Fictional characters are generally expected to take actions exclusively (or almost exclusively) based on their beliefs.  You are not a fictional character.  You are expected to take actions based on beliefs, emotions (mostly fear and pleasure), thoughts, and literally nothing meaningful at all - just random stimuli in your environment that slip through your perceptual filter and prompt action you consider after the fact.

I think this is good news for certain of our actions in life.  Especially the ones people challenge as in some way prejudiced.

If you start off with the assumption that all of your beliefs are borne out in all of your actions, of course you're going to get defensive/frustrated/angry when someone says your actions/words were offensive/discomfiting/otherwise unokay.
You may not think you make that assumption, but ask yourself: when someone challenges something you did/said, do you defend yourself with what you believe?

This might sound like: "Oh, of course I didn't mean it, because I am a feminist/believe in equal rights for all/actively fight this -phobia or that misogyny/etc."

Or worse, so much worse: "You misunderstood me/took it the wrong way. I believe this/that/the other thing, so obviously what I just said/did isn't a problem." This is usually followed up with a "Jeez, lighten up, you!" and/or "You're so sensitive!" and/or It's not always about race/gender/etc.!"

As though holding a belief/value meant you could never do anything contradictory. Jeez, what are you, perfect? Cut yourself some slack. Doing and saying things that violate some value of ours is almost a guarantee of the human condition. Live long enough, socialize with other people, it WILL happen.

If we let go of this assumption, I think it will be easier to hear and accept when someone feels wronged by our words/actions in some way. Easier not to discharge the anxiety of these moments by placing the burden on the party feeling wronged. Easier to accept that maybe we screwed up and that has no necessary implications for our personalities or belief systems - just that we screwed up.

And if we routinely find ourselves screwing up in similar ways, maybe it will be easier to step back and look at the difference between our professed beliefs and our patterns of behavior, because there's still no indictment of our overall worth or esteem. It just means we screw up pretty often and need to change.

If we do bring our beliefs into those discussions, it might look like this: "I am so sorry. Please tell me exactly what it was that made you feel the way you did [if they haven't already]; I really believe in this/that/the other thing, and I want to try to live like that and treat other people like that."

And I think it's okay to open/continue a dialogue like that even when we're feeling a little indignant. We can deal with the other person's concerns now and our indignation later. Maybe the former will help the latter. (Also, maybe not. Maybe we need to whine to our friends and hear them say, "So-and-so was right, you were wrong, but you handled it well.")
Hell, the person I have to have this dialogue with the most often is myself, and it's still a challenge.

Fourteen years ago, I was exhausted. I'd just gotten back to Poughkeepsie from my uncle & aunt's wedding in SLC. While my friends were catching me up on the weekend's events that Monday night, I drank. Bunches. (It was not unique that I drank bunches, but that I did so while physically and emotionally exhausted on a Monday.)

I woke up realizing that I had failed to set my alarm clock and that Tuesday morning class would not be happening. I pulled myself off the futon into my desk chair and opened my NY Times morning update. While I was reading about one plane, Outlook Express chimed its merry New Mail sound to notify me of the second.

I wandered out into the living room. I wasn't the only housemate pacing around looking bewildered.

We wandered out of the house. We weren't the only ones in South Commons pacing around looking bewildered.

We wandered to the Villard Room. There was little room for pacing; bewilderment had faded into genuine shock. And, yeah, terror. Cellphone reception was down and landlines were no better; there was an antenna atop one of those towers and the lines were clogged solid. People couldn't reach their families, their friends. Alums were making their way out of the city back to campus - often hiking across bridges before finding their way north. When they arrived, the shock in their glassed eyes made ours look like eagle-keen awareness.

That day shaped more of our lives over the ensuing 14 years than I think we account for sometimes. In that time, there have been more nights I went to bed exhausted and awakened to a changed world. Thankfully, every time the shift has been that immediate and that seismic, the change has been for the better.

The threads of change that have increased the amount of suffering in the world - in this country - have been far more insidious and hard to pin down. I think we've spent so much time this almost-decade-and-a-half fighting Big Obvious Enemies that most of us let down our guard against the lurking blights that are only Enemies if we anthropomorphize them (I'm looking at you, Ta-Nehisi).

Now we've got a country in so much pain from so many injuries that it's hard to separate one from another well enough to *begin* triage. And so many of us don't even see or feel the injury, caught up in battle-lust or denial or the weary combination of the two.

Our hair-trigger responses to the differing perspectives of our peers isolate us into scared packs of homogeneous belief. We lash out at the smallest hints of racism, transphobia, misogyny. Or we lash out at the smallest hints that our traditional beliefs and rituals are being attacked by progress, treating equality as a zero-sum game we are losing because others are winning. We numb the tectonic cognitive dissonance of equality as zero-sum by filling the split with confirmation bias.

We speak everywhere of assault - the assault on gay marriage, the assault on Christianity. The assault on the Confederate soldiers of the past, the assault on the Black bodies of the present. The assault on women's reproductive rights, the assault on men's rights. Only a handful of times are we actually referring to physical violence - even when we are, it is the ideological violence that arouses our righteous ire. We are hyper-vigilant against these assaults, often defending ourselves and our pack far beyond what the situation warrants. Or we defend against specters that disappear when we strike.

So many in our scared packs are jailed in the past, seeing only the echoes of what came before in what occurs now. Our collective memories, unreliable as they are, present themselves as the Gospel according to which we must interpret the state of things.

Acute trauma followed by shock. Hypervigilance, constant re-experiencing of the trauma, altered sense of self, deep mistrust of others. There is a clinical term for the symptomology I describe. This country has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.