No! I will not Stop it! ...

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

216. I don't think maturity is the issue.

I think it's what you point to at the end of your sentence - life experience.

And quite frankly, the vast majority of us white folks simply don't get around to seeing the experiences most PoC go through every single day. When I was in grade school, I knew exactly one black guy. And he was an adoptee, being raised by white yuppies, so he was hardly representative. He did have to deal with a lot of the privilege issues, but still was shielded to some degree from some of what I would consider the worst of them. (He might have felt differently. I never ran into him again later in life to ask.)

So when you never see something, it can be hard to believe it exists. It takes actually getting the diverse life experiences to even begin to see how society molds us into automatically, unthinkingly accepting our 'reality' as the only 'reality'. I was 'blind' into my mid 20s, when I finally started to see black acquaintances consistently having to put up with crap that their white counterparts like myself, did not. And I was somewhere in my 30s before I actually began to learn and accept that there was more going on than just racial bigotry (that everyone around me was just calling 'racism'.). And it was even later yet when I finally, finally, was introduced to the concept of privilege. And I STILL took weeks to wrap my head around it even in part. I wasn't as consistently obnoxious about it as certain posters, but it took me a while to move from first reading about it to actually 'seeing' it.

Because I spent most of my life 'sheltered' from diversity. I lived in an almost all-white part of an almost all-white town. I hung out with other white people. I went to school at a university that talked a lot about diversity, but I rarely ran into PoC. I simply didn't have the life experiences that allowed me to even see what PoC were going through, and only began to find out about them in online forums.

It's a more diverse country out there in a lot of places, but it's still possible to live in that 'white bubble' in a lot of places too. So I'm not surprised that there are still younger people who haven't had the experiences that let them see how other people are disadvantaged by not being afforded the privilege of belonging to the 'power group' in the country. And, of course, once they finally do start understanding white privilege, you've still got to walk them through privilege intersectionality.