I don’t care who Ellen makes friends with. Her reasons are her own, although I think her insistence on niceness, and likability, is probably informed by the trauma she experienced when she came out on national television, and got so much hate for it. I don’t like that she feels a need for appeasement, but I understand why she might.

What I take issue with is her insistence, as someone with very little skin in this, because her race and money insulate her from the worst of it, that marginalized people need to “hug it out” with those who “disagree” with their existence. There can be no compromise with people who don’t want you to exist or to be happy.

There’s no meeting them halfway, or agreeing to disagree, and I resent her getting on television and wagging her finger at people who have so much more to lose than she does, and who live much deeper in the trenches of the culture wars.

I am heartily sick (and damn tired) of so many privileged people constantly haranguing marginalized people, in essay, after thinkpiece, after article, to suck it up, grow thicker skins, stop being so sensitive, and just love everybody, especially by those who have a vested interest (since they belong to the oppressor classes) in deflecting our anger away from them.