Being opportunistically accused of being a bigot is annoying to many people. And that is also quickly becoming cliché.
You mean in my hypothetical? The imaginary situation that I contrived specifically to explore my obligations if I had not made any such missteps?
Oddly enough, yes, I am 100% certain that I was completely blameless in that situation. Because, you know, it’s imaginary and I invented it.
How can you ever know if you’re blameless? It seems like a pretty unrealistic hypothetical.
So, let me get this straight… even in an imaginary situation where I’ve contrived myself to be blameless, specifically to explore what to do in that situation, you’re still not sure I’m innocent?
You’re really leaning all the way into this?
It’s just a useless hypothetical in for any sort of social situation. But, whatever.
Even if you’re absolutely sure, somehow, that you haven’t somehow caused offense, I still don’t see why you wouldn’t just apologize and move on.
Wait, so the idea that someone could get accused of racism, when in fact they didn’t do or say anything racist… is not even imaginable to you?
This is where some people get the idea that there’s no point responding to accusations of racism. The concept that the person might be innocent is too outlandish to be seriously considered, even in make-believe land.
I’m saying that the idea that you can know for sure you haven’t fucked up or gotten some terminology wrong or whatever is unimaginable to me.
The 9 pages was probably the drastically edited version.
I remember the story from Gwynn Dyer of the Jordanian general whose entire front was being rolled up by the Israelis. Under the pressure he reverted back to a second lieutenant and devoted all his attention to the activities of a single artillery battery. The OP sounds like someone reverting to his rite of passage/moment of grace: the grad thesis.
As any good manager understands, a cornered human being behaves pretty much the same as a cornered animal.
And that’s the underlying issue. You seem to see apologies as some sort of contest over who is right, rather than a way to acknowledge someone else’s offense and make it clear that it wasn’t intended. You don’t seem to get why acknowledging their emotions is an important part of communication.
If you make apologies into a contest, then you will get escalation. It’s exactly what leads to responses like this. The guy had convinced himself that he was the victim in this. He took something very small and made it into something huge. His “passionate defense” only made him look like a jerk who refused to consider the feelings of the other person. And the same is true of every person I can think of who faced consequences for this sort of thing.
Your hypothetical doesn’t make a lot of sense. We’re talking about racism and bigotry. You are an expert on neither, and even the experts (those who study it and live it) know they can’t know it all. Furthermore, there isn’t a situation where there will be no consequences. Caring about the feelings of others and resolving conflicts is essential to good communication. This is especially true when, as in the above, your job is to communicate ideas.
I get that the desire to defend yourself is strong. I’ve felt it. And I’ve had to force myself to switch to apologizing, clarifying what I meant, and asking for more information of why they were offended. I knew that angrily defending myself would only make me look bad.
You may find that unfair. I don’t, because I argue that idea comes from the idea that apologies are a contest about right and wrong, rather than a way to show empathy and resolve conflict. But, if you do, then, well, life is unfair.
It’s a cliché, all right, in that people keep going on about it. And I’m sure there’s an occasional case in which it’s happened. But I’m quite doubtful that “being opportunistically accused of being a bigot” is something that comes up very often in actual practice.
That phrasing, first of all, assumes that the accuser is complaining not because they think something bigoted was actually said or done, but only because they want to make a fuss because they think it will bring them some advantage. And second, it assumes that the complainant isn’t informing someone of a specific phrasing or action which they’d like corrected, but is instead accusing the person who said or did the thing of being overall and deliberately a bigot.
Again, I’m not saying that combination has never happened in the history of the country. I’m saying that I very much doubt that’s what’s going on in most cases in which there’s a complaint on the grounds that there are racist implications in what somebody did or said.
And I think that reacting to an accusation of having said something racist as if the accuser were opportunistically accusing you of being a bigot is, to get back to the question in the title of the post, the wrong thing to do. It’s certainly the wrong thing to do if that’s no more what they meant to be doing than you meant to be sounding like a bigot (presuming, of course, that you didn’t mean to sound like a bigot.)
Bear in mind that if someone tells you that you said something that sounds bigoted, they may well be doing so precisely because they think you’re not a bigot; and therefore, since they think you’re not a bigot, they think you’ll want to correct yourself based on the information. You may have reasons why you think the information’s wrong; those reasons may even be correct. But that wouldn’t mean it was their intentions that are the problem.
I think some posters in this thread are experiencing a failure of imagination that would be immediately remedied if they allowed themselves to indulge in a little mental exercise where their accuser was, I dunno, Donald Trump Jr., or Alan Dershowitz, or Kimberly Klacik.
And, in all the interactions that minorities and women have, the number of (a) incorrect accusations is outnumbered by (b) the number of minor offenses that they just sigh and let go, is what, a 100,000 to one? Million to one?
If you (generic you) called somebody by the wrong name, then obviously you did something wrong, and obviously you should apologize for it.
If you are ignoring the fact of your (presumably inadvertent) rudeness in calling somebody by the wrong name, in order to fixate instead on whether it would be justifiable for somebody else to attribute that mistake to deliberate or unconscious racism on your part, then you (generic you) are being kind of a self-centered asshole and should stop that.
If in some unlikely concatenation of circumstances I happened to be speaking with Donald Trump Jr., and I happened to inadvertently address him as “Eric” or “Matt” or “Madison” or by the name of any other right-wing jackass, my immediate reaction would be to apologize for that error.
It’s got nothing to do with predisposition to ideological agreement or disagreement: it’s a fundamental issue of basic manners.
As I said, if you (generic you) are going to overlook your fundamental obligation to apologize for the rudeness of misidentifying somebody, in favor of getting into an argument with them over whether your mistake might have been due to bigotry, then you’re the asshole in this situation. (Not to say that there’s no possibility that they’re being something of an asshole as well, but your own assholery is what you need to immediately address.)
Sure; if someone tells you you’ve wronged them by making a mistake you know you’ve made, what harm in apologizing.
I am referring to the inability of several posters to imagine HMS_Irruncible’s hypothetical scenario where an apology is not needed because no wrong has been done. I am confident that if Lauren Boebert calls someone in this thread a racist/misogynist/homophobe/whatever for whatever, they will not offer a sincere apology under those circumstances. They will have a different appreciation for the occasional need for a spirited defense.
Ah. I didn’t get that at all from your post. I suppose if a known asshole and liar called me something like that, I’d probably just ignore them. No need to feed the trolls.
There is no “hypothetical scenario” where you don’t need to apologize to somebody for calling them by the wrong name, no matter how innocent and non-racist your inadvertent misidentification of them may have been.
If HMS_Irruncible is trying to suggest some kind of “hypothetical scenario” where there is no such misidentification, but nonetheless somebody is getting accused of racism for some unspecified reason, then I think he needs to clarify its hypothetical circumstances a bit better.
If I accidentally call Lauren Boebert “Marjorie” or whatever, and she jumps on that to claim that I misnamed her because I’m a racist/misogynist/homophobe/whatever, my first reaction will still be to apologize for the rudeness of having called her by the wrong name. Sincerely.
Like I said, if you call someone the wrong name, you’ve made a mistake, and apologizing for the mistake is one thing, but a different thing.
It seems to me like they were pretty clear in the scenario that they posited: somebody accuses you of racism, yet you didn’t do anything racist. That’s all. It would be surprising to me if the possibility of such a scenario was a hot topic for debate. It seems clear to me that it is possible for that to happen. I thought their question was whether, having lamentably found yourself in that scenario, you should apologize anyway for the harm you have done to them, without in any way suggesting that you did not do anything racist.
ISTM that such a “scenario” is so open-ended and vague as to be meaningless. What, if anything, did you (generic you) do that your accuser interpreted as racist? Or did the accuser just select you at random out of the blue to call you racist? What makes you so sure that you “didn’t do anything racist”?
I’ve seen plenty of examples of, e.g., people who’ve obstinately insisted that they weren’t being racist when they called a black person an “ape” or a “monkey”. They’re just so fixated on their own lack of conscious racist intent that they’re completely oblivious to the manifold ways that such individual insults are built on centuries of racist stereotypes.
So without any info on these hypothetical circumstances, I’m very skeptical of all this abstract defiant chest-thumping about how you don’t have to apologize if you didn’t do anything racist. In general, most people who are convinced that they have absolutely nothing to apologize for in any given situation are at least a little bit wrong.
OK. I think you can probably just refer to the discussion above, where all of this has already happened, and presumably will happen again.
I’m truly sorry for all of my abstract defiant chest-thumping.
And I’m truly sorry for my somewhat excessive censoriousness. Two apologies are generally better than none.