The problem is that an article like the one I responded to doesn’t tell you anything useful about racism. All it is is one particular story, which may or may not even be completely true, about one particular sick, old white Dutch guy. For a story like this to inform or educate you, it wouldn’t just talk about one particular experience with one particular guy. It would have actual facts and statistics or, at least, analysis to explain to you whether this incident might be representative of anything and/or what exactly it’s representative of. You can’t just tell your story about one racist dotard, slap the name of “white privilege” on it, without even explaining where exactly the privilege is here, and then leave your readers to form mistaken conclusions about how prevalent this kind of thing is. That’s irresponsible. It’s yellow journalism. We already have too much of this kind of thing going around.
Personally, among all the white people I know, virtually ALL of them not only would not use the N-word but would be horrified to hear it used by another white person. Virtually all of them are virulent anti-racists rather than racists. So why exactly is the story about the one 87-yr.-old guy more legitimate or representative than my experience of all my friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc.? Maybe instead of telling these kinds of rabble-rousing clickbait stories of the one old white racist on the verge of death, we should be telling the stories of all the (many more) white people who abhor racism. I would argue, for example, that the phenomenon of white masochism is far more common today than this story of an unreconstructed old white racist. Or maybe, better yet, instead of telling these kinds of dueling stories, we should present actual facts. Oh … wait … that would require effort and research, wouldn’t it? And most of us are way too lazy and stupid to spend time sorting through data and forming sound conclusions on the basis of that data. If, however, you’re among those who aren’t lazy and stupid and want some actual data about racism, and an explanation of how our current zealous crusade against it is actually making the problem worse, this is a good start.
