Identity fragility

People not being able to handle criticism that in some way connects to something with which they identify.

Identity fragility intersecting with the "Not All" fallacy

Lets take a story in three steps, with the character labels in italic...

Step 1.) Some people are doing categorist things against people who belong to a certain category of people, for example the local managers in a corporation refusing to give a certain employee a raise or promotion simply because this employee happens to be black or white or homosexual or heterosexual or Athist or Christian.

Step 2.) Someone speaks up against the discrimination in step one, this speaker tells about how the acts of the local managers (and of those who behave in the same way) are unfair both against the employee personally and to people of the employees category in general.

Step 3.) Some bystander feels offended by the speaker. This bystander is not employed at the corporation and doesn't know any involved people personally. Hoever, the bystander shares a category with the local managers, and feels that the speaker has somehow offended everyone in the category: THis bystander treats the speaker as if pointing out the unfairness of these local managers and of other people who behave in the same way would somehow mean that ALL managers/whites/blacks/heterosexuals/homosexuals/christians/atheists are mean people like that. So now the discussion is all about how the speaker is the villain and about how the bystander is the real victim here.

Identity fragility intersecting with systemic Gaslighting

Lets take the story above, but replace step three with a new version...

Step 3.) Some bystander hears the story, and suddenly "realizes" that speaker is lying. After all, speaker is talking about people of a certain category of people, a category which are actually the good guys which the bystander personally identifies with. The bystander geels personally accused by the speakers story, and it is indeed true that the bystander did not commit the offence which the speaker spoke of. Therefore the accusation is not true, and therefore the speaker and the employee are either lying or delusional. Having no actual knowledge of what actually happened, the bystander thus procedes to inform everyone of "the real truth", this imaginary or alternative "fact" that the speaker and the employee are either lying or delusional. Having heard and believed the "facts" presented by the bystander, people now starts pestering the employee about how important it is to punlicly admit the truth that the discrimination never happened, that it was only a bad dream which got mistaken for having actually happened.

Misc

The book "White fragility" by Robin DiAngelo has lots of examples of this phenomenon, although she frames it as if the phenomenon would be limited to skin color, specifically to one specific skin color. However, the phenomenon is not at all limited to any specific categorization or category. Egocentrism and defensiveness are universally human traits, not specific to any race or gender or social status position.