Livre d'Or

One of my favorite sayings is, "The truth shall set you free, but first it shall piss you off."

I am deeply okay with the fact that the frame of privilege horribly offends people who want to believe falsities about their standing in the world. That kind of latent racism/sexism/anti-semitism/etc is like land mines: I don't know any scalable way of removing them from the landscape, but to set them off.

When people get emotionally invested in things that are factually incorrect, they get upset to have that pointed out to them. That upsetness often initially comes out as anger. There really isn't any way of letting people down that's sufficiently gentle that finding out that the world doesn't work as they always thought isn't going to be a huge shock, and quite ego threatening. It calls into question their very ability to know the world. Consider how angry people get when they find out they've been tricked or conned -- or that they think someone might be playing them. To find out that the game you thought you were winning was rigged in your favor all along, that's finding out you were lied to. Even more scarily, it may have been you lying to yourself. This doesn't go down easy.