In terms of my very first reply to you, I don’t think I have mentioned this yet because we’ve got so caught up in whether my misunderstanding was reasonable, yes maybe it was a little hostile (or defensive from my point of view). As there had been a lot of discussion in this thread prior to that, where myself and at least one other ethnic minority disser had been defending Kitson and defending the role of intentions in evaluating kitson, then you a white disser comes in and makes an authoritative statement, that they are tired of how this is being discussed, and this is how it should be evaluated, disregarding what people affected by it in this thread were saying.
I have no problem with anyone disagreeing with me about intentions when it comes to racism, especially as my whole argument is about thinking it is difficult to claim a consensus here, but your wording just felt really dismissive.
The whole subthread felt so frustrating as my initial point of why does Iqbal’s view that you seem to support, that intentions aren’t as important, take priority as the way things should evaluated, over people from ethnic minorities that don’t agree with that. So the whole time we were going down the subthread of whether you were saying Kitson was wrong or not I was thinking, ‘why does this matter to the point I was trying to make’. But like you say not every post is well crafted so maybe I shouldn’t have felt your first post was dismissive.
The thing I don’t think people have grasped is my issues isn’t actually about whether my misunderstanding was reasonable or not, I mean my issue obviously is related to that, but my issue was actually about race, and how I think white people should be sensitive to non-white people in threads about racism regardless of who is right or wrong.
I didn’t explain it in those terms early on, but that was why I reacted so badly, I did eventually say I thought it was inappropriate, then in my final post in the first day of this thread I did kind of say as someone who is affected by racism it was the hostility in a thread about racism that got to me. You are not a mind reader so I don’t expect you to know why I was getting so annoyed, I think others could see it, but once I had explained it in those terms I think it should have been the end of it, as it explains why I was so sensitive about the misunderstanding and overreacted to it, but still after I posted that things are being framed in terms of whether the inference was reasonable or not.
To illustrate, imagine it was a thread on misogyny and not racism, and a man came into a thread of mostly men and made an authoritative statement on how a related controversy should be evaluated (in opposition to what a couple of female posters had been saying). Imagine one of the said female posters misunderstood the male poster, genuinely taking several posts to understand where they had gone wrong and the male poster from the offset wouldn’t acknowledge how the misunderstanding was possible, and would argue that the misunderstanding was unreasonable in increasingly strong terms. I am sure people would think that regardless of the reasonableness of the misunderstanding that that would be inappropriate of the male poster and people would expect them to just back off regardless of whether they were right or wrong.
In terms of whether posts from don’t help, I don’t know, clearly some posts are not helpful, but some I really did appreciate the support, problems is we both feel like the injured parties here so posts that feel supportive to me feel like ganging up on you, I don’t know if there is any way of reconciling that in these situations the nature of a forum is people are going to chip in based on what the feel is right.
Anyway I genuinely hope there are no hard feelings, and I am sorry this has happened during a bad time, I am super stressed at the moment too
