I want to take a moment to thank particularly the Black and Brown folks on here who have talked about and explained how to learn from them (ie. "read, don't challenge") - it has really helped me conceptualize the idea that sometimes, there are discussions that you just shouldn't be having, and often it is because it's not your place to be having them as it is not your lived experience. No matter how well you think you understand the situation.
While it's a concept that I've sort of intuitively understood for a while, I never quite understood it in a form that I could apply to situations outside of my own. This has helped with that a lot, by making it a more concrete principle.
Now I only wish that other people understood this concept too. It ends up being applicable in so many cases.
transphobic/racist rhetoric, sexual assault mention
A follow-up explaining what I mean, since someone asked me for clarification:
A frequent example is tone policing of marginalized folks; the discussion of "should this marginalized group [of which I am not a part] be allowed to speak loudly, accuse, or generalize - do their circumstances justify it?"
There's other cases too, like arguing "actually police aren't racist, it's just because of higher crime numbers" or the infamous trans bathroom 'debate'. Another example of a slightly different kind would be "but can you *prove* that that happened?" to people who got sexually assaulted.
Basically anything where people cannot accept that maybe marginalized folks know what they're doing, and that they might be right even if you don't immediately see how.
That's probably the easiest way to identify the problem - people refusing to just (provisionally) believe that marginalized folks are speaking the truth, and instead approaching it from an angle of "I cannot accept it to be true unless I can reason towards it from my own understanding".
Those are the sort of discussions that one just *shouldn't* have; instead one should be listening to marginalized folks, provisionally accept that they are speaking the truth, and gradually do the work *themselves* of untangling the reasons behind it.
