You mention that your opinion is being disregarded solely because of the color of your skin, but fail to acknowledge that your skin color has put you in a position where you virtually never see the same kind of harassment or microaggressions as the people accusing you. Rather than getting hostile about it, maybe you should listen to their opinions on the matter to see if maybe there IS something you can alter for the benefit of both parties involved
Hard disagree here. This may have been true 60 years ago, but not in today's society. I can't expect anything to be given to me or taken from me based solely on my immutable characteristics (skin color, eye color, etc.), which is the way it should be.
Any privilege I have in life are due to my parents working as hard as they possibly could throughout their life in order to advance in their respective careers, and they didn't come from places of privilege either; my mother was raised by her grandparents in rural Louisiana when her mother left when she was 3 years old, and my father was raised in a low income part of Camden, NJ, and left home at 16 when his mother couldn't support him anymore. Of course, this isn't to say that nobody else has possibly had a harder life than they did, but I find it somewhat insulting to imply that any advantages I had in life are simply due to my skin color, and not because my parents worked their asses off so that they could give their future selves and their children a better life than they had growing up.
I feel like I worded my original post a little too harshly, although I suppose that's what happens when you stay up until the wee hours of the night. The interactions I mentioned in my initial post aren't the norm, but I'm finding them more and more commonplace in my social media feeds, along with places such as Reddit.
You'd have to elaborate on this one. If the rest of the world progresses and the US stays stagnant, we fall as a nation. Nobody's gonna wait for us to catch up, we'd simply tumble further in the ranks of education, social equality, wage equality, renewable energy, healthcare costs, etc. The past is dead and gone, and the US can't retreat from the world stage back into regressive isolation just because a few neocons are having "economic anxiety." All we're doing with those types of policies is speeding ourselves toward the next crash regardless.
The U.S. is still firmly in position as the largest world economic center, and I feel that this position is taken for granted very often, particularly by our friends in Europe. The primary reason that many European countries can have great social programs is because they don't need to spend nearly as much on defense or medical research, since the U.S. takes the brunt of that. If the U.S. were to switch to a full socialized/single-payer healthcare system, it would be absolutely disastrous for the average citizen, since healthcare is nearly 18% of the U.S.'s GDP (about $3.3 trillion, about $10,000 per person or $25,400 per household). This amount of spending is more than the entire GDP of every other country except for China, Japan, and Germany.
As for wage inequality, women make less than men
on average. As in, if you take the average of every man's income and compare it to every woman's income, women make less than men. This is due to women tending to make different career choices than men, with the average male tending to gravitate towards STEM related fields and the average woman gravitating towards more arts-oriented fields. When you compare salaries in the same field, women make, for all intents and purposes, the same amount of money as a man in the same job, with slight deviations depending on individual situations.
Obviously, the U.S. isn't a perfect paradise. Particularly, our public education system is absolute dogshit thanks to No Child Left Behind and the advent of standardized multiple-choice tests being used as a gauge for school funding, and our dependence on coal and fossil fuels should be better, with coal needing to be replaced by nuclear energy and fossil fuels needing to be replaced (mostly) by electric vehicles, but many of these issues are incredibly complicated and are being vastly oversimplified.
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Sicklyboy:
