Every person that's stepped up to make change got shot, lol. I've done my part.

And we are all better off for it. It's why we call them heroes.

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I recognize that the costs/benefits analysis of this discussion does not support my efforts in answering you, but I'm going to try.

I further recognize that there's likely to be a swamp of death-by-1000-cuts line-by-line parsing so that larger issues can be ignored in favor of minutiae, but I accept that.

In amongst several thousand words of cross-purpose antagonism, there's this shining, rhetorical lodestone that sweeps away all the chaff, all the bluster, all the willfully ignorant sophistry so I'm gonna fish it out, run it under the tap and put it under the light because by damn, you might just understand.

HERE IT IS: The less horrible the majority acts, the fewer heroes the minority has to sacrifice.

You seem quite positive and honorific about the sacrifices oppressed groups have made to lessen their oppression. However, you lack sympathy for the idea that sacrifices should not be required. To you, it's an abstraction: the onus is on the oppressed to rise up and demand their fair share. To 8bit, he's 21 times more likely to get shot by a cop than you.

This accounts for the unsympathetic reception you've received: The white person's role is to accept the mild inconvenience of vigilance towards racism. The black person's role is, according to you, martyrdom. The issue is compounded by the ready evidence of martyrdom amongst the black community and the scarce evidence of its effectiveness. Rodney King was 23 years ago. Detroit was 25 years before that (and then 25 years before that). The Emancipation Proclamation was 150 years ago - your arbitrary cut-off of when we started treating blacks as "human". Yet it's still substantially harder to thrive as a minority in the United States than as the majority.

Minorities definitely serve to benefit the most from equal treatment. From a "rational markets" perspective, the onus of transformation is on them. But rational markets are pure evil from an ethical standpoint: if I'm seven times less likely to go to jail and 21 times less likely to get shot over it, isn't the onus on me to do something about it?

Particularly when all I have to do is not be a douche and accept that sometimes I should go out of my way to be sensitive to people different than me? "No process is instant, and no good thing takes no work to achieve." Yes. Absolutely. But holy fuck. There are people in trenches and people in lawn chairs and sometimes it's good for the soul to recognize which one you are and pick up a spade. Or at least grab an extra beer from the fridge if you're going there anyway.