There is so much I appreciate about your response and regret that I can’t see your feedback while typing mine (I’m using the app on my phone).

I’ll try and circle back. There’s a lot of good stuff in here that I want to ask about.

What caught my attention is this: we misunderstand each others’ meanings more than we should. I agree completely. It’s easy to do in person and significantly easier to do on line.

One of the reasons I try and sit with my thoughts are that my first impression of something I find provocative is usually wrong.

Not sometimes wrong. Usually wrong.

With something as layered and fraught with emotions as race-relations, often times the second and third impressions can be wrong too.

That’s important for me to keep in mind. It’s hard enough to engage in this kind of exchange. I needn’t make it harder than necessary to do this crucial work before us.

I’ve revisited this in the clear light of day, as recently so yesterday. I didn’t think, when I wrote this, and I don’t believe now that the speaker meant anything but what she said. In this careful “running with a full glass of water” moment, I was reaching for separating my reception from my perception of her motive. And I think she is genuine.

I’m not sure what a reasonable expectation borne of that should be, though. Certainly, I can’t be angry with her. On the other hand, despite what she meant, her conduct could cost my son his life. Not intentionally, but even friendly fire kills. So in that balancing, I must always temper my conduct according to what most minimizes his risk. Sometimes that means that no matter WHAT she intended, the conduct must change.

It behooves me, on behalf of my son, to remain effective. What “effective” means isn’t always clear. But what IS clear is that what we’re doing isn’t working.

Let’s consider just our engagement here: nothing about the topic had anything to do with a value system, though I see you touch on it presumably for context. The thing is, value system was completely irrelevant to even my initial comment. It didn’t seem to register that teaching my son self protection didn’t intersect with teaching him about values. But I’ve had to go through that door twice to even reach what was in play: my boy’s safety. To my ear, talking about values amidst a race discussion is akin to talking about swimming pool courtesy when I’m showing my son how not to drown.

The SOP for civil exchange isn’t helping him become any safer, so I’m less inclined to indulge it even as a threshold conversational common courtesy.

My point — as long winded as it is — is this: in live or death questiond, I MUST divorce this spirit of the message from the consequences of the conduct, unintentional or otherwise. That’s not a fixture in everyday exchanges for the average mom.

This is a fixture in every day life for a Black mother.

So despite the speaker’s heart and mind, I had to — as a priority — stay her hand. Once done, I could reset to the more conciliatory and traditional norms of effective social engagement.

I’m trying to find a muted way to say it’s hard to appreciate black living from white shoes. Things that are normal to everyone else are effectively warfare for us. It is a daily and constant battle to survive, and that is not an overstatement. And, there is no room for our — Black folks’ — unique perspective in our normal models of American social intercourse.

So we’re going to have to break the normal models and build new ones.

That new one deprioritizes a speaker’s intent and targets consequence. Gentility gets benched where it threatens the clarity of the message. Not entirely, no. But certainly more than we are accustomed to in our normal rule set.

And I believe some of that might be what you are seeing here.