To my enduring surprise, responses and reactions to this piece continue to trickle in — some in the form of emails and tweets and pending comments, some in the form of essays on related topics. Most of the people who’ve reached out to me personally have been supportive, and many have shared similar stories. As for the people who said truly terrible things to me, well, internet lesson learned; I realize these are angry times we live in.
In the weeks since I published the piece, several not-terrible (but still misguided) readers have chimed in with some form of: Why not just give everyone the benefit of the doubt? Wouldn’t it be better if you just assumed that most people have genuinely good intentions? Next time, they suggest, I should remember that everyone really means well, and take it upon myself to educate them. Kindly. Patiently. And SMILE ! 🙂
Yes, what’s in one’s heart matters, a great deal — and I don’t think every conscious or unconscious bias a person lets slip is necessarily a sign that they are past all redemption. That doesn’t mean everyone should ignore what actually comes out of someone’s mouth, nor does it mean we are always duty-bound to spend our time and energy educating them. Not only does it sound socially disastrous and potentially wasteful of my one wild and precious life to go around offering impromptu primers on Racism: Why It’s Actually Not Great, it also seems silly to ask me to base my emotions or reactions on the alleged “good intentions” of others.
I have not been able to stop thinking about those twin protests — “but, good intentions!” and “the benefit of the doubt” — and what they really mean. Who usually gets the benefit of the doubt? Who is expected to grant it?
A few weeks ago I was in a discussion about anti-racist parenting, and at one point a white parent asked how they were supposed to keep their kids from developing a low opinion of people of color if they’d had “bad experiences” with them. They told a longish story about two boys at their child’s school who sometimes flout authority or are mean to the white kids. They don’t listen to the teachers who try and tell them to stop, because they don’t respect women in their culture. I pointed out that there is no culture that universally respects women, and that whatever good intentions they might possess, they were still thinking of literally two children as representative of an entire group of people. They couldn’t even manage to look at two kids and see them as individuals. And their own child was probably picking up on this, and doing the same generalizing and stereotyping.
So much for the benefit of the doubt.
The person who said all of this was clearly not trying to cause offense. If I had called them out in harsher terms, I’m fairly sure that is the defense I would have gotten — something about just being honest and not racist and that’s not my intention! It’s difficult for me to understand how anyone could hope to rely on the presumption of innocence while simultaneously condemning others as guilty.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve heard What if you/your kids have had bad experiences with people of color? as if all people of color are a monolith; as if we don’t have plenty of “bad experiences” (there’s a euphemism for you) with white people. Yet we’re honestly expected to carry no baggage at all, just bring trust and faith and boundless patience to each new interaction and relationship — to offer well-intentioned white folks the benefit of the doubt, every single time.
I don’t always have the mental, emotional, or spiritual fortitude to trust in the purity of some stranger’s intentions. I don’t have the capacity to believe I’ll never be hurt by a white person again.
Over the years I have been conditioned — particularly by my adoptive upbringing, I suppose — to be patient with and also crave the approval of white people. I’ve accepted that deprogramming myself will probably require a lifetime’s worth of work. And yes, sometimes I’ll bite my tongue. Sometimes I’ll “educate.” These are just some of the things I have to do in order to keep my friends and do my job and function in society. But I’ve been over this idea of “good intentions” and their supposed weight and importance for a long, long time now.
I should note that the bigotry I’ve faced, over the years, has been relatively minor — name-calling, slurs, stereotyping, fetishism. I’ve been overlooked, underestimated, erased. I’ve been the token friends and family can point to while denying their prejudices; I’ve been used as a “model minority” to prop up anti-Blackness. Still, no matter how large or small the offenses, I don’t always have the mental, emotional, or spiritual fortitude to unquestioningly trust in the purity of some stranger’s intentions. I don’t have the capacity to believe I’ll never be hurt by a white person again. And I cannot bring unfailing faith and trust and sweetness and light to every single interaction I have with white people. That should not be asked of me, or anyone.
So, yes, I get angry sometimes. I won’t allow the feelings or fears of others to dictate how I feel about racism. I don’t care deeply about or even care to acknowledge someone’s heart of gold if what comes out of their mouth is hurtful or hateful. I don’t have a grudge or a chip on my shoulder; I have simply had experiences enough — in real life, and online — to know that sometimes, trust has to be earned. The truth is, I don’t think most white people realize just how often they are given the benefit of the doubt, over and over and over again. Sometimes you don’t have any more to give.
Aughhh, all of this is so true. As someone who is multi-racial I get all sorts of weird responses from people, I do not have time to explain to people why asking “What are you?” is rude, tiring and frustrating. I have learned from previous experiences that explaining my (admittedly complex) background leads to people going “But mixed people haven’t been around that long! You CANNOT POSSIBLY THAT MIXED.”
YOU CANNOT BE SCOTTISH IRISH AND GERMAN AT THE SAME TIME THOSE ARE DIFFERENT COUNTRIES IT MAKES NO SENSE EXPLAIN IT TO ME
Right? My response is usually “Well, when two people love each other very much…”
My conversations then usually go like this though: You’re TOO LIGHT to be JAMAICAN/INDIAN! I DEMAND AN EXPLANATION
Me: Have you heard of this thing called Colonialism?
Them: *indignant spluttering*
Meanwhile, plenty of white Americans learned fractions from their parents’ explanations of their national ancestry.
Wha? Mixed people haven’t been around that long? What, were they invented yesterday?
You would think so by the amount of times that I’ve heard this!
Your grandparents were mixed? UNPOSSIBLE
I wonder if telling them about Pocahontas’ marriage to John Rolfe in 1614 would just cause a total system shutdown…
When we read Othello in high school there was a student who would not, COULD not accept Othello was black. Because Shakespeare “never went to Africa. How did he know black people existed?”
<333333333333333
Wouldn’t it be better if you just assumed that most people have genuinely good intentions?
If their intentions are so good they shouldn’t mind being appropriately corrected.
EDIT: Not that they are entitled to be corrected, just that they should conduct themselves in a way that might encourage people to feel more comfortable doing so.
I think one of the most damaging attitudes a person can have is that only bigots say bigoted things, and that “good” people are incapable of being bigoted. As if being a good person is a trophy you can win, excusing you from all future missteps, instead of something that has to be constantly, deliberately practiced.
Yesssssssss: As if being a good person is a trophy you can win, excusing you from all future missteps, instead of something that has to be constantly, deliberately practiced.
YES! One of the valuable things I learned from my mom (who grew up white in Mississippi in the 50s and 60s) is that we think our current circumstance is nuanced, while historical conflicts have a clear right and wrong.
She taught me that most of the people (not the violent, Klan people) who opposed civil rights were good people. They considered their black maids a part of their families. They couldn’t possibly understand why black people would be so upset about the state of race in Mississippi. Sure, they wanted black people to, say, have more scholarships for “the smart ones who worked hard” to get a good education. But integration is complicated!
Like, they were good kind people who loved their families and did great, wonderful things to their communities. And they were racist beyond belief in ways that seem unfathomable to us now. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, so whenever I think something is just really complicated and there’s no easy answer, I should remember that in 50 years most people will think what I’m dealing with is pretty UNnuanced and cut and dry.
Yes yes yes. Moral absolutism is a trap.
Yes yes yesssss. Like I am not talking to my in-laws right now because they are convinced they are good people and that they would never say bigoted things. Except for where they do constantly. 😐 We are socialized to be awful in so many thoughtless ways and I think we are honor-bound, as people, to fight that in ourselves every day.
Yes, there are really almost no “good” or “bad” people. Realizing that helps me to be simultaneously more careful because I know that even good people can do hurtful things, and more forgiving because I know that a lot of good is done by the exact same people who do some bad (which is not to say that people should not be accountable.) But the most important aspect of this is self-awareness. As you point out, I have to think about what constitutes good things, and practice doing good things, and apologize, because within me lies the potential to do everything bad.
Of course it is really hard to decide who to vote for and who to be friends with if you can’t just lump people into categories. But real life is complicated.
agree with a lot of this, but I think this time around it’s really pretty easy to decide who to vote for.
At least it’s easy to know who to vote AGAINST. Not much ambiguity there.
What a clear way of putting this. Thanks. It really does seem like so many people feel that way.
My wife, who I met in her 40’s, is on the far Left of most political compass questionnaires and has spent a lot of time working in (Australian) Aboriginal Reconciliation groups. Most people would label her at least a “good person” if not “bleeding heart liberal Greenie”.
A few days after I met her, I pointed out that she regularly used “Jewish” as a slur to refer to behaviours/statements as mean or parsimonious. She was utterly mortified.
This was completely unconscious language from her suburban Australian Catholic upbringing and contrary to all her beliefs and conscious practices. But, nobody had pointed it out to her. Ever!
Just wanted to say THANK YOU for this.
Man, I like to think of myself as some next level progressive and insightful and AWARES, but there is a paragraph up there that somehow dropped a grand piano of wisdom on me.
The second to the last sentence is pretty killer.
100% this, all the time. Thank you, Nicole.
I got a little embarrassed by my rant being off-topic and deleted it, but others think it’s relevant so here it is
This sort-of pinpoints why I get furious every time I see a post/article telling us that we should listen to the concerns of Trump voters. An acquaintance from college wrote one saying that Trump voters are just as smart and well-informed as anyone else and that if we aren’t friends with one, we need to expand our friend circle.
Stop telling me I need to listen to the views of people who hate literally everything I am. The people who make me grateful that my dad got his citizenship years ago and that he’s mostly lost his accent because it means they can’t necessarily tell right away that he’s Latino and therefore “illegal”. I don’t need to be friends with people who are voting for a racist who needed to wait for public backlash to disavow the KKK.
/off-topic rant
lol at “expand our friend circle” to include more racists
WHERE IS YOUR COMMITMENT TO BROADENING YOUR ~HORIZONS~
All you’d be doing is giving them the chance to say that they have [race] friends.
Which is such a non sequitur in the first place. Nobody cares whether a stranger hangs around people like them. Like, as a (white) woman, I am not interested in some rando trying to be my friend just so he can say he has female friends; I already have plenty of friends. I would rather a man spend zero time socializing with women but call out sexism in the men he spends time with. Actually, that sounds kinda great.
My liberal friend, in the interest of being open-minded, posted on Facebook asking people who support Trump to explain their thinking, since she was genuinely at a loss. I responded that I neither want nor need to hear the pitch. I’m not treating Trump as a serious candidate any more than I have to.
Only tangentially related, but I am consistently frustrated with media organizations that are required, by the decree of “fair and balanced” to treat Trump’s bigotry, vitriol, and hate speech as legitimate concerns and part of some political platform. I understand the ideal of no bias in coverage but the media should tell the truth instead of tiptoeing around his “controversial statements” and cloaking his blatant racism in euphemisms. It’s racism, and coming from anyone other than a presidential candidate it would be considered as such. Call it what it is!
Yep, it’s a classic example of racist bias. Objectivity is an important ideal in journalism. But being objective and accurately representing both sides should not be an excuse for treating hate speech as something reasonable when it is not. Impartiality has value, but that doesn’t mean you have to pretend that all opinions are equivalent.
Well said. And the key thing is, when you look at breakdowns of the coverage (maybe it was Five Thirty Eight where I saw some charts?), the media is giving an overwhelming amount of attention to Trump. So not only are his opinions given the same weight as other candidates’, his visibility is much higher and the dissemination of his racist ideas is much wider.
I highly recommend that you listen to the episode “Pumped on Trump” from the podcast Reveal. It does a good job of engaging with Trump supporters while not ignoring the horrific racism and problematic rhetoric in the campaign and the supporter’s own views (it helps that its reporters are quite diverse and the host/creator is a black man).
Yeah, I think that it’s interesting/important to talk about Trump’s bigotry, vitriol, and hate speech as part of a political platform—- in that it bears resemblances to Fascist Movements. Rachel Maddow has talked about it in a way that I have found really useful. Because while comparing Trump to Hitler may be more accurate than it usually is to compare a politician to Hitler, it still makes people stop listening (myself included!!!). But comparing his campaign/platform/etc to Oswald Mosley? Not nearly as emotionally charged in the US, so I find it way more effective.
The thing that really pisses me off, which the British media does over and over again, is describing racist speech as nebulously “controversial” or “offensive”, as if the problem with it is that it makes white people purse their mouths and frown a little. It’s never hurtful, nor ever talked about in terms of the impact on the people it hurts directly or indirectly, the people who feel less safe, or the people who are literally physically hurt by people emboldened by public racist rhetoric. It’s always “offensive”, and then there are the god-awful debates about whether or not people (often implicitly white people) deserve not to be “offended”.
Endorsing/praising Trump earns you an automatic unfriend in my (face)book. Hate and racism is not some unexplored viewpoint I need to consider.
It is very telling that some people think judging a person based on their race/gender/religion is the exact same as judging a person based on their personality or opinions.
Ugh, I’ve heard similar sanctimonious comments about how “I don’t choose my friends based on their political views” and how there’s nothing wrong with having friends who are also Trump voters.
There has never been an election (in my memory, anyway) that made it so clear how politics is also ethics, as it has to do with how you view and treat everyone around you, especially those who don’t look like you or has a different upbringing or wasn’t so lucky as to be born in this “land of the free,” and how hard you judge them for wanting to make a life here despite the LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE immigration system.
It’s about compassion, and the lack of it has always struck a nerve with me (even playing make-believe games as a kid, when my brother bombed my toys’ peace march). Nothing makes me so angry and feel so hopeless for social progress. So yeah, this election cycle has brought dark days indeed.
It seems to me that the same people who cry, “You should give everyone the benefit of the doubt!” are the same people who say, “Why would you put yourself in that situation?” when you are harmed.
(“Why did you get drunk at that party?” “Everyone at that restaurant was white, what did you expect?” “Why did you let your 12 year old play in a park with a toy gun?”)
THIS.
Why are you acting so victimy! You shouldn’t act like a victim and then you wouldn’t be one! DUH!
Yep. The same people who complain that no one ever talks to strangers anymore, why are kids these days all on their phones all the time, nobody makes connections, and then when you tell them about being creeped on by a dude at the bus stop, ask you what you expected standing at the bus stop at night like you assume people will respect you as a human being.
The other week there was a headline in the UK screaming about how two people who were found guilty of murder had been given £40k in legal aid (eg. state aid for legal representation.) This is LITERALLY complaining about criminals being given a fair trial. I would love to see the Venn diagram of people complaining about legal aid going to criminals and people who chant “innocent until proven guilty” when someone makes an allegation of rape or sexual assault.
I suspect that Venn diagram would just be a circle.
I was talking about how much that framing of the story pissed me off just the other day. Similarly with the reporting of this one: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/triple… It’s all focused on the amount of “taxpayers’ money” spent on these things, and the details of the crimes the people involved committed, which is all completely beside the point – everyone is entitled to a fair trial and legal representation! Everyone has the right not to have their possessions wilfully damaged or stolen. Making it into a story about “look at these murderers, wasting your hard-earned money on trivialities” is vile.
Wouldn’t it be better if you just assumed that most people have genuinely good intentions?
Wouldn’t it be better
WOULDN’T IT BE BETTER
That depends what better is, and that question presupposes that it’s BETTER
A. for a person who says racist things not to have to confront their own unexamined racism;
B. for POC to carry the extra burden not just of dealing with racism, but of tutoring unwilling audiences about it.
Sooooooo that’s better for racism and racists, intentional or otherwise, yeah, but not for, y’know, anyone or anything else.
Wouldn’t it just be better if people of color didn’t have to EXPERIENCE RACISM INTENTIONAL OR UN- EVERY GODDAMN DAY?
I’m working on reminding myself that if I really MEAN well I have to commit to DOING well, which means acknowledging that good intentions can still come with shitty execution. Acts hurt people regardless of intent.
I DEFINITELY need these reminders, and go through daily life in the grip of terror that I will fuck up in some way. which I do! It’s on me to try and educate myself, and not expect other people to do it when I do mess up. But knowing this is somehow…freeing? in a way? because only I can control whether I get better, and am strongly motivated to address those deficits.
I’ve found that acknowledging that I don’t know everything (as sad as that is) and that I’ve still got stuff to figure out and that I will occasionally fuck something up means that when I fuck up, it means “I’ve still got stuff to figure out” rather than “I’m a dumbass/asshole/monster/racist.” I mean, I would still rather know everything, but since that doesn’t seem to be an option…
I love “stepping on someone’s foot” metaphor. I’m pretty sure I read it on Captain Awkward, originally applied to good intentions/benefit of a doubt around creepiness but it’s great in general when intentions/benefit of the doubt comes up around just about any grossness. If I step on someone’s foot, it hurts even when I didn’t mean to step on their foot. And it still hurts if I had good intentions. I need to 1. Get off their foot. 2. Apologize for stepping on their foot. 3. Take whatever steps necessary not to step on their foot again.
Yes yes yes yes yes
I hoped there’d be a follow-up!
This is another case where I just can’t believe the lengths to which people will go to justify this shit.
I would like to think that the measure of my good intentions is my willingness to listen when someone says ”hey, that thing you just said wasn’t cool because x reason.” If I can’t even bother listening to a polite critique (and most people are diplomatic as hell when pointing out discriminatory statements), the alleged goodness of my intention must be pretty damn shallow.
I’m a grad student (god, four weeks left!) and am on-campus for just 3.5 hours each week. It’s a large state university in a major, major metropolitan area. It’s a diverse undergrad campus that’s had its share of problems around race relations, most recently a moderately well-publicized trial of some students w/r/t abuse of a fellow student that was totally a hate crime.
Last night I went to the restroom, shut the door to the stall, and found actual shit on the door:
“White-identified undergraduates welcome.” Like, I literally have no doubts to benefit anyone involved in this. Is someone at this school trying to cause a rage embolism in my brain before I can graduate? Because it’s working. What the actual bleeping bleepity bleep is “whiteness studies?” My queer, Asian ass cannot deal with this. I need to gain 10000 pounds so that my rage can be appropriately large. I cropped the flyer, but you have to email this girl (who, btw, used her @school.edu address) to find out the location of this meeting. For the research. On “whiteness.” And a $10 gift card. WHAT.
The girl who organized this can have a heart made out of platinum and diamonds in the shape of angels and I DON’T CARE. UGH.
oh wow
that’s…wow
is it for someone’s thesis or something???
Google tells me that the person who put up the flyer is apparently a masters student in social work, which brings up SO MANY other questions for me…
Maybe it’s an experiment. She’s recruiting them for some sort of survey or study. The $10 gift card hints at that direction. Anyway, that’s the most benefit-of-doubt available here.
I’d be tempted to go, just to see what it was (would sit by the door, though, for quick getaway if necessary, because maybe it’s exactly what it looks like).
There’s a woman in a diversity-related position at my uni who wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the “meaning of whiteness” in {field}. I could vom just thinking about the logic that got her the job she currently has.
The entire thing is gross, but the $10 gift card? Why are they bribing white people to show up at their ‘whiteness studies’ ‘focus group’? What is happening? What even is this? Is it a trap?
I would have trouble resisting the urge to email them and find out, but I’d also be afraid I’d just get more mad, and it’s a wash.
My girlfriend might actually try and go, but we’re both concerned about the trap thing. Or it’s a Trump rally? We can’t tell if it’s even on campus.
I’m not going to comment on the study itself, because if literally nothing else, it’s being really weirdly presented. But it’s extremely common to do some sort of small compensation for participating in a study. That’s not where the weirdness comes from.
Yeah, what robot_dinosaur said. I worked on an IRB (institutional review board, all research that involves living people in the US has to go through one of these before the study takes place to make sure the study isn’t exploitative–this is the theory but in reality it’s just risk management and is designed to cover the institution’s ass in case of lawsuits) and it’s almost universal to offer some nominal incentive for people to participate. If this student is recruiting subjects for their study in the restrooms on campus, you can be sure some board somewhere approved the study and the flyer and the $10 gift card. Ugh.
Not necessarily the flyer. I’ve had IRB cert for three different projects and I didn’t have to submit examples of the publicity – only examples of the disclaimer text.
In my mind this is a study to see if people can identify different shades of white paint samples, like what really is the difference between off-white and egg-white? Or, what color is beige? I refuse to believe otherwise.
(Also, typo at the bottom saying “white- identified” instead of identifying is just cringeworthy like does the person posting this get to decide if someone is white enough (?), as if the title/premise weren’t enough)
I think we should give this person the benifit of the doubt.
Snort.
I do remember reading something about “whiteness studies” at universities at some point- it might have been this article:
http://www.umass.edu/wost/articles/postwhiteness….
Wikipedia has an article about it as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_studies
That was my first thought, too.
no
Oh, my god. I hope she’s actually writing her thesis on racism, and this is a trick to get racists to come talk to her about it.
I…doubt this is the case.
You have won the giving this poster the most benefit of the doubt award.
There’s nothing weird about having to email someone to find out where the meeting is, because that allows you to make sure you don’t have too many people for your focus group. And some form of compensation is pretty common for this stuff too. I’m assuming it’s a graduate student running a study. That doesn’t make the rest of it at the absolute very best extremely, extremely weird and poorly presented. But the rest isn’t weird at all.
Sure, sure. But we’re back to benefit of the doubt… *throws up hands*
If it is a research study, your school’s IRB (Institutional Review Board)should have approved it, and you can complain to them . Given my experience with dissertation research, my guess would be your IRB has never seen this project. I hope to all the heavens no IRB would approve this as research.*
*based on this limited information
I’m going to send this along to the school’s IRB, thank you for the information! If this is indeed dissertation research, I can think of 100 other ways to put together a flyer for this without it being so horrifying. :/
I hope you are heard–it’s important!
I received really great feedback from the IRB, so thank you for the suggestion! They were in agreement that the flyer’s language was not centering the research and gave a very “off” impression of the research that was in-process.
Ugh, this brings back a memory: my junior year at a heavily-white New England liberal arts college, there was some fallout (and I honestly can’t remember any details beyond that) over the Black Student Union. Later that year, I took a performative class in which someone in the mostly-if-not-entirely white group had the bright idea that we should pretend to be starting a White Student Union to see what the reaction would be. As this was somewhere around twenty years ago, I did not have the language to express why this was so offensive (I’m white), and I was appalled by how many of the passers-by bought into the idea. To my knowledge, no one ever actually started it, thank goodness.
Hm, I read this as not white-supremacist, but about decentring whiteness and making it visible? As in, getting white people to understand that they are White, and to talk about what white privilege means, not just that they are “people” and that race is a thing that people of colour have. But it’s really badly done if it reads like white-supremacist to you!
I (a white person) also read this about making whiteness visible and a topic of discussion in the same way that the identities of people of colors get treated. Jennifer Harvey, an anti-racist activist, talks a lot about this kind of thing.
The women’s center on my campus holds groups for men to talk about what it means to be a man/masculine in today’s society–could this be along the same lines?
I can certainly see how with Trump and the general shittiness of the world we live in, though, you could react to this flyer as something in the line with pleas for White History Month.
this was my thought, but shouldn’t the flyer make it clear that’s the purpose of the event? it is…a weird flyer.
It’s the “white-identified” that skeeves me. Should a good-faith discussion of white privilege be *only* open to white people?
My thought (as a fellow queer Asian) is that she’s doing some kind of research on racism and racist attitudes in white people, not that this is an actual pro-“white studies” event. It’s just designed to attract people who think that “white studies” is or should be a thing.
I spend a lot of time with very new adults, who are champions at saying or doing staggeringly stupid things with the best of intentions*. It is an interesting and constant reminder that a) when working as an educator, it is a good idea to assume that people have good intentions, b) having good intentions is very different from being a good person, c) I really don’t know what “being a good person” means at all, and d) assuming that someone has good intentions means you also assume that they would want to be held accountable for a disconnect between their intentions and the actual effect of their choices. So you hold them accountable for it.
All of this is to say that good intentions excuse us from precisely nothing, should make us more profoundly accountable for our words and actions, and my job is exhausting most days.
* – They also say or do staggeringly stupid things with terrible intentions, but that requires a different approach.
…assuming that someone has good intentions means you also assume that they would want to be held accountable for a disconnect between their intentions and the actual effect of their choices. So you hold them accountable for it.
This is such a good point. Thanks.
Yes. Very well said. I was thinking something similar but couldn’t articulate it well.
But that’s my experience as an educator too. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is not the same as not holding them accountable for their actions.
So here’s a metaphor for talking to clueless people about how Intent Doesn’t Matter that I’ve been working on – what do you all think?
Let’s say I’m walking down the street, not paying attention (maybe on my phone, whatever) and I run into someone and knock them down, causing them to break their wrist. The fact that I didn’t mean to break their wrist is very important, from both a legal and moral standpoint – it may even make the other person feel better to know that no one was deliberately targeting them, though they would have no obligation to feel that way.
But the fact that I didn’t mean to knock them down doesn’t make their wrist any less broken. They still have to go to the hospital, and they still have to go through the healing process, and they still have to deal with the financial consequences. If my response were to say “how dare you be injured, I didn’t do it on purpose, and anyway, you should have patiently taught me about paying attention to my surroundings instead of immediately acting the victim by asking me to call an ambulance,” I would rightly be labeled an asshole.
I’m a fan of the foot-stepping metaphor, myself. If you accidentally step on someone’s foot, the not-asshole thing to do is to apologize and make an effort to avoid stepping on their foot again! Same if you’re unintentionally racist or whatever. Apologize, make an effort not to do it again.
I hadn’t heard that one until this thread, but I like it too!
Perfectly said my friend.
Yep, I made a very similar post on Captain Awkward a week ago, although the context there was needing to honour the pain caused by someone who was an addict, rather than attempting to brush it off as “he’s an addict, he didn’t mean it.”
Having good intentions means honouring the hurt you have caused, even if it was unintentional. Thinking that your good intentions mean the hurt was incidental is the opposite of having good intentions.
Thanks for posting this, Nikki. People need to remember that “the benefit of the doubt” is exactly that: a benefit. It’s a gift that you are given. It’s not something you just deserve.
Nicole, you so beautifully articulate what I cannot. Amazing piece, sharing the sh*t out of it.
I definitely bookmarked this to send to people for when I just can’t. Thank you for this.
Yes. Yes. To all of this, yes, thank you. This is why I’m mad that I worry I have to be 100% sure that something is racist before I can even bring it up, like with citations and everything, because otherwise some person will not believe me. If POC experience something as racist, guess what? It’s racist! Believe the people who know what it feels like, and please don’t prioritize the racist or not racist categorization of some white person you’ve never met over the POC who is telling you their experience.
Right! And the Decent Human Being response to being told that something you did/said is racist (or sexist or ableist or whatever else it is) is simply “I’m so sorry, I did not realize, I’ll work on not doing/saying that any more.” That’s it. No justifications about why you did/said the thing, or about how your other _fill in the blank_ friend said it was ok, or anything. Apologize and promise to work on it. (And I say work on it because changing ingrained behaviors is HARD. It takes a lot of conscious thought and effort to change a long-standing habit.)
I was just thinking the other night that it should not take bravery to say something is racist. What a fucked-up society, when saying, “Um, that was kind of racist” requires bravery.
thanks for writing this; this is a great piece.
directives like “let’s take a step back and think about where the other person is coming from” are typically issued at marginalized communities that already take on a greater burden of emotional labor to constantly see things from “the other side’s” perspective! there has to be validated space for anger, hurt, processing etc.
Right. Why the fuck aren’t the “well-intentioned” people told to take a step back and consider where the other person is coming from? They’re probably coming from a much rougher place.
“just being honest” oh what, but they don’t want you to be honest with them, presumably. That would be too much honesty.
“saying whatever I want about various people of color without fear of honest rejoinder/smackdown is a deeply important tenet of MY culture, so actually YOU are the racist, madam”
I feel like the I wee where I want sketch (about halfway down the page) is relevant also.
A thousand million hearts.
FUCK YES. This is perfect.
I love this so much. It’s so true. To be honest, I’m the opposite — I’ve never been very chill about this until I started writing for the internet. Partly because I just never had people to listen to me when I got this angry, but now that I do, I don’t care about talking to people who show themselves to be markedly disinterested in what I have to say, but only interested in me having to listen to them.
But like I keep telling everyone, I think this year is the year when a lot of people are putting their foot down in terms of wanting to be heard. Last year it was a lot of tiptoeing steps but this year with Trump and the depressing past couple years, it’s too much not to say anything. I also think that white people — as Chris Rock said in an interview last year — have “gotten nicer.” I really like how white people are defending POC because we need that as it takes a teensy bit of the pressure off us since we have more to lose but ALSO because I don’t remember it being the norm or the default in liberal circles before. It’s by no means perfect but it’s so refreshing and makes me feel less like I have to be cool about everything.
This is a bit disorganized but I just got back on coffee today and I am /feeling. it./
I just got back on coffee today and I am /feeling. it./
omg congratulations SO HAPPY FOR U. coffee is the ONLY thing that makes me feel super great about the world and all that is POSSIBLE. and not even the FIRST cup, but the SECOND cup.
I’ve never considered whether writing things on the internet has made me more chill or less so when it comes to racism. I’m probably about the same as I ever was when actually confronted with it — that is, sometimes I say the right thing and sometimes I’m just unable to make my brain work — only now that I can write about it, I guess it feels like I can always have the last word, in a sense!
*mic drop*
So much. And I mean, the times in which I *do* assign good intentions to someone are when we have a history and this is an anomaly and I know that if I bring it up, they’ll take it well. Not “rando on the street I’ve never met before who decides the best way to get my attention is to scream ‘Ni hao!’ Or, the person who continues to be impervious to any comments no matter what I say or do.” A pinch still hurts. Multiple pinches are just chronic pain.
This. I’ve gotten in quite a few discussions (always with men it seems) about “good intentions”. It will usually come up when I hold them accountable for their actions.
“But what about my good intentions?” they inevitably ask.
“Your intentions mean nothing to me if you can’t express them in the real world.” is my usual reply. “I can’t read your mind and it’s up to you to make sure your actions reflect your intentions.”
I’m harsh and I know I’m harsh, but I’ve run into too many abusive people who masquerade the abuse under “good intentions” to care anymore. *mic drop*
You could have tiny fairies brush critique on with a kiss of their gossamer wings and white people would still freak out that they were being attacked.
Are some of the white people who demand their feelings be treated with supreme gentleness the same who get real indignant whenever anyone says “safe space” because THERE IS NO SAFE SPACE lalalala? No safe space in the smiling world of well-intentioned white people.
These essays have also reminded me again that my ability to challenge racism bluntly/snarkily/aggressively is in many ways a privilege afforded by my own whiteness. (Not that POC don’t challenge racism bluntly! Just that the social costs and risks are so much higher.)
Thanks Abbey for that last paragraph. I don’t think I ever realised that my whiteness is allowing me to get as snarky as I do without (much) backlash.
Thanks Nicole for articulating this so well. I feel similarly when pondering if I should give benefit or give flame to those making stupid comments such as these. I hope to one day write as well as you.
Assuming everybody has good intentions and giving them the benefit of the doubt is mutually exclusive to educating. In the original event, the person who said those incredibly stupid and unabashedly racist things didn’t need the benefit of the doubt or assumptions about her intentions to stop being stupid and racist in the future: she needed to get educated with a strong and angry response, because that should be what happens when you offend people. I’m not blaming you for not giving her one, because things like that can take your breath away when they happen to you, but given you were in a group of people *somebody* should have given her one, either on the spot or later.
Personally, I only try to educate people if I think they have good intentions and give them the benefit of the doubt. If they’re actually racist/sexist/ablist/etc deep down in their core I’m probably not going to change that. I have limited energy and patience and I’d rather spend it on people who I think would want to do better.
I understand, and I was wrong to write mutually exclusive. But education is more than just calmly and patiently explaining to someone you reckon has good intentions about how they’re being offensive and it would be great if they stopped. It’s also about being open about how offended you are and being able to express anger; it’s deciding to value your own self-worth over your desire to not embarass them, because damn, is embarassment educational.
Somebody at that table saying something angry like “It sounds like you’re saying Asian people all look the same. Do you know how that sounds?” or even “why in heaven’s name would you ask such a question?” would have been a healthy expression of anger and support for Nicole, and if it didn’t educate the person who made the comments that they’re racist and ridiculous, it would at least educate her to keep her mouth shut about ethnicity a little better, which is a favour for the world if not her personally.
Racism is certainly the biggest problem in this situation but I also see a problem with how little Americans seem to be allowed to get angry with each other and still carry on having a reasonably good social time with each other. As an outsider that sort of thing looks like everybody there is always getting each other mint juleps, loaning around lawn mowers, and keeping quiet at dinner parties when people say terribly racist things to them, and then suddenly cracking and voting for Donald Trump, or treating people with different politics like it’s still the Civil or Cold War.
I’m white. Just so people know my perspective when I say this:
I do think most people in the world are generally good people who want to be kind to others and who honestly don’t understand when thought and behavior patterns they learned from their families and communities are hurting others, or are just plain contributing to the overall atmosphere of racism and assorted other bullshit that pervades our society. I think people WANT to be good.
But I don’t think that anybody needs to be given the benefit of the doubt. The only way this will become a better society for everybody–one where people stop and think harder about why they believe the things they do, and question their own beliefs–is if people get a bit of a shake-up now and then. Instead of having our good intentions tip-toed around, maybe we need to be confronted by somebody else’s reality, even if that reality is uncomfortable for us. Then we can take our discomfort and use it to educate ourselves and become better members of society.
I think there’s only way for people who “have good intentions” and genuinely want to be good to achieve their desire: to be confronted with reality. Letting things remain status-quo because people have good intentions doesn’t bring about positive changes for anybody: not the people who face discrimination, and not the people who are (perhaps inadvertently) doing the discriminating.
It’s pretty telling what perspective people are coming from when they try to use the “good intentions” argument. Clearly they think of these incidents as just momentary blips in the life of an otherwise innocent white person, rather than something that people of color have to deal with every single day to one degree or another.
Why not just give everyone the benefit of the doubt? Wouldn’t it be better if you just assumed that most people have genuinely good intentions?
Funny, the ones saying Hey, uh, this is racist, and I think people can do better are absolutely giving people the benefit of the doubt. Hell, assuming that a person who just said something shitty and racist doesn’t actually want to be shitty and racist and would listen to a correction seems almost sweetly optimistic.
Another thing about the “you shouldn’t call what they said racist if they didn’t MEAN to be racist” school of thought: if someone DOES mean to be racist, then probably nothing you say is going to make them less racist. (Of course, you should still say something if you want to — maybe it will make you or other POC present feel better, which is a very valuable purpose — but your interlocutor is probably going to remain just as racist.) But if someone said something racist without meaning to be racist, then it’s all the more important for them to be told that what they said was racist. For example, I (despite not being white) did not know until eighth grade that a certain racial slur was considered offensive and inappropriate. Fortunately, it so happened that I never uttered it, but if I had, I really hope someone would have told me that it was racist rather than just letting me proceed through life under the illusion that there was nothing wrong with it.
Apologies for the length of this comment… I hate that there’s a need for articles like this, but I’m grateful to read something that I can really relate to. I live in Australia and work at a private school assisting the sports program and in December I was called a wetback by the head of English Dept (yes, I know). I’m from California, so was able to go see my family for Christmas and then deal with it when I came back. (The school year goes from Jan-Dec, so it was the start of a new year). The most fucked up notion of this debacle was an idea that was brought up by one of the Vice Principals (who was there when she said it, he really had no idea what that word was). He kept pushing that she couldn’t have knew the meaning of the word. Because apparently, there’s another meaning to ‘wetback’. For me to not put in a complaint, because she couldn’t have known. Bullshit. I put in a complaint and apparently she had a massive breakdown when she was sat down with the Principal (I chose not to be there, cause I really couldn’t be neutral). Want to know what the Head of English said in this meltdown? “I have this thing where I say things without thinking of the consequences.” You don’t say? This is what happens when racism goes unchecked. This woman has lived about 50 years, is Head of an English Department and that’s the kind of stuff that ‘slips’ out of her mouth. This article resonates so much. Thank you.
That lady’s an idiot and deserves all the panic/hurt feelings/whatever she got when you reported her. Good for you.
Thank you. I can now openly roll my eyes at her when she walks past me.
Hi…I’m Western Australian and well aware of what that word means. I’m NOT aware of any Australian context that would give it another meaning. Either way, now she does know – how hard is it to apologise? Or preferably, not speak in the first place.
I’ve gotten a mixed response. I’m in Queensland and asked a couple of co-workers and a friend (who’s a lawyer, she helped write the complaint). None of them knew. The principal didn’t even know until she looked up. But once they looked it up, they were horrified. I mostly wrote about this, because this woman probably went her whole life not being checked. Thinking her behavior is acceptable, how she speaks to people. Through this whole process, people still reminded me to think of her and her intentions, as if they were good. It was so messed up. But I totally agree with you and her not speaking, she’s just vile.
I’m so sorry you have to deal with this.
Thanks, the good news is that we are making plans on moving on. It’s also helps to read articles of ideas going on in my head. I’m contemplating on passing this on to the VP who insisted that I not make a complaint before I go.
That reminds me of one of the lines I find most jarring in Connie Willis's (mostly great!) To Say Nothing of the Dog. A minor character mentions he is not allowed to time-travel to the Victorian period due to his race, saying something along the lines of "All of history is a ten [most dangerous rating] for blacks". And, I mean, yes, racism is a thing which has existed for a long time and in loads of cultures, but … you know the not all black people "in history" were slaves, right, Connie Willis? And, indeed, that there is history composed entirely of black people? (I suppose the assuption is that nobody wants to travel back to learn about the Ashanti Empire or similar.)
In many ways, expecting, and getting, the benefit of the doubt in most situations, regardless of one’s actual behavior, is the essence of privilege itself.
And good intentions often serve as a handy cover for the lack of consideration and respect that lie beneath. We have to demand more rigor from ourselves than that. We must judge ourselves not by our intentions but by our results.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, Nikki!