I think there's something to the idea that as a culture we've cultivated enough widespread emotional immaturity that our vocabulary for talking about relationships is so impoverished we can't even discuss them. These include relationships between genders and races.

I think there's two main spaces on which we see this: the continuous invocation of "guilt" or "feeling bad" when we're talking about race, gender, and orientation, and the invocation of a "hierarchy of oppression."

People really, really like to talk about how they've been made to "feel bad" or "feel guilt" about their race or gender and how this is an unjust situation. Eg, I should not have to feel guilt about my ancestors having slaves.

The thing is - I actually think the average BLM activist would agree with you. No one wants you to "feel guilt" about what your ancestors did. What they want is for you to *feel responsibility* for the way things are right now as a consequence of what our ancestors did.

But this is where the emotional immaturity comes in. We don't naturally seize at emotionally mature vocabulary like responsibility and ownership when we're talking about injustice. We seize on emotionally immature vocabulary like "bad" and "guilty" to deflect it.

Okay, so, if you enjoyed that bit, here's where things might get a little dicey for you.

The second place I see this is in interest in a "hierarchy of oppression" - ie, I can plausibly locate myself because of my race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc in such a way that I can claim that I am more aggrieved than my interlocutor.

Obviously, all those classes I just mentioned deserve justice and representation. But the hierarchy idea doesn't function to do that. It functions to give oneself a plausible out that, depending on where one finds oneself in the hierarchy, one *never needs to feel ownership.*

So I'll tell you where I see this all the time. If someone says to you "What you just said is sexist," the correct response is not "But I'm Asian." If someone says to you "What you just said was racist," the correct answer is not "But I'm gay."

Okay! You might be! And your status as a gay man or an Asian immigrant deserves justice and protection. But what you said is still sexist or racist.

I have to check myself on this *all the time* because it's really easy to think that as a woman who goes to grad school I'm probably a pretty nice person. But I can't point to being a woman to get out of the feeling of responsibility when I mess up. That would be immature.

If any of this touched a nerve I'm happy to talk about it. But this is something I've noticed in myself (and, I'll be honest, some of you) so I think we should talk about it.