I’m going to keep repeating this until people wise up.
Once again, there have been many posts and comments (seriously, like dozens) in FB groups, and on friends’ walls—all from moderate-to-liberal folk—asking for their own to be more civil, understand the other side, and/or some other bullshit that implies misbehavior that should be corrected.
Made-up Examples: “Maybe if we considered that the people we disagree with are human beings, we can find some common ground.”
“If we respond to their hatred with hatred, we are no better than them.”
It SOUNDS nice, right? But when you’re talking to anyone but a straight cis white male, it’s not. It’s ignorant and offensive, and it needs to stop. Either that, of the people who post this kind of thing need to preface it with “Dear straight cis white males…”
Here is why these sentiments are offensive:
- The people who are targets of conservative hatred have been civil toward conservatives for generations. We have bent over backwards to be civil in the face of their hatred. We protest, use our words, and occasionally resort to aggression in response to hundreds of years of oppression and violence. Understand who is the civil group there? Many of us are done being civil. We’ve turned so many cheeks, we got no cheeks left to turn.
- The people who say these kind of things are lacking in empathy, yet they criticize others for lacking empathy. We DO have empathy toward conservatives—we feel their fear. It’s just that we have learned that responding politely only provokes their hate. If you work on your empathy toward conservatives’ targets, you’d see that we are actually being unreasonably accommodating of their hatred.
- It is offensive to be told by people of privilege how people without that privilege should behave toward other people of privilege.
So please just stop that shit. We know that you think that you’re working to make things better, but the hard reality is that these kinds of statements make things worse.
