wait, you don’t think this is a real problem?
