Nathan Whiteside
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

What I said is that I haven’t seen any pieces on Medium that aren’t strongly pro-social justice. SOB’s articles are strongly pro-social justice, so I honestly don’t understand what you mean.

In fact, his was one of the first articles that I read upon joining Medium, and I liked it so much that I immediately hit the Follow button. I am impressed by the depth of his knowledge and his incisive understanding of the situation as it is, and I do not fault his righteous anger. But not all of his articles are like that first one I read, and now I do have some grave misgivings about the sort of callous responses he sometimes expresses (to put it mildly), which become advocacy for those responses by virtue of his writing and publishing them. Just like anyone else, I am allowed to have a principled disagreement with him, even if I am of the same demographic that is largely responsible for these atrocities. But I’m not the only demographic he shuts down. I’ve seen him shut down a Native person for intruding into black space “like a white person” would do, and I’ve seen him accuse black people who disagree with him of just wanting to be white adjacent. Never could it possibly be that anyone, even those who share his experience of being black in America, might have a valid opinion that diverges from his own. This is all extremely problematic, especially for someone who puts himself forth as a moral authority on deeply painful and complicated social issues, which is what he did in his article about Scalise.

Now, you are right that if all anyone had to go on was my writing thus far on Medium and my demographic, one might understandably assume certain things about me. But a careful examination of all my writing here should still show that I don’t think state violence against PoC is okay. And even if someone doesn’t want to waste their time by digging through my writing, rather than assume the worst in me that person could just as easily ask me what I think about the subject and what I have or haven’t done to be a voice for justice. That is where I was going with my question.