First, it's complete and utter nonsense. To demonstrate this, let me rephrase the question another way. I'm a male. If I hang out with nothing but women, will I ever know what it's like to experience life in this society as a woman? Will I ever know what it's like to be the victim of a sexist comment, mindset, or discriminatory act? No. If a black man hangs out with nothing but white people, is he going to begin to be judged as a white man? Negative. Just because one hangs out with people in mixed-race relationships does not mean they themselves know what it's like socially.
I wanted to tell this girl so badly that "No, you don't know how it feels to be judged as a Mexican in a white society - you're white and American. You may know how it feels to be viewed as a white female who dates a Mexican male, and that is a relevant discussion for another time; but it's far from being the same thing".
It's insulting in this way: it invalidates the unique reality a person of Mexican descent might feel in such a society. It sort of passively writes off being an oppressed situation by insinuating that watching and hearing something happen to another is the same or supreme to being the one that received the action. It's like seeing a punch thrown at somebody, seeing it connect, hearing the "pop", and saying "Man, I felt that just as bad as he/she did!"
This does not mean that white people have no valid stories or situations in society. An anti-racist white person (male or female) could very well say that non-whites do not understand how it is to be going against the institutional and social norm of white racism and experience the "traitorous" attitudes attributed to them. That is something that they can talk about and share (and it is an outlook and story that has a LOT of meaning, as white people are central allies in the fight against racism). However, nobody else can appropriate that feeling for themselves if they don't experience.
Therein lies the difference between living and learning. It's important to do both. By living, we affirm who we are in society: your ethnicity, your gender, your religion/lack-of-religion, your class, etc. All of these things contribute in very unique and special ways to who you are and how you experience life. Women go through things daily that men do not understand. Why? They do not live it. Men experience things that women will never experience, just on a different side of the coin.
By learning, we put aside our own viewpoint to empathise with that of another. We try to view things in their lenses, to understand that our reality is not the one objective reality upon which everything else is based. The male reality is not the generic, definitive one. The American reality is not the benchmark upon which everyone else in the world should be judged. People are a result of their biography and history, and those histories are shaped in their status and classification in society. These things are key to understanding who we are and where we're going.
If a person can't grasp that concept, I suspect it's going to rather hard for them to make sense out of much of what goes on in life without resorting to violence, resentment, and confusion that could be remedied and solved by simply putting their ego and vanity aside. Only when a person honestly realises that they don't know it all through their lenses do they really begin to learn about others and, in a way likely not expected, even more about themselves.
So in the end, the next time you're thinking about how your friend or family member of a different race/gender/religion sees the world, admit to yourself up front that this is a viewpoint that you've never lived and can only learn; but to truly understand how they live their experience, you have to put your aside momentarily. Otherwise, you're just swimming in a sea of your own shit.
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