Look at that tweet. Absorb it. Drink it in. Gape. It gets worse. And no, @cheilt isn’t talking about xenophobia directed at Eastern Europeans. She is a native white Irish living in… Ireland.
Now I’ll tell you a story about why tone never matters because white people will flood you with their tears at the slightest provocation. Lesson: being manipulative, racist faux-martyrs is an entrenched characteristic of the white culture.
This is how I first began to interact with the white martyr @cheilt. Now, you can prattle on at length about tone–little shits love that–but prior to this tweet there was no other interaction. The only place my “tone” could be objectionable here might be if the other party is a toddler; a factual, firm statement that says “you’ve got white privilege and are part of the hegemony” should not set you off into screaming temper tantrums and a white tears flash-flood.
It doesn’t matter what tone a POC is using. What matters is that a white person’s reality distortion field has been disrupted, inside which she tells herself a Disney fairytale wherein she is a righteous, abused white princess and everyone else is a rampaging monster or evil queen.
An exceptional straw whitey, except she’s not putting up an educational performance on what not to do; she’s doing this shit for real and believes every word she’s spouting. Yes, she really thinks she should tell a First Nations individual that she–white Irish–is just as oppressed as anyone. Where? In white supremacist countries. Where she, as a white westerner holding an Irish passport, is apparently “treated like shit.”
Later on, as fellow whites rallied to her aid, there were many howls of “troll!” and “abuse!” and, memorably, “psychopath.” For a full account, look here. What I’m going to talk about is the use of these words and the reframing of the events, and of course that whitest, most western phenomenon, the Cult of Nice.
Me Princess, You Troll
This is where it starts to feel like the “GOD HATES FAGS!” sign-wavers. While the political sentiments are exactly opposite, the motivations are remarkably similar: I WOULD LIKE TO DERAIL THIS CONVERSATION AND HAVE AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE WITNESS HOW RIGHT I AM. I don’t care if your politics are progressive and your focus is on social justice: if you’re shouting at people online and refusing to have a dialogue, you’re bullying. I don’t care if you’re fighting the good fight: if you’re fighting in a way that’s more about public performance, shaming and righteousness, I’m not fighting with you.
… Even if I agree with your goals.
[...]
This is where this kind of conversation begins to feel more like liberal bullying, where the only correct response is agreeing and acquiescing. Any other response is seen as ignorant at best, hateful at worst.
Stallings is a white woman who’s been called out for a number of things. Her response? “You bullies.” Julie Burchill is a transphobic piece of shit defending another transphobic piece of shit. Her framing? “Those transsexual bullies drove my [transphobic] friend off twitter!” Paul Weimer, a white man and genre fan, once bemoaned to me on twitter that he was “cyber-bullied” by some women of color a year or two ago because he defended Elizabeth Moon’s Islamophobia–an absurd concept, and he’s never been able to produce evidence that anything resembling “bullying” was going on. Did they threaten to cut off his white dick? No clue. It’s just this nebulous accusation of “bullying.” At one point, unable to take being called a misogynistic shitheel any longer, R Scott Bakker drew comparisons between himself and teenagers who’ve been bullied into suicide.
There’s a pattern here. Bullying is real, of course, but isn’t it interesting how it’s the first thing people latch onto when called out even in the mildest manner imaginable?
“Bullying” works as a manipulative catch-all because among westerners it’s seen as a universal experience. “I’m bullied (by minorities)!” a white westerner cries and instantly she will garner the sympathy of everyone, because apparently in the west the high school experience is a psychosexual hellhole of beating, mass shootings and gang-rapes. Or something like that, I’m not sure; I’m not too interested in the rituals and traditions of white savages. Or maybe “I’m bullied” works because it’s a battle cry for nerds, who believe that people being mean to you in school because you like My Little Ponies equals real oppression; for examples of this see fandom of any stripe or reddit. This gets into incoherent tantrums about “reverse racism” as well–”a black girl bullied me in grade four!” is cited as evidence that whites, too, can suffer racism.
When a POC looks at a white person we see someone who lives off (and is almost certainly complicit in) genocide, which you’ll probably agree is a concern somewhat more pressing than “bullying” that has no real consequences. White people don’t lose their jobs or their freedom because they’re racist, and the worst trauma they’ll suffer for it is maybe a few angry tweets.
There’s a Cult of Nice mechanism at work. The ideals of white womanhood are rooted in niceness, in a sort of Disney princesshood. You’re sparkly and sweet and shiny. You’re the angel of the house. You have tea and crumpets with other white ladies (also known as “people of obvious pallor” or “POOP”–yes, many POC are quite pale, but whiteys have always wanted their own special label, so let’s give them one), and you all make nice. Anger isn’t nice. Swearing isn’t nice. Being told “you’ve got white privilege” by someone who doesn’t care about your ideals of niceness–well, that disrupts the tea party. You can’t circlejerk on and on about how nice you and your friends are anymore. Why did they have to bring in race? It’s so… so rude! As you and your white friends agree, you’re “color-blind.” Besides, if you don’t get to be mean and loud and angry, why should those uppity WOC? They’re supposed to be your inferiors.
It’s about patriarchal status quo of course, but many white women fail to realize this and vent their frustration with said patriarchy on women of color. It’s easier! Challenging patriarchy is scary. Spitting on women of color is so much funner, takes no effort, and lets you indulge in that beautiful, beautiful persecution complex about “reverse racism” and how “whites can be victims of racism too.” Keep at it long enough and white men will even join in to reinforce you. The white men will shit on the WOC instead of you, and isn’t it cool to shift the real abuse somewhere else for a change? Now the ones at the top of the food chain like you! Racial solidarity overcoming misogyny: almost as magical as ponies. You’re the sparkly white princess and you can do no wrong while those WOC are “crazy” bullying abusive trolls.
If anyone asks, you stick to that party line. There you were, just minding your own business, not doing anything wrong. Racism is normative, right? So anyone “jumping on you” for a racist tweet, well, that’s “completely random” and abusive and horrible. It’s a cute little story you tell yourself. You repeat it until you’re absolutely sure it’s true, and you repeat it to anyone who’d listen that you were a martyred saint bearing that giant white cross, dragged to the stake by shrieking harpies of color. Or maybe you were a galloping white hero, there to “stand up” for your white friend who’s being ganged up on by so many POC. You might trot out some outlandish analogies: comparisons to partner abuse, domestic violence, sexual harassment, mass shooting or whatever tragedy you feel like appropriating and trivializing.
Manipulative? You won’t think so. You’ll say you’re telling it like it was. Don’t worry, everyone will believe you. You, whitey, a lying shit? Never. The white mind is rational and objective; the mind of color is primitive and untrustworthy. By the time you’re done telling your “side” of things you’ll say it didn’t start with a POC blandly saying “you have white privilege,” oh no. You’ll sob about “the most horrible abuse” your friend suffered from the get-go. The bullying, you know. The awful, traumatic bullying consisting of tweets which say “lol, you’re racist.” Nobody ever dared tell you that before, did they? Your friends of color think you’re perfect but, more importantly, your white friends reassure you that you’re the best progressive liberal activist angel who’s never so much as thought anything racist. Your ancestors never even owned slaves! It was really the black slaveholders who were the worst, anyway, and there’s that thing about “No Irish need apply” signs–never mind that the prevalence of such signs is sheer urban myth. That’s when it’s not just flat-out fictional.
White people make great fuel, by the way. Try it sometime. They want something to cry about? Let’s give them something to cry about.
It’s telling that Jane Eyre is held up as an icon of white feminism. White people love it, white women particularly, it being a predecessor and prototype for the romance genre where the true sign of accomplishment is winning or becoming the possession of a man. And you know, Jane Eyre is pitted against a madwoman who’s of mixed race, right? Google up “madwoman in the attic” and Wide Sargasso Sea for more on this, but in short it’s a perfect storm of internalized misogyny tossed into a blender with racism. Bertha/Antoinette is bestial and “mad”–and it’s implied her being biracial (that taint of something other than purebred white Anglo stock) is the cause of her animalistic madness.
A bit under 200 years later, we’ve still got whiteys calling WOC they hate psychopathic trolls (essentially bestial), rabid animals, and the like. I predict this trend will continue 300-1000 years after the publication of Jane Eyre. If white people survive their own stupidity that long.
Psychic, who me?
Matthew Montgomery (@mmmontycarlo)
/ January 22, 2013Plus, there’s a fear of Rochester “going native” once he’s been to the colonies. One of the great Victorian tensions was the taint of being rich from money made in the colonies. There’s a grand phobia that spending too much time with the other is contagious in some sort of way.
I still don’t quite understand why people get so vehemently upset when it’s simply observed that white privilege exists. Fuck, I’m a white middle class straight male and it’s painfully obvious that I have white privilege. It’s irrefutable and totally demonstrable. Why can’t everybody just shut the fuck up and accept that such a thing exists?
gefnsdottir
/ January 22, 2013In my experience (as a white woman) the term “privilege” puts people on the defensive. I wrote a post about the “p” word about a year ago, and the first comment I received was from a white woman who went on about how she had to work in the military for several years, having been born into poverty, and she couldn’t see how the colour of her skin still gave her oodles of privilege, that and intersectionality is a thing. That’s the other thing, many of the people I’ve talked to don’t seem to realize that having privilege doesn’t automatically mean you’ll have an easy life, and it doesn’t mean that white person isn’t unprivileged due to something else (say sexual orientation, being trans*, or economic status).
But, it can be hard for someone who has experienced poverty like that to recognize how privileged they’ve been in other areas (in this woman’s case, as a straight white able-bodied woman).
saajanpatel
/ January 22, 2013Yeah, I think people equate the world “privilege” with class privilege. So people balk at the idea that being white/straight/etc could be the equivalent of coming from a well to do family.
Then you have the people who are blinding by world justification via religious + nationalist narratives who I would suspect of being the most dramatic in their reactions, as in their minds everything they have was earned by them or their incredibly honorable family members who were naturally the best people of their time period living in the best country/religion/civilization possible.
Really, I have almost every privilege you can think of save for being a PoC and I accept that. Even if I wasn’t born in America I’d still benefit from the technologies and such that came out of colonization and imperialism, not to mention caste privilege if I was in India.
But it definitely took me awhile to swallow that pill.
R.M. Jones (@Rmjonesc13)
/ January 22, 2013…
Talking about visibility of a writer as it pertains to skincolor.
Defense is that she’s Irish, so SHE TOTALLY GETS THE SAME THING GAIS.
I proceed to not be able to read anything more as my brain has blacked out with rage at the sheer and utter stupidity and ignorance in that statement.
I am a white, American English major who loved the Victorian and Romance poets (although halfway through studying, I realized that many of them are horribly babied assholes). Do you know how many Irish poets there were? A freakin’ ton. Same with authors. Ireland shares a trait with Scotland in that both have a HUGELY DISPROPORTIONATE amount of successful and famous writers compared to the percentage of different countries’ population.
I mean, on a sheer basic level the vast majority of your average Joe in the western world knows who Oscar Wilde is. Ask the average Joe to name even just ONE author from Africa, and you would get blank looks. And once you have been through the system of Education, and actually do well in it and study, then you will be able to name countless Irish Authors… and still have trouble bringing up one African one.
Good lord in heaven. This is 1 +1 = 2 level of logic. It terrifies me that people are so unwilling to admit they maybe, juuuuust maybe, have a advantage in the world that others don’t. SHOCKING.
Zachary Jernigan
/ January 22, 2013The biggest burden I as a white person have is… Well, it’s likely listening to other white people try to act as if it’s a burden to be so privileged.
No, seriously, the hardest thing for me to communicate (to anybody) is how such ridiculous privilege warps a person’s character from birth without sounding as if I’m complaining about how hard it is to be privileged. It isn’t hard, at all — I’m given so many goddamn advantages, it’s hard for me to conceive of them all — but it is destructive. It weakens a population, to be so abnormally soft and insular.
I wish that white people — me of course included — wouldn’t deny this obvious fact, that we’re soft and weak and blind from centuries of mistreating others to our material benefit. I wish we wouldn’t get so defensive over every righteously hurled (or, indeed, softly stated) criticism. It’s whiny. It says nothing good about us that we can’t admit our own privilege and the effects of that privilege.
Sorry. Didn’t really contribute anything to the discussion there, did I? I don’t know; maybe I did; it’s not for me to judge, anyway.
Thanks.
saajanpatel
/ January 22, 2013I am actually curious about the underlying reasons this is such a challenge for people to accept.
Do you think part of the resistance has to do with not understanding the context, or possibly due to the idea that being white is a trump card compared to other privileges?
I think people miss the fact that it isn’t saying every white person has an easier life than every non-white person, it’s saying institutions are created to benefit white people whether they take knowingly take advantage of them or support said institutions. I suppose the advantages are also probabilistic rather than axiomatic.
In the same way, being male means having benefits related to probability of higher pay, probability of more support academically even from female professors, etc.
dynamickenparker
/ January 23, 2013I think people still benefiting from exploitation and slavery have a hard time examining this stuff because it might mean they have to give some of it up, or work to change it. What we call our “standard of living” in the US, the one we’re exporting to the rest of the world, is simply immoral.
saajanpatel
/ January 23, 2013I guess it depends on how much you’ve bought into the just world illusion/fallacy. I think for me, being straight and male, one of the harder things was wrapping my mind around some of the more subtle/pervasive aspects of patriarchy.
It’s interesting because I can still feel that knee jerk desire to dismiss, which I can now use in a weird way as a means of realizing I need to pay attention. It’s like having that wiring to justify is still there but using reason I can better navigate/understand.
acrackedmoon
/ January 23, 2013That is pretty great. I will adopt this.
dynamickenparker
/ January 23, 2013Hey Saajan, can’t nest in any further, but what I meant was that the “transparency” of white privilege is essential to its functioning. So I don’t think “buying in” is the right metaphor, white people are born “in” and it’s about breaking out of a comfortable prison that is intentionally concealed from them. White people can’t and can’t be allowed to come to grips with these things because it would mean major social and economic reorganization, largely to their “detriment” in the way we think about standard of living now. The US education system was designed to stupefy its students so they wouldn’t grow up thinking about stuff like this, for the same reasons.
Class consciousness in the US is similarly obscured.
Do you mean you still have a kneejerk desire to dismiss the arguments about white privilege?
lvirs
/ January 24, 2013@Saajan Patel. I think the word “privilege” as used in identity politic is hard to understand for contextual reasons. People usually understand by privilege a special (=infrequent) advantage, while in identity politics it can also signify an advantage shared by most of the (national) population. So when a dominant tells a member of a minority that he is not priveleged, he compares himself with the rest of the dominants and he may then well be correct. And the member of a minority will maintain that the dominant is priveleged because she takes as reference either the whole world, her own social context or refuses to take a reference to avoid legitimating it as more normal. Naturally she is just as right and her perspective may be broader, but we don’t need to interpret a difference in usage as a difference of opinion.
It might be better to avoid using “privileged” without qualification when characterizing an interlocutor, it is too global an assessment of her life to be well accepted.
layogenic
/ January 25, 2013“It might be better to avoid using “privileged” without qualification when characterizing an interlocutor, it is too global an assessment of her life to be well accepted.”
Alternatively, it might be better for white people to stop assuming white is default, and start thinking outside their self-established normality when reading words that mean things. Unlike ACM, I have full faith in white people to be able to use their brains–which means I expect them to use them, and not actually underprivileged people to modulate their language to make them feel better.
lvirs
/ January 26, 2013If two people are speaking together they should each strive to adapt to how the other person is thinking and communicating. I didn’t suggest that the effort should be unilateral.
A dominant will have integrated all kind of defence mechanisms to discourses that expose the injustice of her advantages, so if you accuse her of being privileged, she will find reasons to dismiss what you say as a whole. For her, you stop being someone trying to tell her something and you become someone attacking her. On the other hand, by being specific, you might get her to admit piecemeal to the existence of her different advantages.
layogenic
/ January 27, 2013It is very rarely the occasion of two people on equal footing having a chat that brings up these hackles of intense deflection. It is, especially re: internets, much more often an occasion of privileged person says something hurtful, stupid, and/or purely erroneous on a big public platform, gets called out on it using language including the word “privilege” by lesser-privileged people they otherwise do not know, and assume that the dozens of people harassing them must be in the wrong. Willful ignorance is not, to any great extent, an excusable defense mechanism.
Furthermore, it is not unreasonable to expect people, like our friend Saajan said, to recognize pathological responses and pay attention to them. That many people don’t is, again, not actually excusable, especially from a privileged group of people who have so very little to lose. It is not, and should not be, the (further!) onus of the under-privileged to coax learning and understanding from the privileged. In fact, I believe this is the best role for privileged allies to fill, but there’s some debate about that at large.
lvirs
/ January 27, 2013I don’t have a problem with telling someone that she has specific unjust advantages, only with triggering her defence mechanism for no good reason by expressing ourselves in a way that makes misinterpretations likely.
“That many people don’t is, again, not actually excusable, …” When most people in a group act in one way, every person in the group as at least two good excuses to act the same way: social pressure and priming. (Actually, I am one of those people that tend to think that everybody as excuses for everything.)
layogenic
/ January 28, 2013I think what you’re calling “excuses” might also be called “reinforcement of bad behavior.” But lack of critical thought is not an excuse any more than “I didn’t think I’d get caught” is an excuse for committing a crime. Social pressure and priming may be factors in thoughtless actions, but that they were thoughtless is the problem–compounded by people believing they have a right to be thoughtless.
Contrary to thinking everybody has excuses, these are conflicts that I bring up against myself constantly. I don’t want to be a person who thoughtlessly does/says things, particularly from my privileged position, which makes it much more likely that those actions/words will be harmful to somebody else. Somebody without the agency to stop me or even call me out in some cases.
For every one person who calls out somebody for being privileged, there are a hundred others who’ve been exposed to that privilege without feeling like they could say anything at all. So to expect that one person to couch their language carefully, to put more thought and energy into an exactly-worded response to somebody’s cheap, thoughtless but hurtful action, is, yes, inexcusable.
passacalle
/ January 23, 2013I was lured in by the title, which hits on a personal bugbear and promised something to disagree with on the Internet, but disappointed to find such a sensible post. I was all lined up to say that tone is a critical part of communication, which is why it’s worth making sure you are pitching it carefully and being precisely as polite or impolite as you mean to be, but as acrackedmoon says, her tone was actually pretty mild (contrast with the tweeter’s response to it, which is downright rude). It gets asserted that ‘tone doesn’t matter’ when what’s really meant is ‘ a rude or angry tone is appropriate in these circumstances’. What sometimes gets communicated is that if you’re talking about something very important – say, the structural oppression you encounter as a minority – sounding all outraged, all the time is not just justified (which is undeniable), it’s sensible. Whereas it isn’t, always. There is definitely a risk that if you never vary your tone, you end up being the guy on the street corner shouting at passers-by that the end of the world is nigh. Which is why I doubt that acm is ever *unintentionally* impolite (or polite for that matter).
acrackedmoon
/ January 23, 2013Yes.
Seamus Scanlon (@SeamusScanlon)
/ January 22, 2013Everytime I hear/read someone from this country (the Republic/South) talk about how historically we experienced great racism I want to bash their heard against a wall till they can no longer talk such shit.
A fair few people in this country seem to think that the Irish suffered terribly under English rule. Bar periods of the 1700 and 1800′s being Catholic Irish in this country is no where near equivalent to being a native from other parts of the British Empire. Being Irish in the countries she mentioned is also the same.
In fact the same people who left the country cause of how they were treated here by the English/Protestant landowners were often as racist to African Americans as Southerners while at the same you had the leader of the struggle for Catholic rights here backing abolition during the time of the Civil War. Frederick Douglas put it best -
“Perhaps no class has carried prejudice against colour to a point more dangerous than have the Irish and yet no people have been more relentlessly oppressed on account of race and religion”
PS – People always bring up the no Irish need apply when you challenge them on this, particularly Irish-Americans and I always bring up the paper you linked as well as the book How the Irish became white.
vehino
/ January 22, 2013http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1390205/Whites-suffer-racism-blacks-Study-shows-white-people-believe-discriminated-against.html
This is awesome! This is truly awesomely, hilarious stuff!
First world problems. Am I right?
magpiewhotypes
/ January 23, 2013Part of this–and I admit this is a strong personal beef–is the “culture” of fandom. Real people will always be second to imaginary characters, so you get folks who can’t possibly be homophobic because they wrote about Captain America fucking Iron Man in his iron ass or who can’t be racist because they totally drew a picture of a black My Little Pony (how that works, I don’t know, but it’s a thing). How you treat actual people is very much secondary.
saajanpatel
/ January 23, 2013This reminds me of people who say they aren’t racist/sexist, but cannot accept their favorite minor character is now black or a woman. (Or they can’t believe the character who was always black is now played by a black actress in the film version of Hunger Games…)
magpiewhotypes
/ January 26, 2013Yeah, although this is more about people who use their “acceptance” of characters in television or movies as a sign of how activist or “good” they are, however they act towards people in the real world. So because you like watching boys’ love anime, you can’t be homophobic towards an actual person. All those hours spent watching cartoon guys get it on makes you the equivalent of somebody who actively campaigned for gay marriage rights here in the United States! You’re a hero!
This sort of behavior is closely related to the JM Frey book that was reviewed on this site, where the author is attempting to “make a stand” in an incredibly clueless way. Not quite the same, but close. I think part of the problem is people getting so into the concept of fandom that they create their identities purely out of the media they choose to consume and expect other people to buy into that value system as well.
Inverarity
/ January 23, 2013*cough* Elizabeth Moon, not Bear. Unless Elizabeth Bear had her own outburst I don’t know about.
acrackedmoon
/ January 23, 2013Haha, shit, I always confuse the two. Corrected.
green_knight
/ January 24, 2013Elizabeth Bear defended her use of ‘death march’ to mean ‘working hard to meet a deadline’ in the face of numerous people saying ‘these two are not the same’. (She was also involved in various other faily things, but IIRC, those things happened more or less in the same time period.)
oakdilettante
/ January 23, 2013Great example of the fallacy of the tone argument.
all the people jumping in to make her feel better and never questioning anything at all were so pathetic.
I don’t know if you saw but later she was saying that she was trying to make a point about Irish women writers vis a vis the male Irish canon, and also she literally said “I was talking about feminism not race”. sad.
jerniganzachary
/ January 23, 2013For whatever reason — probably my stupidity — I’m unable to find a way to respond to individual comments on here, but I wanted to address saajanpatel’s words, which I think were addressed at me but may have been more hypothetical in nature:
“I am actually curious about the underlying reasons this is such a challenge for people to accept. .. Do you think part of the resistance has to do with not understanding the context, or possibly due to the idea that being white is a trump card compared to other privileges?”
I think white folks — males in particular, because of said added luxuries — are trained to be bad listeners in general, so context is largely thrown out the window. All context is OUR CONTEXT. We tend to miss nuances in the face of our butthurt over being challenged. Our authority — a fictitious concept based on nothing more concrete than an equation which stipulates that because we FEEL we are being listened to, we must therefore be saying something very important — rests upon sustaining a level of blindness and deafness to the world around us.
And thus every challenge is an opportunity for our world to come crashing down around our ears, because heaven forbid we reevaluate ourselves and come up lacking. That would… well, hell, what would that do? It would make it a moral imperative to begin to change, to become something smaller and more manageable — to stop being such an imposition on everything everywhere — to stop speaking from immense ignorance and on behalf of others.
As to this: “It’s interesting because I can still feel that knee jerk desire to dismiss, which I can now use in a weird way as a means of realizing I need to pay attention. It’s like having that wiring to justify is still there but using reason I can better navigate/understand.” — I’m in complete agreement with acrackedmoon. It’s pretty great. I too will be referencing it in the future. Thank you. It’s a beautiful sentiment.
Gourmet Neurovore
/ January 24, 2013Have you tried hovering over the bottom right corners of posts? A ‘reply’ button should pop up. There’s a maximum size for reply threads, though, so if you can’t reply to the post you want to, just reply to the latest one in the thread that you can get the button for and your comment should pop up in the right place.
saajanpatel
/ January 23, 2013@ dynamickenparker:
“Do you mean you still have a kneejerk desire to dismiss the arguments about white privilege?”
Oh I was thinking about feminist concerns about things like how women are depicted in camera shots, narratives, etc. I was never one of those guys who would shriek about how Wonder Woman must be in panties during a battle, but I also was in denial about other aspects of patriarchy.
Over time, I got stuff explained to me and while I’m far from perfect I think I am better. But there’s still that irrational conditioning and it sneaks up on you.
It’s a bit weird, and a bit scary how much you get wired to certain notions even while trying to consciously be better. So I rarely have the same knee jerk reaction to something relating to feminism, but occasionally feel that irrational desire to dismiss the concerns – it’s usually a clue that this is, instead, something I should definitely think about.
khaalidah (@khaalidah)
/ February 4, 2013I read the twitter exchange… boy oh boy did that get all fired up.
I actually felt sad for the Irish lady because to the end she was never humble enough to simply accept that she may have said something that was inappropriate, hurtful, and ultimately dismissive. I don’t think she was intentionally racist, but what matters most is that she be able to see her error. She never did, up till the end. She kept insisting, despite proclamations to the contrary that her understand was the right and only undersanding. It was wholly dismissive and insulting. But that’s the nature of the privileged, yes? They don’t have to see anyone else’s POV. *smh* Very, very sad indeed.