Outside of a court of law or the GD forum, there are few places where it’s appropriate to declare that one party to a conversation has the “burden of proof”. A group of people who are voluntarily supporting each other in improving their writing certainly isn’t such a place.
And I haven’t, nor do I think anyone has, that Walter’s response should have been to apologize. I would recommend something like “I’m surprised to hear you say that, I wasn’t aware that the term had racist connotations. Can you tell me more about that?” That seems much more likely to lead to a positive interaction than “Look! My phone says you’re wrong!”
I mean, it’s possible that she actually had some legitimate reason for assuming the term was racist which she might have shared if Walter had made her felt more comfortable doing so. But more likely, she was just jumping to a conclusion and addressing her concerns in inappropriately hostile language. I agree that it seems like a weird conclusion to jump to, and if I were Walter I wouldn’t be too worried that a lot of readers would have that particular reaction, though I might be concerned in general that my readers didn’t know what the words I was using meant.
I do. Why are you assuming that Jane is representative of “folks like her” - by which presumably you mean Black people?
If you assess her criticism on its merits and decide that her interpretation and criticism had reasonable foundation, then sure, we can reasonably infer some “folks like her”-level conclusions. (And for the avoidance of doubt, by “merit” I certainly do NOT just mean the superficial “facts” of the etymology of the word - I’m talking about the entire cultural context, considering her lived experience as a Black person.)
But if, with careful consideration of all those factors, her criticism does not have merit, the appropriate conclusion is not to say something like - “Well, it makes no sense, but maybe all Black people will see things that way”. The appropriate conclusion is that maybe she, as an individual, is just not a careful reader, she is a person who jumps to conclusions and tends to overreact. That’s her issue, it’s not an implied characteristic of all Black people.
I absolutely did not mean Black people. I meant folks who would, like her, suspect a racist meaning for that phrase. Please re-read my post with that in mind.
Okay, so “folks like her” does not mean Black people. But then what on earth does it mean?
To reiterate - if, after careful consideration, her criticism does not have merit, then the appropriate conclusion is that she, as an individual, is not a careful reader, she is a person who jumps to conclusions and tends to overreact. (I hope you will agree that IN PRINCIPLE this can be the case - even if the facts in this instance are that probably both writer and reader were somewhat at fault.)
If that’s the case, the only sensible meaning you can assign to “folks like her” is the set of all people who are not careful readers, and who tend to jump to conclusions and overreact.
So what do you mean by “excluding” this group? Their shortcomings are their issue to work on. I certainly don’t think it’s appropriate that we should be writing to accommodate the lowest common denominator in our potential audience.
We’re back to a situation where you seem to be trying to argue that when there’s a failure of communication, the writer must be primarily at fault. And I’m not seeing it. I think who is at fault depends on the specific facts. It’s always possible that the reader as an individual is primarily at fault, without drawing any “broad audience” - level conclusions.
I don’t see it that way at all. I, for example, am not Black but am definitely in the category of “folks like her” in the sense that I would tend, as LHoD said, to “suspect a racist meaning” for an unfamiliar phrase with derogatory connotations (e.g., a “-boy” suffix) uttered in the context of a pervasively racist society.
Now, I think I would probably be a little more cautious than Jane about jumping to the conclusion that the phrase necessarily is racist, but I could definitely see myself considering it potentially somewhat suspect.
I think that’s a much more realistic and meaningful delineation of the category that LHoD was talking about than your artificial distinction between people who “jump to conclusions and overreact” and people who don’t.
You’re acting as though the only problematic aspect of this situation is that Jane incorrectly assumed that a somewhat racist-sounding phrase actually had a racist origin. And I don’t agree with you; I think it’s also potentially problematic, for example, that the author who used the phrase never even noticed that it could come across as somewhat racist-sounding. (And that his only concern when the issue came up was that Jane never apologized for making that incorrect assumption.)
The context isn’t a courtroom, or a formal debate, or even Great Debates. The context is a writing group. Specifically,
It’s not a group only for people who specialize in Victorian England and who are writing for an audience of those who also specialize in Victorian England. It’s a group for writers of any kind of fiction; and presumably people in the group are writing for readers who may know very little if anything about the time and place they’re writing about, as well as for readers who do.
Given that to a member of that writing club “sandboy” sounded like a racist term: that is useful information. And it’s useful information even given that it wouldn’t have been considered a racist term in Victorian England. The issue, in a writer’s group, isn’t solely whether it was a racist term in Victorian England, but also whether it’s likely to be perceived that way by a modern audience. And Jane provided the information that it’s likely to be perceived that way by at least one member of that modern audience.
If WalterBishop had asked Jane why she saw it that way, they could have gotten a better idea of whether that was likely to be a common mistake, or to be an unusual mistake among most groups of people but a common one among others, and if so possibly among which others – which wouldn’t necessarily be Black people, it might for all I know be a common insult in Kansas or Manchester or Ottawa or Ivy League college dormitories. Or it might not. Maybe it really is just Jane. But leaping to the conclusion that it’s just Jane makes no sense to me at all.
(It actually seems unlikely to me that it’s just Jane. The phrase looks pretty dubious to me, and to @Kimstu, and to @puzzlegal; and both “boy” and “sand” clearly are occasionally used as racially derogatory, though obviously they’ve both got lots of other meanings.)
If, as according to the account of the incident we seem to be, we’re talking about writing general fiction: then yes it’s a very good idea to be writing for people who are not studying what they read with care and a dictionary, but for people who are reading casually for pleasure and relaxation. I wouldn’t call that group ‘the lowest common denominator’, myself. They may be perfectly capable of reading a technical paper with close attention and checking to make sure they know what any unfamiliar term means. They may have been doing that all day at work or school, and have picked up a piece of historical fiction in the evening precisely because they want to do something that’s not studying.
I’m reminded of a college friend of mine who was reading some 19th-century novel where some English colonel type says of an “exotic” female character something like “Unusual woman, that—a very Hebe!”
My friend, who was Jewish, was aware of the word “hebe” as an antisemitic slur, but not of the Victorian custom of using the name of the classical Greek goddess of youth Hebe to describe a radiant young woman, and was understandably somewhat disconcerted. (It was not clear solely from the context of the passage whether the Colonel’s remark was meant to be complimentary or not, or whether the woman in question was Jewish or not.)
Of course the author of that 19th-century novel is in no way responsible for the fact that a late 20th-century reader initially misinterpreted his dialogue due to cultural and linguistic changes over time. But if an author today writing a historical novel set in the 19th century wanted to use similar dialogue, I would expect them to be more aware of the potential for such misinterpretation, and to think about how readers might react.
I’m not the Great_Antibob, but, for example, you jumped to the conclusion that LHoD meant Black people when LHoD wrote “people like her”. I thought LHoD meant people who would interpret a word ending in -boy as racist, or would be on the lookout for racist terminology when analyzing a fellow writer’s work, and it actually never occurred to me that LHoD meant Black people.
Anyway, it was a little amusing to see you jumping to conclusions while writing a post about people who jump to conclusions. That might be what the @Great_Antibob was talking about.
Returning to the title question, “how should a person accused of racism respond?”
The first thing you should do is reflect on whether you have been accused of being racist or of saying or writing something that may reasonably be interpreted as racist. Those are very different. Feel free to get your hackles up in the first case. But if it’s just the second, treat it as constructive criticism, ask questions, don’t jump to conclusions, and otherwise engage with the person who is likely trying to help you.
Agreed - I think there is actually more than one question being posed by the OP of this thread, including at the very least:
How should one respond to false accusations?
How should this guy have responded to this accusation, given these circumstances?
If someone accuses me of running through the streets of Buenos Aires last Tuesday, naked, throwing excrement and screaming racist limericks, there is absolutely no legitimate call for me to apologise for my conduct and promise to try harder and be better in future. The appropriate response in this case is “Get lost. I wasn’t even there.”
I still think a more appropriate response, if I don’t know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the accuser is maliciously fabricating the accusation, would be something like “What?! I’m completely baffled about why you would think this, because I’ve never even been in Buenos Aires. None of what you’re claiming ever happened.”
Even if I did know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the accuser was maliciously fabricating the accusation, I would probably still use that less antagonistic response. Because it improves your credibility if you don’t appear to be spoiling for a fight.
Seems fair. I think there’s quite the spectrum though, between accusations based on malicious fabrication and those based on idiotically wrong and hostile assumption. (Quite aside from the example in the OP, which is something else altogether).
From my own experience, reasonable responses don’t often work at any point in this range, because nothing works.