This all sounds very wonderful - and I think it's an excellent initiative, but that's not been my experience of you. You opened a conversation with me by calling me an arrogant, entitled, graceless and clueless You've repeatedly come after me with numerous ad-hominem under the assumption that I'm a white guy who enjoys hectoring minority groups. You've continued to do this even when I've presented you plenty of evidence to the contrary in my own writing and informed you that the algorithm may be showing you only one aspect of the total amount of things I write. You regularly frame reasonable objections as 'denigrating behaviour' and it is perpetually framed as oppression when I sincerely don't believe it's any such thing.

As for IZI, as I have said in the past, if you bring the initiative to London then I will happily come along and chat with people. It sounds exactly my sort of thing - because what you're doing is encouraging people to sit down and listen to each other. I get on very well with people and I love listening to personal stories, because I think identity is an individual thing... I think identity is a complex weave of genetics and everything that has happened in a person's life. To prescribe identity into neat boxes like 'Black' and 'White' or even 'American' and 'British' is a great disservice. It's like looking at the complexity of a countryside vista and calling it 'green' and 'outside'. There is nuance to identity and my personal penguin essay makes that point.

The reason I don't like contrite-faux liberals is that I don't think they've done the work. I genuinely don't. I think Amy Cooper is EXACTLY this sort of person. She voted for Obama, she probably put anti-racism stickers up in her window. She's exactly the sort of person who does performative contrition and absolves herself of the higher psychological need to explore why she might indeed be very racist underneath. She hasn't thought about her identity, she hasn't thought about the psychological triggers or her history. She hasn't thought about interpersonal complexity.... because, it's MUCH easier to put a sticker up in the window and forget about it. Write some shit on Twitter and show everyone what a good person you are and you're done. It doesn't work. I have done the work and I've rejected the modern notion of simple identity as a useful direction of travel. I think it's a combined sham which prima facie awards minority groups a place at the table but only at the behest of white folks who remain those creating the structures.

I will question anyone who does subscribe to this reductionist idea of identity. I think it's dangerous. I think it's dangerous on the left and I think it's dangerous on the right. We began our back and forth on YourNativeFriends story - which you insisted was a personal essay about appropriation in which I needed to read between the lines and which I insisted was an attempt to homogenise the world into oppressors (white folks) and oppressed (minority groups). I felt, and do still feel, her words aren't in the spirit of curiosity and sharing that you would have at an IZI table and you gave her a hard pass because it fit an identity world view you agreed with. She assumed a) I was white b) I was an oppressor and c) that I was part of an oppressive group that had stolen her language. When I pointed out that I was British and her native languages were replaced by Spanish and that Brits and Spaniards are (broadly speaking) a different ethnic group, I was met with indifference then called clueless, ahistorical and lacking grace. All for daring to go against the direction of travel because there's an assumption that anyone who objects at this point MUST be trying to denigrate minority groups rather than be someone who has reached a different conclusion based on the evidence provided.

Now, I appreciate I have a snarky tone - I get that - but our interactions viewed through an objective lens will see you give as good as you get. So I will respect your wish not to have IZI attacked, and I will apologise - because I did not intend to be offensive and I genuinely do think it's an excellent scheme and you caught me on a bad day and in full snark mode. For that I am sorry.