"Steve, if you cannot avoid taking the following personally as being about you, please stop reading here."

Okay, we're going to sort this out now. Because I find this almost unbelievably rude and condescending. I'm not sure why it's happened, I think there was one conversation in particular when we really couldn't stop misinterpreting/talking past each other, and it seems to have coloured our interactions ever since, but this is as far down the slope as we're going to go.

Let me say right up front that I'm not claiming I'm blameless here, more on that at the end, but there are a couple of things I want to make very clear.

A) You are a guest here. A very welcome and valued guest. But a guest. I don't expect or want deference. I welcome thoughtful pushback. I do as little policing of people's expression as possible, but I do expect a very basic degree of respect. If you think you're about to write something I don't want you to write here, don't write it, or at least think carefully about how best to write it. It's not your place to tell me to stop reading and just write it anyway.

I'm not a child, I have difficult conversations for a living and generally navigate them just fine. I'm quite good at judging intent. But if you're aware, as you obviously are, that the way you phrase things leads to potential misunderstandings or offence, stop phrasing them that way. Unless you're physicaly unable to stop your fingers from moving, every word you type is a choice.

B) As for your frustration that some people "push your points into justification for disadvantages," please seriously consider the possibility that you may have some responsibility for their reaction. Or, in fact, that your biases might be, in part, creating the "racial competition" they're responding to. Your arguments are pretty much unfailingly biased towards questioning the influence or significance of racism.

A commenter mentions, as an aside, that they believe the African slave trade may have been the most brutal form of slavery, and it's a multi-day debate simply because I believe, with no real conviction, that it's possible that that's true.

People like Charles Murray and Nicholas Wade speak in obviously race essentialist terms, and we're quibbling about the exact wording of a sentence as if we can't understand context.

I state the well known fact that affirmative action has benefitted white women more than any other demographic (https://time.com/4884132/affirmative-action-civil-rights-white-women/), and you ask me, as you do irritatingly often, if I'm just blindly repeating what I've heard somebody else say instead of confirming it for myself (you understand that I have thousands of people critiquing what I say on a regular basis, right? I'm not in the habit of saying things I haven't verified).

And in each of these cases, I'm pretty sure (and in some cases have seen evidence), that you wouldn't have the same quibbles in the reverse case. If somebody claimed that the Atlantic Slave trade *wasn't* the most brutal form of slavery, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't feel the need to debate their assertion for days on end or at all.

If somebody said that the accusations of racial bias levelled at Chales Murray were baseless, I'm not convinced you'd offer any pushback at all, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be the same degree (this despite the critiques of many good-faith, well educated, people who have read his work carefully and work in his field).

If somebody said affirmative action benefitted black people more than any other demographic, even though there are no studies that support this, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have asked for one.

To be clear, other than it being a bit exhausting at times, I don't particularly mind this. As a writer, it's valuable to have people keeping me on my toes. I don't want you not to ask me for verifcation of my claims if they're new to you (although a quick Google search of your own might be in order first). And as my bias is more towards the idea that racism is still a meaningful problem in many ways, it's good to have pushback. I'd be disappointed (and bored) if everybody here thought the same way I do.

But instead of telling people not to react to the things you write, maybe consider modifying the way you write. Consider that biases often come across even if you don't intend them to and even if you aren't aware of them. I'm not saying this to suggest I'm perfect in this regard, I'm certainly not. But if you're repeatedly getting this feedback from people's reactions, it's probably going to get you further to look within than to criticise what keeps happening from without.

As I said up top, I'm not pretending I'm blameless with regards to the friction and misunderstandings we're finding in our interactions. I've definitely allowed past irritation to influence later conversations, and I apologise. I'm going to do my very best to reset. It will be enormously helpful for me to do that if you stop caveating about emotionality or telling me what you're "not accusing me of but..." But regardless, I'll make a conscious effort to err on the side of assuming the best of intentions and to be polite and generous in my future responses.