Holding people accountable, especially if they’re doing the work to undo harm they caused doesn’t mean ruin their life. We’re all capable of causing harm and y’all will eat that cancellation shit up until it’s you.
cannot STAND “you said what you said” mentality where people just don’t give a shit about apologies or INTENT. Intent is everything!!! not everyone can eloquently figure out what they’re trying to say and they might word it wrong. if you get mad at them but then ignore their apologies and subsequent explanation of intent then YOU’RE the asshole. idfc how much it hurt you, they apologized and explained their intent and you can’t just keep choosing what you want to hear so that you can stay mad.
Yes! Intent matters. Impact matters too; if I say something with the best intentions and someone misinterprets it and is harmed by that misinterpretation, I’m absolutely going to apologize for accidentally causing harm BUT -
BUT on the flipside, I have a right to explain myself and clarify. It is not diminishing or dismissing or gaslighting the person who was hurt for me to say:
“Oh, yikes, that’s absolutely not what I meant, here, this is what I meant! I was not trying to cause harm.”
This is not gaslighting. I’m also not honestly responsible for the fact that you misread what I wrote. I am absolutely baffled that some people think it is harmful to talk things out, and here’s the bottom line:
Intentional harm and accidental harm are not the same thing.
People love to talk about false equivalences on here all the time, until it comes to intent vs impact; suddenly everything becomes black and white and ALL intent is meaningless and ALL impacts are the “truth” even when they very clearly are not what the person meant.
Like. In our justice system we literally delineate between different kinds of “killing people”. This is an extreme example, but ride with me for a sec. We have something called “accidental manslaughter”, but we also have “murder in the first degree”, which means you planned it and intended to murder.
Our justice system is aware that not all harm is equivalent, so people online acting like intent is irrelevant are just wildly ignorant on purpose.
Are there exceptions to this? Yeah, of course there are. Just like it’s not black and white that intent never matters, sometimes, people do try to dismiss others by saying “that’s not what I meant” - but it’s usually pretty damn obvious when someone is trying to backpedal from something they knew was offensive, and their behavior is very different from someone who caused unintentional harm.
ALT
ALT
