Feeling Offended, Speaking Up, Getting Curious, Shrugging Off

When We Hear Something That Upsets Us

I belong to a Facebook group for people who love language—writers, editors, teachers, translators, and linguists. Recently, an older lady wrote a post to say that she has used a certain phrase for her whole life, and that everyone she knows thinks that that phrase is totally normal. But now she is worried that it might be offensive. A zealous member of the group, a young man, repeatedly castigated her and anyone who made supportive comments: “Imagine writing this justification instead of adjusting your language so as not to offend people,” “You don’t get to decide what causes harm in another person,” and “Keep reminding yourself that you are HURTING people” (emphasis in original). Readers, are you curious about this offensive phrase that is hurting people? I’m going to tell you what it is. Are you ready?

you guys

OK, yes, I’m being flippant and a bit unsympathetic here.¹ Even though I, like most Americans, grew up saying “you guys,” I suppose it is possible for a person to feel a bit put off by the phrase. But harmed? Hurt? Really? What’s left for words that are actually hateful and vicious, if we’ve ginned up so much outrage over “you guys”?

Disclaimers and a Brief Digression into the Categorical Imperative

In what follows, I am not talking about those words and ideas that are so hateful, so heinous, and so harmful that they are rightfully no longer acceptable in public. I also want to emphasize that we should always strive to consider other people’s feelings. For example, my dad, perhaps because of his thirty-plus years as a middle-school principal, despises curse words. Most of us don’t find curse words offensive, but my dad does, and because we love him and don’t want to make him uncomfortable, we never swear around him, and we warn him when we’re about to watch Ted Lasso so he can go somewhere else and not have to listen to the blue rantings of Roy Kent.

To spare my dad’s feelings, I won’t include any quotes, but we all know what Roy Kent is thinking here.

So, the Categorical Imperative. The Categorical Imperative is that rare Kantian concept that is easy to grasp: We shouldn’t impose a rule unless it can be universally applied. We all understand this intuitively, because it’s what we grew up hearing from our parents. Say you want to take home a pretty rock that you just saw in a public garden. Maybe no one will notice if you just put it in your pocket? But then your mom says, “Honey, please put the rock back. What if every child took a rock away? That would destroy the garden.”² Or, to take a more current example, say everyone in your country is on lockdown and is not allowed to visit loved ones or be at the bedsides of dying relatives. But you are a super-important politician, and you and your staffers want to party! So you have drunken bashes every week, the press has published photos, and now your entire country is mad at you. And rightly so! It isn’t fair to have one rule for some people and different rules for others.

What does all this have to do with how we should react when we feel offended? One typical response when someone says they’re offended, in the words of the young fellow from the Facebook group, is this: “If someone is telling you something is causing them harm, you should respect that.” And not a single one of us actually believes this is true. Why? Because of the Categorical Imperative. Sure, we want other people to respect us (or people on our side) when we say we’re offended. Sure, we want other people to adapt to us and to stop saying or writing the words we don’t like. But when someone on the other side says they’re harmed, we don’t unquestioningly accept that their complaint is legitimate—quite the contrary—nor do we believe we should reflexively change our speech in response to their complaints.

Don’t believe me? I’ll remind you of two recent stories in the news in which people have felt offended and harmed by books. Should we “respect” that? Should we honor their feelings and censor those books? A town in Tennessee removed Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum because the school board was offended by the word “damn” and by pictures of a naked cartoon mouse (which, it should go without saying, was not there for salacious purposes).³ A Texas school district recently banned New Kid, a sweet and totally apolitical YA graphic novel, from its libraries, and they also cancelled the planned visit of the book’s author, Jerry Craft, for no apparent other reason than that the book’s main character is Black. Patriotic Americans who support the First Amendment did not respect the Texas officials’ offended feelings and defer to them. No. They spoke up, and as a result the district eventually returned the books to the libraries and reinstated Craft’s visit.

I recommend three different approaches for when we hear something that offends us. The particular approach we choose depends on the situation and on the person we’re speaking with, but all three approaches avoid scolding and shaming, and all three help make the world a better place and improve our own emotional health to boot.

Speaking Up

Speaking up when you have been offended can be the most effective way to help people learn and maybe even change their minds and actions. I feel so strongly about this idea that I’m going to illustrate it by sharing a personal story in which I was the bad guy. I run a book club for parents at the international school in our city. At a PTC meeting for new families last year, I wanted to encourage people to join the club, so I mentioned that that month’s book, Normal People, by Sally Rooney, was a quick and easy read. I told the parents that “I read it in a single day because I found it so compelling.” One of the women in the club, whom I’ll call Lise, sent me a private message to politely remind me that most of the parents at the school, while able to converse in English, are not native speakers, and that books that are easy for me might be difficult for them. She told me, again tactfully, that my thoughtless comment had made her feel bad about herself, because she had found the book rather difficult, and it had taken her a lot longer than a single day to read it. We talked, I apologized and promised to do better, and she accepted my apology unconditionally. She never once brought the matter up again, neither in public nor in private.

Lise’s strategy worked: I changed how I talk about the books, and I strive to be less braggy in my announcements at meetings. What made Lise’s way of speaking up so effective?

1. She messaged me privately. She didn’t shame me in front of other people or gossip about me behind my back.

2. She assumed my good intentions. She began her message by saying that she knew that I just wanted to make the book sound less intimidating.

3. She was eager to talk with, not at, me.

4. She framed her comments not as an attack on my failings but rather as an effort to help me better achieve my goal.

Notice that everything Lise did is the opposite of how internet callouts usually happen. Most obviously, callouts are public and expose their targets to sometimes devastating public shaming. Next, most people calling someone out online will say that intentions don’t matter, or they will impute secret evil intentions to the person they’re calling out. But intentions do matter, and we all know it.⁴ In fact no one responds well to being told that they’re evil, especially when they know their intentions are good. Have you ever seen someone in an online dispute suddenly say, like Job, “Wherefore I repent and abhor myself,” and change their wicked ways? I didn’t think so. If we’re attacked, we become defensive and stop listening to criticisms that might have been useful. And if we are the attacker, we may get a dopamine hit, but we will only make the situation worse, especially if the person being addressed is a stranger with no reason to give any credence to the accusations.

I do recognize that it is not fair that the burden of speaking up falls on people who have been excluded or offended. A common complaint you will see online is “It’s not my job to educate you!” And it’s true; it isn’t. My question is, to quote Hillel, “If not us, who?” Would we rather wait for someone we disagree with to have a spontaneous, miraculous epiphany and realize that we were right all along? (Hint: this doesn’t happen very often.) Should we escalate a situation to anger and divisiveness because it feels so good to yell at people who are wrong on the internet? Or would we prefer instead to make a positive change in the world? I’m thinking here of Daryl Davis, the Black musician who, through conversations and friendship, has persuaded more than two hundred KKK members to give up their robes. While most of us aren’t capable of his patience, generosity, and courage, we can at least take him as our role model for future conflicts. After all, Davis has converted orders of magnitude more people away from lives of hatred than online scolding ever did. We ought to at least give his method a try.

Getting Curious

As an American who has lived in Europe for almost eight years, I regularly hear opinions about us that I find offensive. Here are a few: Americans are loud. Americans smile too much, which shows they are insincere. Americans like to push other countries around and intrude into situations where they’re not wanted. When I first moved overseas, these opinions upset me, but instead of lashing out, I decided to get curious and reflect a bit. And if I’m honest with myself, Americans are kind of loud and we do smile more than people from other cultures. In fact, I love our brashness and friendly nature. (There’s some evidence that countries whose citizens smile more—the US, Australia, and Canada, for example—do so because these countries are more diverse, and a friendly smile is a natural way to build connections among people from varied backgrounds.)

As for that last opinion, that the US throws its weight around too much, well, it might be a useful lesson for us to hear that our military interventions overseas aren’t always appreciated. As a result of getting curious rather than reflexively trying to shut people up when they’ve offended me, I have a deeper understanding of myself and my country and have gained some insight into how people in other countries think.

To return to the US: What if those Tennessee school board members, instead of immediately trying to eliminate speech that offended them, had gotten curious about why they reacted to Maus as they did? Were they actually upset by the swearing? If they had ever set foot in an American middle school, they would know that American kids hear much worse than “damn” hundreds of times a day. (My dad could confirm this.) What if instead of treating their offended feelings as a legitimate reaction that ought to lead to censorship, they had thought more deeply about how we should teach the Holocaust? Perhaps they might have realized that they felt upset not because of some curse words here and there, but rather because the Holocaust is an unmitigated horror, one with vanishingly few opportunities for hope. Perhaps they hated to imagine how young teenagers would respond. Perhaps they might have suggested teaching a different book to the eighth graders and moving Maus to tenth or eleventh grade, when kids are a bit more mature, rather than eliminating it from the curriculum. In cases like these, an attitude of curiosity will lead to deeper thinking and to better solutions than merely suppressing the upsetting content.

Shrugging Off

I’m going to embarrass myself again and share a story where I blurted out something offensive. This time, my victim did me the favor of shrugging off my comment. When I was in college and grad school, I took care of a boy after school. The family invited me to the boy’s bar mitzvah, and a week before the party, the mom, whom I’ll call Betsy, came home from her shopping expedition very excited about the dress she had bought for the party. “Uh huh, very nice,” I said, privately thinking that the dress looked awful. Fast forward to the party. When I arrived, Betsy greeted me, and without even stopping to think, I said, “That dress looks so much better when you’re wearing it!” Yikes, right? Now, Betsy could have seethed and stewed about how I had insulted her. She could have let her hurt feelings ruin her enjoyment of her son’s bar mitzvah, to say nothing of our friendship. She could have gossiped to other people about how rude and vulgar I was. Instead, she chose to shrug off my thoughtless comment and pretend it didn’t happen. As a wise woman once said,

Here’s another case where shrugging off would have made sense: In 2013, before she became the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James tried to make “fetch” happen⁵: she notified the Brian Lehrer Show during a segment on mixed-race families that it was offensive to refer to people as “mixed race,” and that the new, politically correct, term was “blended.” (This occurs here at about the 5:00 mark.) As you are likely aware, “blended” never caught on; people say “mixed race” all the time these days with no apparent ill consequences. Which is no surprise: Not only is “blended” just a synonym for “mixed” (so why is one term permitted and the other verboten?), but it’s also confusing, because we already use “blended” to refer to families with step-parents and -siblings. In situations like this, rather than declaring a commonly-used term offensive and trying to impose new vocabulary by fiat, we could just shrug and say, “Huh. Most people seem to have no problem with this term. Maybe it’s just me?”

Sometimes shrugging off is the best approach for our own mental health, even when a person has said something hateful. When I lived in Prague, I heard a lot of anti-immigrant statements, including, once, from a man who wrote a letter to the editor to complain that Czech people were being “crowded out” of concert halls by “foreigners in sweaters,” whom he thought should be forbidden to attend concerts. I could have dashed off an angry letter of my own, ruminated over my hurt feelings, and complained to everyone I knew about this man, but—apart from the opportunity to practice my Czech in the letter—this would have been an empty exercise. It’s not like I, a foreigner in a sweater myself, would have persuaded him. It is much more fun to laugh at him, say to myself, “Oh well—there will always be people with ridiculous opinions!” and blithely continue to wear my sweaters to concerts.

To recap, when we decide to respond to upsetting language not with anger and censorship but instead with one of these approaches, we all benefit: We might actually change people’s minds or at least give them something to think about, we learn about ourselves and the world, and we protect our emotional health. Speaking up, getting curious, and shrugging off can be a challenge, but the results are worth it.

How about you, readers? Have you found an effective approach for what to do when you hear words or ideas that upset you? Do you have any good stories? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Please enjoy these fascinating facts, which help put our lives in perspective. The world is wide, and history is long.

There is more time between Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex than there is between Tyrannosaurus Rex and us.

There is more time between the building of the Great Pyramids at Giza and Cleopatra than there is between Cleopatra and us.

Woolly Mammoths still roamed the earth when the Great Pyramids were being built.

There is more time between the historical Macbeth and Shakespeare than there is between Shakespeare and us.

Eugene Aldrin watched the Wright brothers’ first flight, and then went on to watch his son, Buzz Aldrin, walk on the moon.

And finally:

1. You just have to laugh. The conversation devolved from there. Someone suggested we could say “folks” instead of “you guys,” and then someone else said that “folks” is racist.

2. In my defense, the rock was really pretty!

3. I’m again reminded of the school board in the town where I grew up. When I was in high school, we put on a musical that included a song, “The Unreconstructed Rebel,” which was a sympathetic portrayal of a Confederate traitor—cough, cough—soldier. The school board objected to the song not because of the pro-Confederacy content but because the word “damn” appeared in the lyrics. Our director rewrote the song to remove the ostensibly offensive word and the actually offensive content.

4. For instance, none of us thinks that we should punish a driver who causes a crash because they suddenly and for the first time in their life had an epileptic seizure, but most of us think we should punish a drunk driver who causes a crash. One crash was an unintentional accident, and the other was the result of a reckless disregard for other people’s safety.

5. Readers unfamiliar with the movie Mean Girls can learn about this expression here.