the privilege to dismiss

I was just reading a friend's blog that included the following passage:

"so then a couple days later i came to new york. i left on saturday night and got here at 5am on sunday morning. my mom's husband, a cab-driver from algeria, (don't ask) came to pick me up from the airport. he talked a lot about how hard it was to live in oregon with my mom. how everyone treated him like a criminal. how it was boring and he couldn't get a job. he went on and on about how crappy the US is, how the people are judgemental and there's discrimination everywhere you turn. i really couldn't disagree. but dude! it's five in the morning. could you bathe me in your negativity another time?"

This friend is white and after I read this part, I really wanted to think about the implications of this passage. Its such a part of white privilege to be able to choose when to think about oppression and to think about it only when its convenient for you or when you're in the mood. To minimize her step-dad's experiences to being simply his "negativity" has the underlying message of "come on get over it already," a message that people of color get all the time. This is the same message that women get about sexism in our society as well. The other thing that made me upset about this post was that two of her white friends congratulated her for this response by commending her "could you bathe me in your negativity another time" comment by declaring how funny and clever it was. I'm trying to decide how I want to respond to her directly and since she's a friend of mine on here, there is a strong chance she will see this post. I'm not writing this to be passive aggressive, sometimes I need to write about it first. The person that wrote this is a really great person and reading this makes me remember that we all have our shit to think about and work though, myself obviously included. I think its hard for us to open us this discussions with people within our own community because a lot of times, when people from outside our direct community says things like this, its easy for us to be dismissive, demonize the person and write them off as "fucked up" rather than attempt to engage in productive discussion. At the same time, when someone in our community displays racist or sexist or classist behaviors, it can be just as difficult for us to engage in this discussion because we write off their behavior by justifying our reasons for not calling out (oh they didn't mean it, oh they were only kidding) or not wanting to "create drama." This is something that makes it hard for me to call people out sometimes, I get that thought in my head "oh, I don't want to create drama." I get pissed at myself when I think that because talking about this shit needs to happen more, its not about creating drama. Its about building a loving community and until that can happen within our own community, how the fuck do we think that institutionalized oppression is EVER going to change??