Once a real person becomes a symbol in a distant public argument, she stops being a thinking, speaking self for most of that public. The symbol takes her place, and the audience ends up misrecognising the reality she was describing.
A public quarrel over whether a marginalised witness got the details right may not really be about the details. Underneath, it shows intellectuals with power refusing to listen to intellectuals from the groups they dominate.
When a witness's account is read without the political history it came out of, an outside audience can turn its meaning upside down. Put the history back and the same words read differently: a speaker from a pushed-aside people trying to voice a shared, many-cultured politics at a turning point for her country.