renaissance poisson

who says you have to go down the path just because a gate has been opened?

The problem is that the gate is opened every. single. time. and the conversation always heads that way despite the best efforts of all Person As, which is what the entire problem is about - that's what subtle marginalization is, in discourse, in media, in culture: that's exactly what they're complaining about - the ways that dominant people manage to push the conversation even when they're not intending to. (I'm more familiar with this through gender studies than ethnic studies - if you look at the patterns in male and female conversation, and patterns of conversation between people of different status in the workplace, you can see how the higher-status individual tends to guide the conversation.)

In the blogs I've been reading, the discussion *has* been nice - "I understand what you're trying to say, but I'd like to address this instead," and so forth, exactly what you're saying in the second paragraph. The problem the Person As are complaining about is that whenever they say that, person B either removes themselves from the conversation entirely so you're left with just a bunch of A's talking to each other with none of the Bs left to listen, or B complains that A's not listening to what B wants to say, despite the fact that A really wants to discuss the subject *they're* interested in, and it's in A's journal to boot.