Tip 3: Don’t compare your experience of oppression or suffering with BIPOC’s experience with racism and white supremacy.
Although you might see similarities between your circumstances (being the minority, feeling out of place, being mistreated, marginalized, or overlooked), resist the urge to interpret a BIPOC’s experience through your limited lens. Your experiences or suffering are real, and might help you feel more connected to or empathetic toward your friend of color, but your experiences are not the same. And often, in conflating them, we minimize the intensity of the impact of white supremacy on the lives of those who are not seen as white.
Systems of oppression are wide and varied, but also not synonymous. As a society, we have created systems of hierarchy and domination surrounding race, gender, ability, age, and more. All of us are likely in the dominant group for some systems and the minoritized group for others. Being part of any minoritized group allows you to better understand the ways systems and structures uphold advantages and disadvantages through social location. But, experiencing life as part of that group truly only gives you a window into the breadth and depth of that particular experience, not the full ramifications of others.
Although you might see similarities between your circumstances (being the minority, feeling out of place, being mistreated, marginalized, or overlooked), resist the urge to interpret a BIPOC’s experience through your limited lens. Your experiences or suffering are real and might help you feel more connected to or empathetic toward your friend of color, but your experiences are not the same. And often, in conflating them, we minimize the intensity of the impact of white supremacy on the lives of those who are not seen as white.
Since we all experience pain from time to time, we sometimes feel we can speak with false authority into the pain of others. We individualize the experience of racism, stripping it of its broader institutionalized and systemic nature. By trying to connect with a person of color over also having felt the pain of someone disliking, hating, or overlooking us, we reduce racism to a painful experience that sometimes happens to BIPOC. It dismisses white supremacy, a worldwide system of oppression for which a painful experience is but one leaf of a broad tree.
Here are some examples of what comparing your experience of oppression or suffering could look like:
- When you tell BIPOC that you understand how it feels to be looked over for that well-deserved promotion because you, too, were rejected for a job you really wanted. You are erasing the structures in place that lead to workplace discrimination. You did feel rejection, but it was an isolated event, not a systemic reality that plays out across all lines of work for generations.
- When BIPOC are sharing how they feel isolated in their church because there is no leadership that looks like them, and you respond by telling the story of how you were misunderstood in the church you grew up in. Your experience could have been dreadful and excruciating, and you are right to feel the hurt, but it is not the same thing as the epidemic of white majority churches refusing leadership roles to BIPOC and the long history of said churches with complicity and reinforcement of white supremacy.
It is never healthy to dismiss or invalidate anyone’s pain and suffering. It is also not acceptable to compare your experience and causes damage to equate an individual experience with the corporate nature of systemic racism. And, when you are a member of a group who experiences societal-level oppression, use that experience to inform how well you listen, learn, and empathize with BIPOC rather than using it to equate your life experiences.
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Want to read more bridge building tips? Check out the first tip here and the second one here.