I don't think there's much more to go through here, because I am always for more information and it would be extremely hypocritical for me to talk about the importance of addressing different (even extreme) perspectives on hot-button issues while not admitting the possibility that there are perspectives I simply have not heard expressed. That being said, I'm sort of surprised that you actually had to look super hard for non-white-man people you agreed with given the amazing resources the internet provides. When I posted that video of Rubin earlier, the link in the side bar was to a skype conversation he had today with Gad Saad - Gad is an evolutionary psychology professor at Concordia who I really enjoy hearing because he makes a lot of sense and has absolutely no time for BS, and they were talking about this stuff among other items. So I'm listening to a Canadian Lebanese immigrant who's also jewish talking to a recently-gay-married guy from Long Island, and quite frankly I couldn't care less about their backgrounds except to the extent that it allowed them to offer interesting examples of things based on their life experiences. I still either agree or disagree with them on the merits (they got into Israel / Palestine at a pretty thousand foot level with unfortunate results).
Anyway, I care about the message, not the messenger, but it certainly makes sense that seeking out different sorts of messengers will expose one to a broader variety of messages. I'm on board there. I just want to stress that there's no area in which background should somehow render a particular message more "right", or more worthy of some inherent respect or somehow insulate that message from scrutiny and criticism where appropriate.
Which is where I get to your second point. If someone is aggrieved, they are either aggrieved for good reason, or not. Some people actually are being oversensitive - the notion that there is any significant energy spent on the overuse of the male pronoun in academic writing is like something out of Swift, and stories like this are just Bizarro World:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/22/uc...en-menstruate/
But leaving that aside, no one can tell someone to be offended or not; that's a subjective reaction. What I can do is determine whether I think a particular grievance should give rise to some redress. That has to be determined objectively. I do not need to have been subjected to similar indignity to make that judgment; arguably that actually would place me in a position of bias, which is why for example if my brother is murdered, I'm not sitting on the jury. And by that token, I just want to call attention to this:
Quote:
e) They legitimately and sincerely apologize
Now if e) was the most common, there's probably not a huge issue,
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Part of the problem in a lot of these cases is that some people seem to feel that if they were subjectively offended, they are
entitled to an apology. As if the fact that they were offended is the end of the story and that offense in itself convicts whoever they're upset with of wrongdoing worthy of penance. Instead of actually discussing the issue and hopefully getting to a place where the other person can really see where they've gone wrong here, the reaction is instead to become indignant and demand and apology. I think this is in many cases why we get the "non-apology apology" of "I'm sorry if you were offended", because it immediately becomes a witch hunt of accusations of some form of insensitivity. People still offer that simply because it seems polite and an apology doesn't cost them anything, but they also don't want to admit that they were in the wrong simply by virtue of having been accused. There's often a conversation there, and if the explanation as to "here's why your statement caused me offense" is met with "you're being oversensitive", a following "here's why I'm not being oversensitive" seems apt.
You're possibly going to say it's naive to think we can just talk it out, and you'd probably be right to some extent, but this sort of attitude is just way, way worse. Plus, at least in an ideal world, the measured, rational explanation for why something is wrong and needs to be addressed should attract more support. I recognize that it's not necessarily that way because you sometimes just need to scream to be heard by a media that loves screaming (hence the coverage), but I think, just from where I sit, it harms the message and alienates anyone who one should want to convince.
I could go further on this - the "it wasn't intentional" speech is something that's worth talking about because it should be obvious, or at least it's obvious to me, that intentions are very important to any moral discussion. But this whole thing is fairly exhausting and I'm skiing tomorrow, so...