#but using weird social justice gotchas like 'the non prefix for identity is a Black thing because of this one academic who coined it'

[whetstonefires]

there are contexts where people are lashing out because Group Hurt Them and you need to point out that that's not appropriate and these are not the right people to punish, if indeed punishment is a relevant response.

(for a relatively uncontroversial case, take the Angry Ex-Christian Atheists Trashing All Religion discourse that's been on my dash a lot lately. jewish people saying 'you need to stop being aggressive toward religious minorities because of your issues with christianity' is not a 'not all X' argument in the invalid sense even when they need to repeat several times that not every religion is, in fact, identical to Christianity.)

the 'not all X' argument is tarnished not because it's never important or relevant that there's nuance within groups that are being Described As Bad by someone who isn't strictly speaking falsehood, but because it's a concept so frequently weaponized to invalidate people's grief and anger, and recenter whoever they're angry at, usually a group with hegemonic status that wants to take refuge from collective responsibility in individualism.

when that's not the context, that's also not the problem. sometimes it can be genuinely hard to decide whether that's the context because anything this complex is rife with edge cases, but.

the thing is there's actually a whole lateral violence treadmill where traumatized people seek to define easy targets as representatives of Powerful Bad Group so they can lash out safely and get an easy win for personal catharsis. (this is. historically a huge part of antisemitism.)

they don't even have to outright misuse labeling like in the Religions example above: a disabled white man being abused by his female social worker (example from life) isn't actually not a white man just because he's institutionally vulnerable in a different way. but it's sure disingenuous to argue on the basis of that access to hegemony that he's too powerful for the abuse to be real or bad.

(this corrupted interpretation of feminism getting leveraged this way is a lot of the ideological basis of the TERF movement, and it's important to realize that the TERF logic isn't just wrong as a matter of definitions, in refusing to recognize trans genders as real, but in its underlying belief system about how it's okay to treat people on the basis of category policing.)

the guy in the original post is either very dumb or arguing in bad faith, but the overcorrection against Not All X that allows people to abuse identity politics to hurt people for personal or political reasons is something we all need to learn to watch out for.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but telling a white supremacist “you don’t speak for me and are not in fact normal” is a very fair and good thing to do. It’s not at all the same as making a “not all white people” comment like the last guy thinks, and it’s especially cringeworthy that he’s another, different white guy himself. It’s like trying too hard to flex allyship. Don’t be a pedant to people who are shutting down a racist’s argument.