[swivelmaster]

I’ve been accused of this in a contentious discussion on Facebook. I had to look it up.

The problem here is that the label is based on the assumed intent of the asker as perceived by the person they’re asking. In my situation, I was asking about a social justice topic that I probably know more about than the average person but not nearly as much as the people I was discussing it with. Unfortunately, said people were in a minority group currently under attack in this country and were tired of people arguing with them in bad faith. In their eyes, my questions were indistinguishable from those they had seen before when being harassed.

It’s a tough situation. I want to understand the issue and I’m happy to listen to someone explain it to me, but those people are consistently so tired of explaining themselves and trying to avoid harassment that it all seems like the same thing.

I don’t really know what the solution is. I don’t really like “Don’t participate in the discussion until you’ve read a thousand pages of history and theory about this subject,” but... I don’t know. I’m increasingly questioning my qualification to even discuss these issues because I simply don’t have the life experience to understand them.