Sure, happy to expand. By comfort I mean that you’re not having to relinquish any of your power by having these conversations. In fact, by recording and sharing them, and getting praise in return, you’re enhancing your individual cultural and social capitals. However, you’re also reinforcing the myth that people benefit from being nice to their oppressors. You may not personally stand to lose a ton under Trump/White supremacy, but to imply that others who do should engage in polite discourse when the state is designed to kill them is something else entirely. Even if this isn’t your intention, you’re reinscribing the good/bad victim binary (which, again, won’t impact you directly or deleteriously.

On a personal note, these days I too am highly educated, articulate, and gender conforming. I’m also a formerly homeless drug user who did survival sex work. I have the resources to engage with people who hate drug users (and poverty) because as difficult as it is, doing so won’t meaningfully limit my life chances. However, I would never ask someone who is currently deprived of housing, etc. to try to do the same, a) because trying in vain to be seen as human is not sustainable unless you’re far removed from the conditions that produce the need to do so; and b) doing so could kill them.

A decade on, I can respond fairly eloquently to being called a crack whore/junkie who should die because I’ve developed identities outside of those. I’m also not about to lose my housing, employment, degrees, or life for disclosing my past. Again, others for whom this isn’t “past” aren’t in the same position. By comfort, I’m also referring to the extent to which your project is intellectual versus embodied. By all means do it, just consider the ramifications by doing it so publicly, as well as how respectability politics have been weaponized against marginalized groups for the last 400+ years.