Is it reasonable to get mad from being called racist because you, as a shop employee, didn’t just let the customer take hundreds of dollars in cigarettes they demanded for free?
If someone calls you a rapist pedophile, are you going to get upset, or ask how you can better reduce your rapist pedophileness?
Would it be unreasonable to be upset if someone is specifically using that because they know in the local eco-niche, it could cost you your job and livelihood if people believe them?
What if you’re autistic and you’ve had a long life of people misrepresenting you intentionally or unintentionally because the double empathy problem is a thing? Like older kids beat the fuck out of you, and when they get in trouble they just claim you were being racist when you were just waiting in silence for the school library to open, and as you cry with eyes bruised and swollen shut, you are told you will be getting the same punishment as the older kids who just assaulted you, and also that the adults in the situation are okay believing you are a racist. Etc.
I definitely agree with the larger sentiment of your statement, especially for the large scale picture of things, and existence of people like MAGA, But the local context and social behaviours can definitely lead to situations that can make the insult and claim hard to internalize, when the claim has only been used against you with stark dishonesty.
Hell, got assaulted by a random drunk driver recently, and im glad they went for ‘pedo’ instead of ‘racist’ because it was much less believable to surrounding people in that context. Still doesn’t make me question what I could have done differently while being assaulted by a drunkard. Nuance exists, and bad actors exist within every group, and frankly it shouldn’t be damning to find fewer insults more insulting, because of your own disdain for racists and abusers.
yes absolutely. few things are binary. it’s like people claiming pro-palestine protestors are antisemitic, or trying to take the valid examples of exceptions as an excuse for unrelated bigotry. it adds a lot of noise and makes it hard to navigate, so a lot of people running on low-dimensional heuristic maps of the situation will lash out and cause legitimate grievance between other people who can or can’t contextualize what happened and why. those who can’t repeat the cycle, and socialize it.
why russia has such an easy time causing division and self-segregating behaviour. also why anti-intellectualism and self-serving behaviour is bad. we are too hackable in contextually ‘noisy’ environments, and bad actors love using that to their advantage.
it takes a lot of energy and time to understand how many blindspots we have within our oversimplified prediction of the world, and diverse environments and experiences, both physical and cyberphysical, and how that leads other people to be making different assumptions about what the world actually looks like. this includes our projections and expectations of others, battling our innate predictive modelling and biases/blindspots.
the issue is when an audience is running on those heuristics and making important choices that affect people. being overconfident in your over-binary predictions can cause these damages that cycle a self fulfilling spiral of legitimate grievance. again, an easy fire to stoke.