Yes, that feeling about having said Pow Wow, and being called out on it in the most gentle and polite manner, must he a very small version of the inciting incident many MAGA types probably went through, or feel they went through.

Abd where you were self aware enough to reel in that indignant feeling of being corrected, they can’t. They didn’t have that, for whatever reason.

It may have been knee jerk, it may have been poor cultural timing, or part of a group looking to exclude them for any reason, it may have been part of their divorce, or maybe they just weren’t politically aware enough to deal and cope with being called out. Or maybe they were just a bit slow. But whatever it is, they’re stuck there and so are gonna try to alter society to what they said, rather than admit they were out of line, or out of date with current standards of propriety.

Interestingly enough Thomas Piketty the Marxist theorist who wrote Capital in the Twenty First century, predicted that as the wealth gap got larger society would return to Victorian era ideas around social classes, the idea of not marrying below your station, and of not fraternizing with commoners or the poor, or bwong uncouth like them.

I don’t know if this might be part of that, but it seems you understand some of the emotional aspects of gow someone slips into the MAGA mindset. The sense of betrayal they must feel.

I appreciate the anecdote, because I think it’s happened to all of us. I had a similar interaction with someone who balked at my usage of the word “homeless” (I live in a city, so it’s come up once or twice), insisting that I should instead call them “unhoused”.

I think the important point in your anecdote is saying “it’s unsettling and angering to be called out for doing/saying something racist when you in fact are not racist”. My stance on this issue is that everyone’s a little bit *-ist. Instead of concluding “people can do and say racist things while not being racist”, I think a more helpful conclusion would be “people do and say racist shit all the time without meaning it because we have a lot of racism built into our brains”.

I agree with you on the othering, however. I dislike when people try and put racists, sexists, etc. in a timeout corner, mostly because it seems to be with the aim of declaring themselves A Good Person rather than actually affecting any social change. I think it’s more helpful to say “hey, look, we’re all born with a lot of baggage from our environments and parents, and we don’t get to choose how our brains are molded”.