When you are part of the dominant culture, you are in a system that rewards your default way of living as being termed ‘right’, and you grow up thinking that being ‘wrong’ is bad, and therefore a serious enough offence to either paralyse you, or invoke anger at the name-caller.

When you are a minority or a survivor of an oppressive system, you are used to your identity being termed ‘wrong’, and you work on the assumption that the systems are all broken. You do not trust power to not be used for oppression, opportunity to not be used for selfish advancement, intelligence to not be used against justice, and discernment to not be used to create bigotry.

We are not used to throwing our abusers in jail after three strikes—we negotiate with our abusers being our bosses and television hosts and school teachers and peacekeeping forces and our clergy. When someone tells us we are wrong, we can’t run away or banish them, we learn to live with them, and with ourselves.

Try to put yourself in this mindset when you hear someone saying you were wrong.