Osler's Razor

Hi! I'm Mark, and I'm a 57-year-old white guy from Grosse Pointe who now lives in Edina, a relatively affluent and mostly white suburb of Minneapolis. I used to be a federal prosecutor, and also in the Rotary Club. I lived in Texas for a while in a neighborhood called "Castle Heights." Even my name, Mark, was used as a proxy for whiteness on Saturday Night Live.

Based on all of these things, people tell me things they probably wouldn't say to someone who wasn't quite so white. Often those things are racist and terrible. I spend a lot of time pushing back, with mixed success.

One thing that I see now is a lot of White Guys My Age ("WGMA") having damaging discussions with people in their families and communities. I'd like to address a few of those tropes here.

#1: The only people being discriminated against now are people like us!

Really, WGMA? You look around you and see bias against... us? In what possible way is that true? What is the last video you saw of a WGMA being mistreated by the police? We are wildly over-represented in nearly every position that confers wealth and power. White men 50-79 years old represent about 15% of the US population. The next presidential election is guaranteed to involve at least 75% people from our group (Trump, Pence, and Biden). The U.S. Senate is composed of +60% white guys our age. We control corporations, non-profits, state governments, and just about everything else, despite being one-seventh of the population. If someone is trying to discriminate against us, it hasn't been very effective. The truth, if you care to see it, is that bias against others has favored us at nearly every step of our lives.

#2: Hey, Black Lives Matter-- What about black-on-black violence?

For some reason (actually, I think we all know the reason), this is a point that White Guys My Age seem a little obsessed with. Here's the problem: what you are doing here is changing the subject. Someone you know-- a child, a grand-child, a co-worker-- is making a point about racism in America, often in the context of police violence. And then you change the subject by turning to black-on-black violence.  You are blowing right past the point they are making to launch into something else-- signalling that you don't care about the topic they brought up (or, really, about them). If your concern for the black victims of gun violence is really so important to you, then maybe what you need to do is pick some other time to talk about it, and then seek out someone knowledgeable to talk to about it- hopefully someone from the community you are apparently so concerned about. The conversation might involve delving into issues of poverty, racism, and gun policies, so be ready for that.


#3:  These rioting Millennials don't know how the real world works!

There's at least three things wrong with this one. Least important, if you are talking about college-age people, they are the generation behind the Millennials-- Generation Z. Second, and more importantly, these people usually seem to be viewing everyone who was out in the streets as "rioters" or at least complicit in rioting (one example here). However, of the entire group in the streets, very few of them were rioting, but many of them were protesting, and the difference is crucial. The former can be a destructive crime. The latter is a right protected by the Constitution, and one which has brought important things to our nation from the beginning. Third, it is much more likely that you don't understand the very real world that young people are living in rather than they don't understand yours. Think about it: They face terrible unemployment, disrupted lives, a deadly pandemic, and a historically unstable federal government. That's pretty real. And they understand us better than you might think; after all, they grew up watching us. If they aren't impressed, maybe that is on us.