White Men are the Most Discriminated Against Demographic

[BoodeBeep]

My boyfriend has just said this to me. His reasons were women and ethnic minorities get schemes/help/AWS etc. I asked why exactly he thinks they have them, who they were trying to equal women up to etc. He said we should have a meritocracy and I agreed but explained we haven't ever ever had that and not all men are there on merit. I asked if he thought the reason there wasn't 50/50 represention was because women just weren't up to it and he said of course not but what other explanation is there?

I left it because there is just no getting through the complete arrogant certainty that he is right despite having done zero reading around the subject, having zero experience of being a woman/ethnic minority and seeing and hearing the experiences me and many other women have.

It's so frustrating. He's generally great but blind on this issue and obviously unwilling to think about it in any depth beyond how it may affect him should he fall victim to the discrimination of an all women shortlist.

Do men ever really get it?

No one is judging the quality of the work according to the race of the author. There is room in the curriculum to include quality authors from a wide range of backgrounds, whilst retaining Shakespeare etc.

if you judge the works of Shakespeare or Austen by the fact they're both white and not by the content, hey then guess what - you're a racist

The great thing about message boards is that usually, you can only judge people by their content, as you've no idea what their sex or colour or anything is. And some of them still turn out to be not worth paying attention to.