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This is the story of the past three years of my life. It’s romance in a way, but it’s also a breakup story. It begins sometime in 2015, a year during which my life was coming apart in various ways. In addition to the unraveling of my marriage, I began to sense some fraying around the edges of my social circles. Both online and in real life, people who’d once shared a common set of assumptions about the realities of the world and the nature of human behavior now seemed oddly divided. Questions that had once been treated as complicated inquiries requiring scrutiny and nuance were increasingly being reduced to moral absolutes, especially as far as liberal types were concerned.I first noticed it with issues pertaining to feminism. If, for instance, you suggested that (or even wondered aloud if) the gender wage gap might not be due entirely to systemic sexism but also to women’s interests, choices, and the inconvenient but unavoidable realities of pregnancy and young-child rearing, you were likely to be labeled an internalized misogynist. This same dynamic played out in other spheres of public debate, of course: gun control, immigration, and due process in campus sexual assault cases, to name a few. If you more or less toed the requisite liberal line but thought there were some gray areas that warranted consideration, you were quite possibly on the wrong side of history. If you called for nuance, you were part of the problem...Social media, the narcotic we were already all addicted to, now did double duty as an outrage amplifier and disseminator of half-truths....Enter my new friends. I found them on YouTube. Actually, I found them first through Bloggingheads.tv, a site where scholars and journalists of all ideological stripes carried on webcam conversations about the issues of the day. I was a particular fan of the monthly dialogue between the economist and professor Glenn Loury and the linguist and literature professor John McWhorter. Calling themselves “the Black Guys on Bloggingheads,†they talked about racial politics with more candor and (ahem) nuance than I’d probably ever heard in my life. They even dared to do what few in the left-leaning chatterati were willing to do: hold the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates up to scrutiny. Often, it wasn’t so much the author himself that they griped about, but the rote, self-congratulatory reverence displayed by Coates’ white fans. This reverence was itself racist, McWhorter pointed out. This implication, if I was reading him correctly, was that Coates was good but not a god. And the need for white people to elevate him to the level of a deity constituted “a kind of soft bigotry which is as nauseating as it is unintended.â€...https://medium.com/s/greatescape/nuance-a-love-story-ae6a14991059
A long read about a lifelong democrat who became educated. Long, but worth reading.
Huh...I thought I posted this a while ago, but I guess I just selfishly read it and didn't post!Glad you posted it...it's an interesting read!
