Public service announcement

[tim]

Dear world:

Please stop using the phrase "I'm sorry if I offended you."

If I'm calling you on your bullshit, your error wasn't to hurt my feelings. If I were actually hurt, I probably wouldn't have the energy to confront you about it, unless you were someone I knew well.

Rather, your error was to say something that made you look like an ignorant clown.

So why are you apologizing to me for that?

Love,
tim

---

Another way of saying it (in re discussion in comments here) is that there is something to learn from any criticism. If "Alice" thinks something you said makes you seem like an ignorant clown, then there's probably something in either what you said, or how you said it, or both, that's worth examining. Unless, that is, you have no respect for "Alice" whatsoever. If "I'm sorry if I offended you" connotes "I have no respect for you whatsoever", is it really a polite thing to say?

Comments

[tim]

But, but, I've had the privilege of never having had to experience an emotion about anything in my entire life, and doesn't that confer on me the privilege of suggesting that having emotions makes one less rational and morally virtuous? MOMMYYYYYY

[juli]

"Motherfuck a window, Radio Raheem is dead."

[tim]

I should watch that.

[juli]

I found it useful since I've been exposed to a lot of bullshit arguments about it since I last watched it, and in attempting to deconstruct my reactions to those, I came away from it with what I found a much more valuable message than the one that the culture I was immersed in when it was a relevant and talked-about film (which, even in its negation, was wrong.)

Also, it's really remarkable how much DTRT feels like a play rather than a film. I'm not sure if I can convey that well, but something about the limited, relatively static environments and some of the acting style really reminds me of a very good play in a way that makes it a really enjoyable to watch in a sort of literary/intellectual way, instead of watching for enjoyment. (Though certainly some of the comic tropes are enjoyable and remind me of people who don't seem to have counterparts on the west coast, and watching how some of them fit into Lee's narrative made me examine some of my experiences with inner-city black culture as a teenager which were incomplete and which I could not make sense of at the time. [Likewise for watching The Wire a few months back, I suppose.])

[tim]

It's really funny how much cultural bullshit we all swallow and probably never know about until someone calls us on it. I remember all the furor over GANGSTA RAP when I was a teenager. I more or less believed what I read in the papers and it never occurred to me that, say, singing about the lives of outlaws could be valid social commentary and not some sort of "go out and kill!" dog-whistle. And nothing *ever* really forced me to challenge that residual belief until the past couple years.

Which, going back to the original point, is why people calling you on your shit is valuable and ought not to be dismissed as merely a matter of having triggered some sort of free-floating distress of theirs (how'd that happen?)

[juli]

A little further from the original point: how insulting and brainwashed is it that people implied that black audiences would watch DTRT and riot? Because, you know, black people (1) can't tell fiction from reality (2) are prone to rioting / are easily-incited (3) have only fictional things worth rioting about (4) or perhaps just ape (get it!) whatever they see in TV/movies unthinkingly. Fuck, man. That's some deep bullshit. I guess you can turn it around and say more charitably that white people just can't handle the idea that black people might have comparable real troubles, and wish that they were irrational and vain and whatever because that would make them feel less bad? Maybe? I guess? Kind of?

Indeed, dismissing anything as mere (mere!) outrage or offense or ... frames the discussion so far away from the actions of the original person and to the response of the person with the (perhaps valid, but its validity is irrelevant) complaint. "It's not me, it's you!" Fuck.