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Some White Guy Thoughts on Discussing Race and Gender

Is the progressive online space really no country for white men?

A lot of people who look like me seem to have gone off the deep end when trying to talk about race and gender. There seem to be only three acceptable attitudes for white men when engaging in a conversation about social issues: resignation, reactionism, and despondency.

Uber-woke white men grovel. Unwoke white men lash out. The white men in between brace themselves and wait for the storm to pass.

I’ve been trying to figure out where popular discourse fell off a cliff and, while I can’t claim to have an answer, I may have stumbled upon the beginnings of a clue.

Some of the most thoughtful and influential leaders of our generation have normalized a logical fallacy in our way of discussing major social and political issues. As a society, we systematically conflate true statements about categories of people with the lived experience and unique attributes of individuals within those categories.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll call it the Categorical Attribution Fallacy. For a wide host of reasons, thought leaders and influencers are painfully…