Nathan Whiteside
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read

Thank you, I appreciate your taking responsibility for your own wounds and triggers. My apology wasn’t my taking responsibility for you, so much as recognizing that my actions had the inadvertent consequence of triggering pain in another, and taking responsibility for that, in the same way I might apologize for tripping and falling into someone. No bad intention, but still a bad outcome, and in any case I can still stand to watch what I’m doing more carefully. Also, something about the way you stated it helped me to see your pain quite directly, so the apology was a witnessing of that pain. And in fact, seeing that in you helped me to see more clearly the pain that my posts here must have caused others — again, not because I had bad intentions, but because of how unseen and blithely dismissed women and PoC are regularly made to feel by all the dominant groups I occupy.

All of which points to a larger truth, which is that true reconciliation between people and groups cannot happen until the transgressor fully recognizes the pain they’ve caused the other, demonstrates remorse for that pain, and takes steps to keep it from happening again. Not everyone will be forgiving even then, but that’s their right, and it still needs to be done so that the process of healing can really get some traction. Unfortunately, cishet white male America has proven to be completely incapable so far of even considering such a process with the various communities they’ve harmed, let alone successfully pull it off. I am in a true quandary over Trump supporters, because they have closed themselves off so thoroughly to outside groups and sources of information, I can’t see how, even in theory, we could ever begin to reach them.