Honest conversation about “honest conversation”s

“What we should be doing is much simpler: Chilling the hell out before this gets even more insane than it has already.” – Katherine Timpf

Indeed.

Dear readers, we’re not, you and I, now or anytime soon, going to have an “honest conversation” about or “real look” at or talk about “social justice” for my alleged “microaggressions,” “white privilege,” “mansplaining,” “cultural insensitivity,” or anything else in this vein. (You may have rattled off two or three more that I’m forgetting.)

I don’t have any patience left for this sort of self-styled sociocultural warrior nag who eagerly and repeatedly invites me to consider what prejudices and other shortcomings may lurk in my foul soul, even without me knowing they’re there, because I’m a white male. (Throw Protestant and straight in there too, if you like.)

Mind, it’s not that I couldn’t possibly care about, to some degree, some of the ideas these people raise. It’s that my disgust for their glee in inviting me to consider these alleged character defects now quickly overwhelms any desire I have to carefully examine what they’re saying.

After all, I know that the conscious, overt way I treat people—professionally, personally, however—constitutes (at least) a very large majority of my total behavior toward them, and I further know that it is fine. My enthusiasm for punctilious scolds supposedly zinging me with just how horribly wrong I am, in agonizing, peer-reviewed, hand-wringing detail, is limited.

Perhaps the finger-wagging is so prominent because the story is thin? Didn’t Shakespeare have something to say about that?

To anyone spun up about this kind of thing: I invite you to consider whether you may be minimizing the genuine struggles of rights and privileges people have overcome, particularly in recent history, and to what degree. I further invite you to consider whether there are any other problems—perhaps bigger problems that don’t take so long to explain, and that may have principals besides white men?—that may be worthy of your attention.

And that’s just what I’m going to do here at BoWilliams.com. The overzealous PC hysteria was funny for a while, but there’s really only one joke, and it’s not funny anymore.