Having a strong sense of justice and feeling like a lot of people around me are okay with saying mildly racist, classist, or misogynist things.. I'm being told I shouldn't take what people say at face value, but it makes me so angry that people just accept being like this?
For some context, I live in a semi-conservative country in southwest Asia, so I'd appreciate taking that into consideration when reading this post. Most people in society here, especially of older generations (but more recently, people of my generation too, late 20s), just haven't seemed to have learned how to be mindful of different groups of people. I'm constantly finding myself in situations where I'm casually hanging out with family members, acquaintances, or old friends, and they end up making the most distasteful comments about another group of people they're not a apart of, whether it's the other gender, the other religion, someone of another social class etc.. They always end up bringing it up on their own, and it either results in me debating them and challenging what they said (which mostly ends in me being very frustrated and in tears later), or I choose to ignore them but I still find myself awake at night FUMING at the awful and ignorant things they said...
Some examples of what kind of comments I mean:
- my stepdad claiming there "couldn't have been any female philosophers in Ancient Greece or we would've known about them" (of course, I pulled up as many references as I could to combat and explain this, I couldn't reach any satisfying end...)
- my aunt taking about her helpers/ live-in nannies like pieces of meat, comparing their prices and features (I will make up fake country names to not offend anyone..) she'll say something like "the ones from Mars are liars and thieves, and double the price, the ones from Venus are just wonderful and half the price!" It's just crazy to me that someone can talk about another HUMAN BEING like that..
- I heard a few Christians in my generation express disgust towards hijabis, even though Christianity is the minority here and we are treated with utmost respect, they developed some kind of unnecessary islamophobia towards their own neighbors?! Like we'll be hanging out in a mall or something and they could say "ew, there's so many hijabis here".... YOU LITERALLY SHARE A COUNTRY SINCE BIRTH!!! help
These incidents fill me with RAGE and they're so much more where this came from....
However, my point with this post isn't to solve any one of these incidents, I had the thought of coming to this sub in particular because I feel emotionally drained from being seemingly the ONLY one in the room to have a strong sense of justice about these things, I wonder if it's actually related in any way to not being an NT??
I've tried discussing this problem with my mom, she responded that a) I'm being too "rigid" or "picky" in conversations and I can't keep policing people on their opinions and b) I shouldn't take peoples' words "literally" and should focus more on their actions (she brought up my aunt as an example being very kind to her helper despite her words, but i STILL think it's wrong.)
Her use of these terms, "literal", "picky" etc.. just reminded me of being ND in general and had me thinking.. is there possibly a connection here?? Has anyone had any similar experiences, is it truly related NTs not putting much importance on what they say, and do you have any advice on how to survive this?