I find it very strange that people don't think their race affects their perspective

[La Lioness Priyanka]

Race shapes our experiences which in turn shapes our perspective. I asked someone about their race because they didn't understand protests of Trump, and people got very defensive about this.

Is it possible that only minorities are aware how their race (or whatever other minority status) shapes their perspectives?

[SusanCalvin]

1. White people (like me) are currently the default.

When you're the default, it's easier to think you're the only. That's been my opinion for a while, anyway.

Hope I live to see this changed.

[Number23]

5. I think you nailed it.

[gollygee]

2. It is more than possible

It's very likely. Beyond just likely. Almost an absolute.

[Kelvin Mace]

3. It does, and anyone who says it doesn't is fooling themselves

[La Lioness Priyanka]

4. that's what i think. you've had a whole host of different experiences based on your demographics

i had to come out to my parents, and i have to constantly come out. to think this experience doesnt shape my worldview is silly.

[EffieBlack]

6. Many white people don't think they HAVE a race - they're just "people"

To them, racial perspectives are for others - and they have no clue that their views and perspectives are significantly shaped by their own race.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

7. must be nice.

[EffieBlack]

8. Must be ' know . . .- but I wouldn't really know, me not being white and all ...

[Recursion]

9. If you're white in America, "race" means "non-white"

It's tempting as hell to fall for it. Just like men think "gender" means "women", and straight people think "sexual orientation" means "gay".

Being in India's been an eye opener in that sense. Every. Single. Interaction I have is conditioned by the color of my skin. In some cases it's a bonus, in others it's a bullseye, but it's impossible to ignore like it is in America.

[Jackie Wilson Said]

10. I am fascinated about your experiences in India.

So you are a POC and in India this becomes an issue?

i am just curious how it differs from here in USA.

[Recursion]

11. I'm white. You definitely don't want to be of African descent in India

I went to a majority-black public school as a kid and currently live in India, which are two experiences that have formed most of my thoughts about race and America.

India is incredibly racist. People of African descent get it the worst.

[Jackie Wilson Said]

12. More about casteism than racism?

[Recursion]

13. They're much of a muchness here

Skin color is in many cases a pretty accurate proxy for caste. Plus caste discrimination is illegal, but oddly enough skin color discrimination isn't.

[Kind of Blue]

14. Well, I don't doubt what you say at all.

My niece went to a university that spends each year of the 4 years studying in a different country. She spent her second year in India where she met her husband, an Iranian, who graduated from the same school.

She had an amazing time, became editor of their paper in India, sending back articles and photos of wherever she was. Maybe she was protected by her mainly white schoolmates and other Indian students in the country. The other Indian students were all males who were already friends of my nephew-in-law. I think that helped a lot not experiencing any overt racism. She's oblivious to so many things and perhaps didn't notice anything covert.

In all her 20-something life, the first time she says she experienced racism was in Iran and it was a constant. But then again, it was just she and her husband so they ended up for a time in Turkey, a dream come true, where she could wander about freely.

[ismnotwasm]

15. I think so

Up until fairly recently Whiteness has not been challenged, or even defined--it didn't have to be. So we (whites) never had to think about it. I think this is why there is so much defensiveness from the -presumably-anti-racist left. It's all well and good to examine race from a distance, or as defined by, say, the state of being black, but it's a whole different ball game to examine the state of being white. It's uncomfortable, and we aren't used to being uncomfortable. We use terms such as "White privilege" or even "White guilt", but it's almost always in the abstract. It's very difficult to be on the inside and look at ourselves with the consistency being anti-racist requires. Which is NOT the problem of PoC, it's a problem with being white and in control of culture. What we don't control, we subsume and/or assimilate for our own use.

This to me is a good short article on it

What is Whiteness?
THE terrorist attack in Charleston, S.C., an atrocity like so many other shameful episodes in American history, has overshadowed the drama of Rachel A. Dolezal’s yearslong passing for black. And for good reason: Hateful mass murder is, of course, more consequential than one woman’s fiction. But the two are connected in a way that is relevant to many Americans.

An essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between “bland nothingness” and “racist hatred.”

On one side is Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old charged with murdering nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on Wednesday. He’s part of a very old racist tradition, stretching from the anti-black violence following the Civil War, through the 1915 movie “The Birth of a Nation,” to today’s white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and gun-toting, apocalyptically minded Obama-haters. And now a mass murderer in a church.

On the other side is Ms. Dolezal, the former leader of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., who, it seems, mistakenly believed that she could not be both anti-racist and white. Faced with her assumed choice between a blank identity or a malevolent one, she opted out of whiteness altogether. Notwithstanding the confusion and anger she has stirred, she continues to say that she identifies as black. Fine. But why, we wonder, did she pretend to be black?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/what-is-whiteness.html?_r=0

[serbbral]

16. @ La Lioness Priyanka

I just think most non- people of color just do not care. I do not think most do not know. The media really trips me out the way they keep asking the wrong people whether Trump's antics with the KKK, etc., matters in their voting of him. Why not ask some POCs what they think? They know what they are doing.