Sigh.
So, if the person is taking pains to solely discuss culture, and one audience member wants to see it as 'racism', the conversation is over, eh?
That doesn't work. I keep going to the shortest path. A 3rd audience member needs to discover what's the intent of the conversation, and what component is getting hiccuped, and then find an alternative description that allows the actual discussion to occur. The offended person isn't required to have alternative framing, especially if they're attending the conversation in order to learn something. Their job is to notice the problem. The originator can't use an alternative framing, or else they would have already.
Sometimes it literally is an Type I error. Assuming that it's a Type II error can cause more damage than recognizing the error in the first place.
The problem is generalising. No?
If someone is taking pains to discuss culture, but doesn't want to reconcile what impact culture has vis-à-vis racism, then they're not engaging properly on the topic. You can't silo things to remove the parts of the whole that aren't palettable. It has to be holistic, otherwise yes, people are going to start assuming some form of bad (or at least poor) faith on any given subject.
A conversation being over is decided by the participants, and (imo) should be respected. Even if others are getting worth out of it, if someone wants to disengage, that should still be respected. Nobody should be conscripted into such a duty, right? Of course, if disengaging comes with sniping or similar behaviour, that's problematic, but again that's good faith / bad faith, etc.
Either participant
can reframe. Neither necessarily have to, but I think you're cutting the originator too much slack in this context. Though maybe that's just realistic, as ill-suited as the realism is to any solution.
Or, it's exactly a hypothetical about such, and you literally assumed away part of the hypothetical. "They should apologize" would be "reasonable". Some people are much better at finding offense than others, to the point where there's nothing reasonable the first person can say. Apologies would require two things (unless you're just trying to placate), recognizing a mistake and then having an alternative framing.
Yes, calling someone 'hyper-woke' will ruin a conversation, but it's also essential to recognize the hyper-woke and realize they're also going to ruin a conversation. The best you can do is be more prepared and more clever than the two looming disruptions.
Hah, I think I have the dissonance here. "reasonable" is subjective. That's a lot of the problem in communication to begin with, for sure, to the extent that you literally say "some people are much better at finding offense than others". The difference is you follow it up with "there's nothing reasonable the first person can say". This puts the burden on the first person; the finder of the offense, to accept the reasonable reframing. Why? I mean, they
can, but it's massively contextual. I'm far more likely to accept a reasonable reframing on topic X than I am topic Y. Because I'm human, and different things affect me differently. That's offense in a nutshell. It just so happens I'm more affected by things related to say, child cruelty, than I am eating meat. I can't excuse it. I can certainly explain it, as much of a downer as it may be, but that still doesn't make it
rational.
You can "recognise" you who you want (redundant note: the spelling wasn't the point of the quotes there), but the label itself is what drives conflict. The originator, in-context. I am what you would call "hyper-woke", you see. My politics, my ideals, place me firmly that left-of-centre that I would be characterised as such. The problem is the language is inherently conservative, so by employing it you're fighting a losing battle. What I think you're actually referring to is a specific line of thought, but that isn't "woke", it's rather ironically bipartisan. A refusal to recognise disruption? Possibly is a way to phrase it. But it's also symptomatic of bias (and idiolect) that "hyper-woke" is the phrase you go for. I'm not knocking it exactly, I'm trying to explain it (late at night, when I should be writing some SQL).
The looming disruption is caused by you
thinking of somebody as hyper-woke, which in turn characterises your response, your angle, the way you
perceive the content, before you even type the phrase. It's all tied together. You see such a person as someone to be prepared for. To be more clever than. That's inherently combative, and not conducive to any kind of resolution.
