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Notes -
So that “white woman cries over random injustice in the world” archetype that is often joked about. Eg a girl cries over the rainforest being destroyed… why does it only seem to be white women? I actually can’t recall ever seeing a black woman online crying about some injustice or harm which doesn’t affect them personally. I wonder: while it may be laughed off as pure naïveté, could it actually be evidence of a greater natural disposition toward empathy?
Just to test my intuition, I looked into who is most likely to run animal shelters or participate in animal rights and it is white women. If you look at animal rights protestor photos online they are almost always white. This over representation is of course criticized online and called white supremacism. Yet what better test is there of empathy than if you are emotional about the plight of animals? One’s emotional response to the suffering of animals is a consequence of their ability to feel the shared feeling of intelligent beings. IMO the political aspirations which follow from these feelings are flawed, but that’s a somewhat distinct question from whether it effortlessly leads to empathy.
You're just talking about upper middle class college educated women.
Redneck white women don't do that. Rich Black or Asian girls do.
They’re generally the ones with the time, energy, and privilege to worry about things that don’t personally affect them. The man has to worry about his job, home upkeep, and so on. Poor people are concerned about baseline survival and meeting their material needs. Upper class women and college students are both pretty unique in that they can afford to waste time on things that don’t affect them personally and generally don’t have a lot of other obligations that keep them busy.
The other thing, which I think slots into the privilege part is that being disproportionately upset by events and situations outside of their personal lives and the life of their community shows off their privilege. There’s almost always a bit of showing off to those things. They always film it, and quite often in their late model cars with an expensive coffee in hand and a fairly fresh manicure. The whole thing stinks of “look at me, even though I’m rich, and have more money in my clothes and jewelry than you make in a day, I’m soooo compassionate that I care very deeply about world affairs. And I’m so highly educated that I know the history of this obscure thing that the plebs don’t care about.” I don’t get the sense that they really do care. I don’t see a lot of evidence that they do anything about the problems they’re filming themselves crying about. They “care” about Palestine? Do they donate to Red Crescent to give humanitarian aid? Have they sent emails to their congressmen? Have they volunteered (and protests don’t count) to do anything about it?
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