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]

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.