| No they didn't. There is at work a formal invalidity to that assertion inherent to the nature of human communication and interrelation that your rhetorical technique is trying to exploit; namely that silence can be taken as assent or agreement or interpreted as charitably as the unchallenged claimer desires. Thus is the crux of your undermining your own case or point's validity. It is an invalid form of argumentation. It has been an invalid form of argumentation since antiquity. You aren't being clever, or utilizing a clever hack to prove your point and look at all the little whiteys getting upset. You're simply doing logic wrong. Everyone here knows it, and most are probably too embarrassed to point it out. Consider this your Emperor's New Clothes moment. You cannot say "X exists, and if you challenge me, it only proves X exists". That is circular reasoning by definition. X, therefore X. Before you go around attributing to others the quality of "white fragility" which you define in reference to itself as "white fragility is the phenomena by which whites must argue that white fragility doesn't exist", then you should not be surprised when anyone with any sort of background in formal logic drops by and attempts to get you sorted out. Further: >I'm not here to "exchange ideas." Good! Now that that's clear, I can cease conversation with you with a clear conscience. There is nothing more distressing to me than seeing someone seemingly trying to make what may be a valid point, but running into difficulty due to stumbling due to poor structure of their arguments. I tend to feel obligated to speak up at that point, as trying to disambiguate or deobfuscate hard to communicate things is something I often engage in. If you are not actually interested in a good faith exchange of ideas, then I bid you adieu, and good night. Do work on the arguments. The world is prone to fallacious reasoning enough without people running around doing it wrong knowingly and intentionally. |
I am white and had no problem hearing about the idea of white fragility, even though I fully recognize the closed loop in the idea that disputing a thing proves the thing.
You know what an actually resiliant person does when someone calls them fragile? Any number of things, most frequently nothing at all, but never "that's a linguistic trick and it doesn't prove anything and it's totally unfair! #notallwhites"
I'm surprised you didn't try to cite a great list of examples of white people not being fragile. Good thing too, because I had already fallen off my chair laughing, I'd had had to get back up just to fall off again.
If someone accuses you of shouting, the one thing you cannot do to clear your name of that charge, is to shout that you are not shouting.
And if you're not white and trying to make this argument for some reason, save it. I'm white and my reaction was "yeah pretty much".