Lived Experience
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The lived experience is what captivated me the most in this week’s readings. There is definitely a lot of theories and written content supporting the anti-racism spirit that seems to be very important in the Northern American countries. However, those are written from the ‘whites’ perspective. It is as their translation and understanding of how we should not be racists but the idea of lived experience is what comes to life here. How the colored have experienced living or in other words, their lived experience is what matters and that is what Yancy beautifully brings up in the article. Being the center of attention merely for the sake of color is per se a very huge burden that colored people experience living in these countries and other tags coming along I believe go under this same umbrella, being the object of gaze! No white can experience what comes along this specific objectification. The « look a white! » constructs a very moving dynamics with shifting the object of attention structure. It also shifts the attention of the whites and gives them a new perspective towards themselves which includes a novel and to some extent terrifying experience. Now, theory is not working anymore and they are going to live the experience they had just read about and this is when they feel the tension and the insecurity but still as they have the cover of being whites, the real lived experience of the colored ones is way ahead of them.