Hitting publish is like a box o’ chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get. But after writing for over a year, I’d foolishly started to believe I had a pretty good handle on the reaction an article would get. J showed me that I still have a lot to learn. In my article “The Unspoken Evils of “Whiteness”, I highlight the hypocrisy, racism and outright idiocy of the term “whiteness”. And while I admit that the name is a little provocative, I still presumed that the people who commented would read it first.
"I presumed that the people who commented would at least read it first."
A mistaken assumption that you learned good and hard. Something I see quite often is people quickly decide (title and/or first paragraph) left or right (or whatever dichotomy is their thing) and then all the words that follow go through that filter. Words from Dante's Divine Comedy come to mind.
"A mistaken assumption that you learned good and hard"
😂 Don't get me wrong, I'm used to people not reading my writing *properly*, but not reading it *at all* is a new one. Especially as he then went on to lie about it. The psychology of somebody who comments on something they haven't read is beyond me. But I guess I should be thankful for that.
Actually, that's a good point. I'll include links to all the month's Medium articles in the subscriber threads from now on. My Substack readers were almost all from Medium initially, but that's no longer the case. Thanks for pointing that out.
Well that was a fascinating psychological experiment. I had to re-read the medium piece to try to see what J saw… I can see where it was just subtle enough in the intro where he might have missed that your critique was of those railing against “whiteness,” not people living in a state of being white. But shoot, your last few paragraphs make it ridiculously clear. Your point stands: way too many people have stopped listening entirely, they’re already pegged everyone else as friend or enemy.
After I read this post, I stumbled on the NYT piece, a perfect illustration of your point if there ever was one: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html This woman reacts to her own neighbors with disgust based on nothing but their skin color and the “whiteness” they epitomize. Now, to her credit, she recognizes what she’s doing and finds it unsettling!! She realizes its the same way racist whites of Levittown reacted to their new black neighbors. But then rather than take her cognitive dissonance to its logical end, she doubles back and assures herself that her reaction is different because she lacks “cultural dominance.” This, she writes in the NYT opinion column?? What has more cultural dominance right now than anti-racism?? (Perhaps I just lack the “moral sophistication” Daniel spoke about 😉)
Sorry, I have to keep going here. The root of the problem is that a segment of society has had *genuine* underdog status (to say the least) for centuries. Being an underdog allows moral coverage to use any means necessary to fight and win. But the goal of the fight all along was to achieve equality. As you get closer to achieving equality (and I’m not claiming the fight is done!), the moral justification for “anything goes” begins to diminish. That’s good! It’s a sign of progress!!! But if the end goal is equality, then at some point you have to be willing to play by the same rules you’re holding others to. We will ALWAYS live in a world where certain groups of our ancestors were screwed over. It makes me mad too!!!! But infuriatingly, we cannot change the past, and certainly not by creating more injustice today that our descendants will have to clean up or revenge tomorrow. Let’s make the buck stop here.
To your point, from the political perspective, there is segment of society, centered in the academic left, that continues to embrace various permutations of the Marxist idea that the only solution to social inequity is to destroy the current system. This progressive left discounts the real racial progress we’ve made in the past several decades. They stoke discord and division rather than working within the current system to make incremental progress. As Steve says, it’s no wonder that eventually ordinary people start to look at them as the enemy of social stability.
"I had to re-read the medium piece to try to see what J saw… I can see where it was just subtle enough in the intro where he might have missed that your critique was of those railing against “whiteness,” not people living in a state of being white."
Yeah exactly. I think if you only read the introduction you could have been left in doubt. But even then, it certainly doesn't qualify as a hate tract. Oh well.😅
And yes! I just read that NYT piece yesterday! I felt exactly the same way. The door of self-realisation was wide open fro her to walk through...and then she does a sharp heel-turn at the last minute. Crazy that the NYT is publishing nonsense like that. But it gets clicks, so it seems they don't care.
Sometimes writers respond with “did you read what I wrote?” to indicate the other person misinterpreted what they read. In this particular case it seems J genuinely didn’t read it at all. He pasted in a pretty elaborate essay about the current social trends of racism against white people. That was his main goal in responding. (It was a pretty good essay, actually.)
But here’s my question. I’m an old white guy who thought I was handling racial issues pretty well in life by treating everyone kindly. It’s only recently occurred to me that someone in a public interaction might be expressing some upfront animosity toward me based on race. Since black people have experienced this frequently, I can’t get too excited about it. I just continue being nice, which works approximately 100% of the time.
So, even though the big picture is that we can’t fight racism with racism, J comes across to me as expressing a bit of white fragility. What is the balanced response to that?
"So, even though the big picture is that we can’t fight racism with racism, J comes across to me as expressing a bit of white fragility. "
Oh absolutely. I dislike the term "white fragility", but fragility for sure.
I don't think a balanced response is possible when you're responding to somebody's *fears* about what you said instead of what you *actually said*. A conversation can only happen if both parties are listening to each other. Otherwise it's just two people talking past each other.
I'd completely understand J's defensiveness if I'd written something about how all white people are evil or racist or whatever garbage people are churning out. I don't think it's fragile to object to being generalised in this way. But if he's going to lie about having read something instead of bothering to read it, there's not a lot I can do.
when I taught critical thinking, the majority of my students could not tell the difference between a point the author was criticizing and a point the author was defending. I once had a student claims that Christian writer CS Lewis was an atheist, and they backed this claim up by quoting Lewis’ paraphrase of certain atheist positions. In the very next paragraph, Lewis rebutted these positions, but the student didn’t seem to pick that up.
when I created multiple-choice tests, I had to have wrong answers that could still be possibly right, or else the student would accurately guess the answer even if they didn’t know the material. I found the best wrong answers were the ones that stated the exact opposite of the correct answer. The students would remember that there was some connection between the right answer and the answer they marked, but they often would not remember that the connection was one of denial.
I think that’s what happened with this commentator. Simply quoting a position seems like defending it if you read carelessly enough.
"I presumed that the people who commented would at least read it first."
A mistaken assumption that you learned good and hard. Something I see quite often is people quickly decide (title and/or first paragraph) left or right (or whatever dichotomy is their thing) and then all the words that follow go through that filter. Words from Dante's Divine Comedy come to mind.
"A mistaken assumption that you learned good and hard"
😂 Don't get me wrong, I'm used to people not reading my writing *properly*, but not reading it *at all* is a new one. Especially as he then went on to lie about it. The psychology of somebody who comments on something they haven't read is beyond me. But I guess I should be thankful for that.
I subscribe to your substack but not to Medium and would like to read that article if possible, thank you.
Hi Erica, here's a link:
https://steveqj.medium.com/the-unspoken-evils-of-whiteness-d87d0b3c245a?sk=15c6260e6149102d96dc08fdde4c8c03
Actually, that's a good point. I'll include links to all the month's Medium articles in the subscriber threads from now on. My Substack readers were almost all from Medium initially, but that's no longer the case. Thanks for pointing that out.
Well that was a fascinating psychological experiment. I had to re-read the medium piece to try to see what J saw… I can see where it was just subtle enough in the intro where he might have missed that your critique was of those railing against “whiteness,” not people living in a state of being white. But shoot, your last few paragraphs make it ridiculously clear. Your point stands: way too many people have stopped listening entirely, they’re already pegged everyone else as friend or enemy.
After I read this post, I stumbled on the NYT piece, a perfect illustration of your point if there ever was one: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html This woman reacts to her own neighbors with disgust based on nothing but their skin color and the “whiteness” they epitomize. Now, to her credit, she recognizes what she’s doing and finds it unsettling!! She realizes its the same way racist whites of Levittown reacted to their new black neighbors. But then rather than take her cognitive dissonance to its logical end, she doubles back and assures herself that her reaction is different because she lacks “cultural dominance.” This, she writes in the NYT opinion column?? What has more cultural dominance right now than anti-racism?? (Perhaps I just lack the “moral sophistication” Daniel spoke about 😉)
Sorry, I have to keep going here. The root of the problem is that a segment of society has had *genuine* underdog status (to say the least) for centuries. Being an underdog allows moral coverage to use any means necessary to fight and win. But the goal of the fight all along was to achieve equality. As you get closer to achieving equality (and I’m not claiming the fight is done!), the moral justification for “anything goes” begins to diminish. That’s good! It’s a sign of progress!!! But if the end goal is equality, then at some point you have to be willing to play by the same rules you’re holding others to. We will ALWAYS live in a world where certain groups of our ancestors were screwed over. It makes me mad too!!!! But infuriatingly, we cannot change the past, and certainly not by creating more injustice today that our descendants will have to clean up or revenge tomorrow. Let’s make the buck stop here.
To your point, from the political perspective, there is segment of society, centered in the academic left, that continues to embrace various permutations of the Marxist idea that the only solution to social inequity is to destroy the current system. This progressive left discounts the real racial progress we’ve made in the past several decades. They stoke discord and division rather than working within the current system to make incremental progress. As Steve says, it’s no wonder that eventually ordinary people start to look at them as the enemy of social stability.
"I had to re-read the medium piece to try to see what J saw… I can see where it was just subtle enough in the intro where he might have missed that your critique was of those railing against “whiteness,” not people living in a state of being white."
Yeah exactly. I think if you only read the introduction you could have been left in doubt. But even then, it certainly doesn't qualify as a hate tract. Oh well.😅
And yes! I just read that NYT piece yesterday! I felt exactly the same way. The door of self-realisation was wide open fro her to walk through...and then she does a sharp heel-turn at the last minute. Crazy that the NYT is publishing nonsense like that. But it gets clicks, so it seems they don't care.
Sometimes writers respond with “did you read what I wrote?” to indicate the other person misinterpreted what they read. In this particular case it seems J genuinely didn’t read it at all. He pasted in a pretty elaborate essay about the current social trends of racism against white people. That was his main goal in responding. (It was a pretty good essay, actually.)
But here’s my question. I’m an old white guy who thought I was handling racial issues pretty well in life by treating everyone kindly. It’s only recently occurred to me that someone in a public interaction might be expressing some upfront animosity toward me based on race. Since black people have experienced this frequently, I can’t get too excited about it. I just continue being nice, which works approximately 100% of the time.
So, even though the big picture is that we can’t fight racism with racism, J comes across to me as expressing a bit of white fragility. What is the balanced response to that?
"So, even though the big picture is that we can’t fight racism with racism, J comes across to me as expressing a bit of white fragility. "
Oh absolutely. I dislike the term "white fragility", but fragility for sure.
I don't think a balanced response is possible when you're responding to somebody's *fears* about what you said instead of what you *actually said*. A conversation can only happen if both parties are listening to each other. Otherwise it's just two people talking past each other.
I'd completely understand J's defensiveness if I'd written something about how all white people are evil or racist or whatever garbage people are churning out. I don't think it's fragile to object to being generalised in this way. But if he's going to lie about having read something instead of bothering to read it, there's not a lot I can do.
when I taught critical thinking, the majority of my students could not tell the difference between a point the author was criticizing and a point the author was defending. I once had a student claims that Christian writer CS Lewis was an atheist, and they backed this claim up by quoting Lewis’ paraphrase of certain atheist positions. In the very next paragraph, Lewis rebutted these positions, but the student didn’t seem to pick that up.
when I created multiple-choice tests, I had to have wrong answers that could still be possibly right, or else the student would accurately guess the answer even if they didn’t know the material. I found the best wrong answers were the ones that stated the exact opposite of the correct answer. The students would remember that there was some connection between the right answer and the answer they marked, but they often would not remember that the connection was one of denial.
I think that’s what happened with this commentator. Simply quoting a position seems like defending it if you read carelessly enough.