In other words, you're arguing that things I have personally experienced do not matter because your generalization of the subject disagrees. Every argument you make deprecates my experience. You aren't even putting up data - you're effectively saying "your experience is a corner case, stop talking about it because it's not valid because the preponderance of truth is on my side, trust me on this." You're doing exactly what I said has been my experience.

No, I simply described my own experiences and tried to start a discussion on why we might have had such different experiences. And don't forget that this whole topic started with someone describing their experiences and understanding of privilege, which your post set up to "invalidate" (to use your understanding), and when my own experiences aligned with the author's, you "invalidated" mine by saying that yours are more important and relevant, and that I should just shut up.

However, I'd argue that a better approach would be to just accept that nobody here has "invalidated" any one else's experience. Different experiences have been presented and a more productive way forward would be to discuss it and figure out why there is a discrepancy. I'm simply saying that I agree with the author, which is that the concept of privilege causes people to become defensive and can often lead to a misunderstanding of how the term is being used.

And here you are, not even acknowledging me or my experience, but choosing instead to have a debate about a straw man. You aren't talking to me, you aren't talking about me, you're saying "here's this construct that I'd prefer to discuss so that I can disregard your opinion."

Again, I've done nothing at all to reject your experience. I'm simply saying that my experience disagrees with yours and it would be interesting to figure out why.

Effectively, you've taken an individual, discussing an individual experience, and sweeping it up into the exact same broad "STFU white boy" conversation that I opened my point by decrying. Do you see why you can't do that and have a reasonable discussion?

I'm beginning to see that my comment about people who claimed to have been told to "shut up" in discussions of privilege are usually misrepresenting the discussion is once again confirmed, and I agree that it makes reasonable discussion difficult but I suspect that's not what you meant.

And just to be clear, since we're intent on throwing about terminology specific to a certain context without concern for that context (like "invalidating" and "experience"), there is no universal rule that says experiences should be valued and never questioned. The reason why we are supposed to be careful not to invalidate the experiences of minorities is because they live in a world where they are told and forced to shut up, where they don't have a representative voice in major decisions that affect them, and because we have a history of making very bad choices "for" them. If a racist comes along and says that their experience of black people is that they are stupid and thieves, then damn fucking right we should be "invalidating" that experience by pointing out that their views are incorrect, misunderstandings, that reality disagrees with them, etc etc.