This comes close to denying that there can ever be an understanding between cultures at all.
It is about time for people to look at the core ethics that guide either thought and at least draw the association between the two. What to name this collective community is anyone's guess, but at least the cognitive dissonance will be gone.
To aspire to understand each other is at the core of facilitating diversity and inclusion. That includes asking stupid questions, difficult questions and sometimes offensive questions. It includes tolerating faux pas and cultural appropriation.
And lastly, it requires treating other communities with the capacity for occasionally just as much good and at other times just as much malice as any other community suffering from the human condition.
Having spent so long fighting against something, the movement has accepted the premise of the things they were fighting against and started fighting for it. Reinforcing separation between people, putting labels on a person, and declaring what a person is allowed to do based on those labels.
They are explicitly for dividing people into races and giving each of those groups permissions.
Racism = being in favor of dividing people into races.
We need more dialogue between cultures, not less.
Thank you for posting this. Many of us agree with you.
there's a very big center. (dare I say it's the plurality?)
despite the news most folks are solidly boring when it comes to politics, and the loud minorities are ... loud minorities.
redefining (the already barely useful) left/right because of them is an unforced error IMHO
In America the Democrats, as the left-er of the two major parties, tend to bend heavily to the will of any adjacent loud minority and eagerly adopt their rhetoric, even if they don't adopt their policies. This gets amplified in both directions by social media, especially Twitter, where advocates press politicians for vocal sup[port, that when given increases the demand and visibility of these requests, ad infinitum.
In the Anglosphere and much of Europe, there is a common pattern of some subset of (usually young) people viewing all issues, even local ones, through an American lens. I have no idea how America established such an overwhelming level of political-cultural imperialism in the last decade or so, but at this point it seems ubiquitous. A discussion on America's policies causes everyone else to examine and start dialogue on their own policies, almost without fail. This leads to any American hot button issues becoming the issue of the week for dozens of countries, and it's all framed through American battle lines.
I've only had much experience with US culture in the USA, and living in Japan. I guess the language/cultural barrier between the US and Japan is still substantial enough that US politics don't really make their way into the Japanese zeitgeist, since I never heard anything about US politics from anyone I know living there other than Americans.
The idea that a white American can't understand non-white non-American views, makes the same amount of sense the other way around. Both ways around need a great deal of research by the ones trying to understand, and I believe she's tried her best.
I'll go even further and say that she understands some things better than those in the culture she's covering, since she's an outside observer, giving her some objectivity that those inside can't have. I know I have this with the particular "white" culture I'm integrating into right now.
I will say that there are some things she'll find difficult to impossible to grasp -- and might not even realise she's missing -- but to say she's not even allowed to try belittles us as human beings. This exclusionary race mentality can go away.