Dear Pania,

I originally posted this as a response to both you and Catherine, it occurred to me that you might not have received a notification about it because it wasn't replying directly to you. I decided to re-post it as a direct comment to you, to make sure you were notified>

Dear Pania and Catherine,

Thanks so much for your careful and thoughtful responses to my comment. I think I have learned something from the common theme that I see in both responses. It was easier to see one important point when expressed in your two different ways, once I had a chance to cool down a bit from my usual defensive first response. Here’s a conclusion I have come to in response to your comments. I hope you find it to be accurate.

As an analytic philosopher, I was trained to always respond to essays with counterexamples. I remember when I first read one of my favorite philosophy books and thinking “this is wonderful! But I’ve got to find something wrong with it, or I won’t be able to write an article about it.“. There are a lot of things wrong with this way of thinking, but you both enabled me to see something about it I hadn’t seen before.

Academia creates a network of shared privilege which assumes an unspoken respect. If you have written an article criticizing another philosopher, that implies that you think their work is worth writing about. in fact, the more your work gets criticized in writing, the more your reputation improves, and the greater your chances are for getting hired as a professor.

That assumption no longer holds, however, in a more open context like medium, where anybody can post whatever pops into their head with minimal effort. And it especially doesn’t hold when you are a privileged person communicating with a marginalized person. In such a context, the marginalized person will probably assume that lack of respect is the default mode,and with good reason.

The privileged person has to make it clear that he has read the marginalized person’s work carefully, and has been influenced by it in some way. Consequently, when I comment on an article written by a marginalized person, I need to spend far more time talking about our areas of agreement then our areas of disagreement. I need to say something about how they have taught me things, and why I will now see the world differently as a result of what they have said. The opening sentence in my comment was meant to do that, but it was nowhere near enough.

I have posted other responses to Marley K., which have expressed my admiration for her eloquence and agreement with many of her points. i’m going to try to do more of that kind of posting in the future. I write about 10 words in response for every thousand of Marley’s that I read, so I think that centers her perspective pretty well. I’ve also been reading some of your medium posts, Catherine, and will comment on them when I feel ready to.

I am not going to give up on critique and counterexamples in my responses to marginalized writers. Surely, Catherine, as a lawyer and law professor, you recognize that there is a place for such discourse in finding the truth. But I do recognize now that I reflexively rely too much on those adversarial techniques, and if I’m going to continue to write about these issues I must have other communication tools in my toolbox. thanks to you both for helping me to see that.