When online, please confirm your assumptions before you respond from your assumptions, causing hurt
It is no longer socially acceptable to be an adult without this skill
NOTE: This post is not referring to social justice-related conversations online. Sometimes people don’t intend to be racist or sexist but what they say is so widely perceived that way that it will be experienced by people as an injustice, as just one of thousands of interactions like it that they’ve experienced. In my value system, I think the onus is on us to care as much or more about our impact as our intention when we could be risking a racist, sexist, ableist, transphobic, homophobic, fatphobic, ageist impact.
I am not talking about that even a little and don’t want my arguments co-opted to push back on social justice even where there are grey areas. That won’t be an intelligent use of the following arguments.
We don’t earn and deserve abuse or rudeness based on how people interpret us
When in a relationship with a friend, family member, or partner, it can be desirable and valuable to think about how something we say might land emotionally on them. It’s skillful to consider what we know about someone plus any surrounding context, and…
