Affirming Someone's Lived Experiences

... doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Well, the negative ones, that is.

My recently-deceased brother was an anti-Semite. As he told the stories, every interaction he had with a Jewish person had resulted in financial and/or sexual cheating. His lived experiences told him that Jews couldn't be trusted.

I never met any of the Jews with whom he had relationships. Given his propensity for using people, I have no doubt that they would have had a very different take on these interactions. I never put any importance in his anti-Semitic gnashings. I knew plenty of Jews myself. Like any other group, most were just fine and a few were truly villainous.

Where does that leave you as you work to affirm someone's lived experiences as we're told to do these days? Doesn't that seem to be doomed to misdiagnoses? How about when the culture teaches you to bias your experiences a certain way? If I had lived in an environment where I was bombarded with stories of Jews doing bad things, I've no doubt I would have taken my brother's experiences as my own. After all, it's me and my brother against everyone, right? And then me and my cousin and then me and my race and then ...

You get the picture.

Lived experiences seem prone to misinterpretations and unfair biases.  It's one thing to sympathize as a friend tells you how a left-handed, Hungarian lesbian* cut them off in traffic and agree that, in general, left-handed, Hungarian lesbians with poor driving skills ought to be closely monitored on the freeways. It's something else entirely to take their experience and use it to insist that all left-handed, Hungarian lesbians need to be dealt with quite harshly.

Also, this is a butterfly.

* - I'm sure you can tell that this is a racist dog whistle and the group who I'm really trying to slander are Eskimo chiropodists under 5'6" tall. Ooh, how I hate them!