"Nuanced" is a description of tone; it says nothing about how well informed the participants are. Someone who comes in saying "I am part of this group, and you're completely misrepresenting me" is not nuanced.
Perhaps our misunderstanding is just one of definition then. I understood nuance to mean something like this from Merriam-Webster: "sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as of meaning, feeling, or value)". A nuanced discussion according to that definition would be one that takes into account the various complexities and positions involved in a topic, rather than papering over them with political rhetoric, partiality, or fallacious reasoning.
For example, I can have a nuanced understanding of how fire works, the fire code in my area, and so on. But I'm not going to be very "nuanced" when I'm trapped in a burning building and screaming for help because I'm about to burn to death.
Both meanings are relevant here.
To the parent poster's point...
Certainly, nuanced discussion is in general a good thing. We want that understanding, that openness to new ideas, the understanding of others' perspectives, the acknowledgement of complexity, the reliance upon facts and not rhetoric or emotion.
However, an insistence on nuanced discussion necessarily excludes folks who do not have the luxury of nuance. If I am trapped in a burning building, I would not have the luxury of nuance. Folks being rounded up for transport to concentration camps do not have the luxury of nuance. A person being stalked by a jealous ex-lover with a history of violence does not have the luxury of nuance.
So if we exclude those whose tone lacks nuance, we also tend to exclude those with a truly nuanced understanding of the issue at hand.
I wouldn't advocate holding any sort of discussion in a burning building or when exigent circumstances demand urgent action. Pausing for a chat while people are, at that moment and in that place, being "rounded up for transport to concentration camps" seems irresponsible. If someone interrupted a conversation to tell me they were having a heart attack, I wouldn't tell them off for lacking nuance.
But conversations don't take place in those circumstances. Those circumstances stop conversations, which can only take place when people have the space to talk or write, making and critiquing arguments, and so on.
To return to my original point: there seems to be an underlying worry that the people we should be listening to about race, who should be part of those conversations, are incapable of nuanced conversation, either nuance of tone or nuance of content, which strikes me as deeply patronizing and nakedly racist.
Either that or it's an attempt to shut down conversation in case the "nuance" tends to show one party's arguments to be false.
To return to my original point: there seems to be
an underlying worry that the people we should be
listening to about race are incapable of nuanced
conversation, either nuance of tone or nuance of
content, which strikes me as nakedly racist.
Nobody is suggesting that any group of people is intrinsically incapable of nuanced conversation. If they did, they would be profoundly (factually and morally) wrong.
What is being suggested that, yes, some individuals and groups are experiencing circumstances that -- while not as exigent as being trapped in a burning building -- are something like that.
Certainly, if I or my loved ones personally experienced police brutality, or if it was a common enough experience for people in my area who looked like me, and it was a real possibility that I faced every day... it would of course be challenging for me to discuss it in a nuanced way. I do not feel this would represent some sort of weakness intrinsic to my race.
