LetalisK said:
I don't quite understand what this has to do with what we're talking about, but if you're implying that personal experience is requisite to comment on how a race is treated, I would not only ask if you see the irony of this argument considering your previous statements, but also wonder why you're commenting at all in that case. If you're not implying that, then I'd ask for you to clarify how it relates to your argument.
I seem not to be explaining my point very well, I'll try again.
It's not a requisite merely to comment (if that was the case "check your privilege" would be replaced with "don't ever say anything"), but personal experience is going to affect people's understanding of things. Not having experience with something is going to limit someone's understanding. It doesn't mean they have no understanding, just less than they would have.
Very often we see people claiming that problem X doesn't really affect group Y, because they aren't in group Y, aren't personally affected by problem X, so they themselves don't see it. Now, that's not to say they couldn't gain an understanding of X by listening to people in Y or anything, there's a lot that they can do to educate themselves. But they have to go and make the effort, it's not a given that they will have any understanding of the situation.
If I wanted to know about how gay people were treated in a particular society, for example, I'd go and listen to what gay people in that society were saying. Preferably I'd listen to a number and try to work out a consensus. It'd be less effective for me to listen to straight people, I wouldn't be getting the information first hand.
On a slight tangent to this, though, are books published by straight people who've pretended to be gay for a bit, those are fairly popular. People have, consciously or not, assumed that the best way to find out about gay people is to read something a straight person has written, not the many, many things written by gay people. Likewise, the issue of gay jurors being rejected in trials for gay people, as they'd be seen to be biased. If someone was to suggest rejecting straight jurors for straight defendants, they'd be laughed down, because the proponents of that idea see the majority as being the unbiased and objective default.
In this context, saying "check your privilege" isn't (or shouldn't be) telling someone that they can't comment on an issue, it's telling someone that their viewpoint isn't objective, that they are looking at an issue from an outsider's perspective, which is very different from that of people who have to deal with the issue directly. The perspective of someone that doesn't have to deal with an issue isn't automatically the best one to examine it with.
