Offended at Being Offended

 I don't always understand why something offends. A lot of the time I hear some group raising hell about a phrase or a media depiction where I scratch my head and think "What's the big deal?". But the reason I don't understand is that I am not part of the group that feels hurt or disrespected. There's no way that I can truly put myself into someone else's head and heart and feel what they feel. Just because I can imagine that if something similar happened to me I would react differently doesn't negate the very real and valid reaction that someone else might have. 

An example is the continuing battle over the use of Native American imagery and team names in sports. Many (not all) Native American individuals, groups, tribes, and nations have expressed how insulting it is to use Indians, chiefs, redskins, warriors etc. as their team mascots. A common "rebuttal" to these images being offensive is that American descendants of Irish immigrants (I count myself as one of that group) don't take offense at depictions of leprechauns, like on the box of Lucky Charms. One meme that I saw recently suggested that the reason was that we weren't "over sensitive whiny little bitches". I suggest that a more accurate reason is that although we once were a persecuted minority, we didn't have our culture, including our language and religion, taken away from us, and we were never considered non-persons. We were within a generation or two accepted as White, an integral part of "real" America. Ask yourself whether Native Americans were treated the same way. 

A rhetorical question that often is asked is "Why, all of a sudden is this offensive?". The answer is that it's probably not all that sudden. Persecution and discrimination have been around for a long time, but speaking out against it has often resulted in lethal consequences in past generations. It's finally relatively safe to demand respect and equality. 

Any other persecuted or marginalized group is going to be sensitive to slights and insults that the dominant majority is going to think are not worthy of getting upset about. The dominant majority isn't going to get upset about these slights because they don't apply to them. Attempting to imagine how they would react to the same slights is meaningless because the majority doesn't have the same context in which to interpret these same words and images. And it shouldn't matter; what someone who doesn't understand why something would be offensive should be doing instead of mocking another for being offended is attempting to understand why it's offensive, or at least accepting the validity of the other's being offended.