Reply To: [TW: rape] Helping Sea Monkeys with triggers (at karaoke and otherwise), was: JCCC4 Post-Mortem
Here is another illustrative story, which I have typed out and deleted three times.
When I was in high school, I was on newspaper staff. I edited the editorial page and wrote editorials. I was also a Very Good Kid who Got Good Grades and Stayed Out of Trouble. Both of these things were important to me.
One day I turned in my editorial for the next issue of the paper, and the day after that I got sent to the vice principal to discuss it. Because, while I really meant well, and I had no idea, it sounded super racist. (Not racist like “race X is better than race Y” but racist like “‘we’ means ‘white people.'” Today people would say I needed to check my privilege. But “racist” still suits.)
It seriously sucked to be in the principal’s office. I was upset and mortified, and not just because of the aforementioned Good Kid Who Doesn’t Get In Trouble business. My mother raised me to treat everyone fairly and equally and, you know, not be racist.
I listened to what the vice principle said to me. I apologized. I went home and rewrote my editorial with that conversation in mind, and I applied that conversation to my thinking on race from there on out.
If I had instead told my African-American principal that there were many readings of my editorial and most of them weren’t racist, or that there were lots of races besides African-Americans who also encountered racism, or that I wasn’t racist so of course my editorial also wasn’t racist, or that there was this one time that I as a white person experienced racism, he would have been totally justified in telling me that I was coming off as pretty insensitive (and, really, if he had been that mild about it, I would have gotten off FAR more easily than I should have).