I completely disagree with your approach on how to handle articles or anything else with which you disagree. Staying silent and/or moving on is what too many of us, whites in particular, routinely do. That’s why we have this silent majority in this country composed of ordinary people who find much of what’s going on--the ludicrous national anthem protests over a repeatedly empirically discredited myth that cops are killing unarmed blacks in droves, the crazy racial polarization and dividing of people into racial and other identity groups, with generalizations galore, the abandonment by the elites of the Civil Rights Era ideal of not judging people based on skin color, the propaganda campaign being waged on ordinary Americans by the mainstream media, academia, smug Hollywood celebrities and other elites--baffling and troubling, to say the least, and yet we stay silent while loud, brash, aggressive minorities and their mouthpieces in the Establishment hoot and holler and curse and protest and wage social media campaigns to bully people into silence, get them fired, etc. So more of us NEED to be speaking up for what we believe. But, unlike our ideological adversaries, I believe in always trying to take the high road, staying away from profanities and ad hominems and labels as much as I can.
Having said that, I don’t know why most of those who’ve taken issue with your articles happen to be white men. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that you, as a white man, have primarily white male readers (since people now routinely decide what to read based on the race, gender and sexual orientation of the author), so those same white men are also going to be over-represented among your dissenters. Personally, however, I’ve found the opposite to be true in my experience here on Medium. Most of those who’ve disagreed with me, and especially the ones whose disagreement is voiced in the form of strident, screeching profane screeds and dumb personal attacks, have tended to be black women. Perhaps that’s because of what I tend to write. But, in any event, unlike you, until I read your article (and against your advice, I read the whole thing even though I disagreed with you), I never thought about the races or genders of those who were writing to disagree with me … at least, not until I read your article and gave the matter some thought. And the reason I never thought about this before is that I do my best to avoid this kind of racialized thinking unless it’s forced on me (which, in our modern-day culture, it regularly is, unfortunately). So, good job in adding to the amount of racism in the world. Next time, though, maybe try dropping the broad generalizations and treating human beings as human beings.
