Yes, I definitely encourage people to write and talk about their lived experiences.
Yes, I definitely encourage people to share experiences that may differ from the majority of the society they live in.
After all, I've been sharing my lived experiences on my blog for 19 years (next year is my Big Two-O), and have been posting YouTube videos about lived experiences for 9 years (next year is also my Big One-0). I definitely encourage others to do the same.
However, the words "lived experience" have also been used by supposedly "woke" fanatics who use that term to deter disagreement from those who look different from them.
They scream if anyone who is not (fill in blank with a racial or gender identity) even dares mention anything related to (fill in blank with a racial or gender identity).
As if I should only be writing about things that pertain to those who are of Mexican/Puerto-Rican/German/Portuguese/Spanish ancestries who live in Hawaii?
Screw that!
I can write about whatever I feel like!
In fact, I'll go as far as saying .... Well-rounded individuals engage in conversations about many things, even about things that have NOTHING to do with their lived experiences.
There's MUCH MORE TO LIFE than only talking about things related to your lived experience.
--------
Not only should this blog post be essential reading, so is this article from the New York Times written by Pamela Paul, titled "The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’"
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/opinion/lived-experience-empathy-culture.html
here are some classic excerpts
Let’s make it personal: Am I, as a new columnist for The Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?
and this
People can successfully project themselves into the lives of others. That is what art is meant to do — cross boundaries, engender empathy with other people, bridge the differences between author and reader, one human and another.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the belief that “lived experience” trumps all other considerations would lead to a world in which we would create stories only about people like ourselves, in stories to be illustrated by people who looked like ourselves, to be reviewed and read only by people who resembled ourselves. If we all wrote only from our personal experience, our films, performances and literature would be reduced to memoir and transcription.
What an impoverished culture that would be.
-------
Yes to all that!
Yes to writing about Japanese things even if you're not Japanese.
Yes to writing about Irish things even if you're not Irish.
And yes to writing about the tiny Latin American community in Hawaii even if you don't share my ancestral backgrounds.
Now, someone might say "those who don't have your experience could write something inaccurate about you and those like you".
If someone writes inaccurate things about me, I'll just respond by telling what is inaccurate and what is accurate.
But I'm not going to be like "you're different from me, so don't write about things coming from people like me".
I'm huge on integration. The world needs more integration.
We will NEVER have peace in this world if everyone is told "stick with your own kind".
Do you want to know what "my own kind" is? It is ANYBODY of ANY BACKGROUND who shares my interests, and who wants to maximize liberty and justice in this world.
After all, we're only a few days from the 30th anniversary of when Rodney King pleaded to the word "can we all just get along?"
While Rodney King is no longer with us on Earth, the spirit of his worlds shall never perish from the Earth.
It's time we start embracing his spirit!
We need to stop segregating ourselves and start integrating with each other!
