[Julie Steiner]

I should clarify that I wasn't justifying extreme tactics. Just commenting on factors that encourage the phenomenon.

While my daughter and I were living in Westwood, waiting for the donor heart that she desperately needed, we had to cross picket lines in front of UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center on a regular basis. Certain classifications of hospital workers were protesting staffing levels that they felt led to employee burnout and inadequate service to patients.

Generally I try to respect picket lines, but duh, my kid was dying. No matter how sympathetic we were to their cause, we really did not have the option of NOT crossing their picket lines (other than when we entered through the emergency department, which was not being picketed; but even scheduled hospital appointments are rarely optional for anyone).

I did feel that nurses' assistants, on whom much of my daughter's care depended during her frequent hospitalizations, were being shamefully overworked and underpaid.

Eventually, a small group of hospital workers got frustrated with the apparent lack of impact that their picket line was having, and they decided to do something more dramatic to get media coverage. They blocked a major local intersection (Wilshire and Westwood) during rush hour, and 25 of them were arrested, which they apparently regarded as martyrdom for their cause.

They did definitely achieve their goal of more visibility. The fact that the optics of their very visible act absolutely sucked, because they were penalizing thousands of innocent bystanders (some of them trapped in ambulances en route to the hospital) for the policies of the hospital administrators, didn't seem to have been a consideration.

As I mentioned before, I'd been sympathetic to their cause up until then; at that point, I began to resent the protesters--even the ones who hadn't gone off-script by blocking the intersection--and also to resent the fact that their strike was exacerbating the very situation (inadequate staffing levels that were causing the quality of patient care to suffer) that they were supposedly protesting.

For similar reasons, there are far more effective ways to explain to well-meaning people why their statements are culturally insensitive, other than publicly tar-and-feathering them as an example to others. But there are so many clueless people, and so little time, and it can be so exhausting to persuade them, one by one, of the fact that harm can be done even when no harm is intended, that I can understand why it's tempting to resort to the more visible approach of merciless public shaming and bullying--the individual effects of which are often disproportionate to the (real or perceived) infraction, and the wider optics of which are definitely counterproductive. I don't condone these tactics, but I do understand the frustration that motivates some people who employ them.

On the other hand, the flip side of unfairly tarring everyone with the same brush of racism is unfairly dismissing every claim of cultural insensitivity as mere "political correctness" and overreaction on the part of "the left," which is also not an ideal situation. I get the impression that the latter is Quillette's standard position. Which is why I take what I read there, however well-written and evidence-based and reasonable-seeming a particular article might be, with a large grain of salt. It was given that particular platform in order to serve a particular agenda.