In the wake of White Nationalists marching in Charlottesville, I saw a few variants of this question: “If these Confederate statues are so terrible, why didn’t Martin Luther King ever talk about them? Why are they only an issue now that Donald Trump is President?” I can’t pretend to speak for the great Reverend King,…
Category: Good Men Project
Tina Fey Eats Cake, Starting an Internal War
Tina Fey recently ate cake, and liberal America freaked out. On one side were those who insisted that Fey’s satire was brilliant, and that those who disliked it had missed the joke. You see, according to this narrative, Fey was playing a character: She was mocking herself and other white liberal women who turn to…
James and the Giant Screed
I have a confession. I used to be a Men’s Rights Activist. I’ve been mulling an essay on this for a while now, but James and the Giant Screed has brought it to the surface. In case you’re not familiar with it, James Damore came to national attention recently when a memo he’d written and…
Why Privilege is White-Washed Supremacy
We are at what Lisa Hickey rightly calls an inflection point in the United States. White Supremacists and White Nationalists are marching around the nation, ostensibly to protest things like the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA. It is time for every white person in this country to decide where…
White Men and the Well of Actually
It seems like a lot of white men like to be experts about everything. Years ago, when I was in graduate school studying linguistics, I was visiting my father. We were chatting, and somewhat randomly, he presented me with a piece of information: “Korean has the same writing as Chinese.” He followed it up with,…
The Good and Bad of School Dress Codes
When I went to public school, the basic dress code for students was: Don’t cause trouble. We had what was ostensibly called “free dress,” but students did occasionally get sent home. The only one I remember involved a t-shirt with a cuss word on it. It was tacitly understood: Cover your basic bits. This is…
Keeping an Eye out for Ableism
I have a prosthetic eye. I have had it since I was about a year old, before I could speak. I don’t know what life would be like without it. More importantly, I don’t know what my life would be like with two functioning eyes. According to my interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act,…
Enough is Enough: The Hoarding of the Ultrarich
Many years ago, I saw a documentary on a tribe somewhere in the third world. This tribe’s diet relied heavily on taro roots, a vegetable similar to a potato. After the harvest, the tribal elder, an old man, would take the largest roots and put them in storage. Supposedly, this was in case there was…
Fat Jokes about People We Dislike are Still Fat Jokes
Last weekend, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had a Marie Antoinette moment: Having closed the state’s beaches to the general population, he and his family relaxed on the sand. Aerial photographs caught him in the act, and illogical explanations followed. What also followed? “Beached whale” jokes. Chris Christie is undeniably obese. He has long struggled…
Why We’re all Fragile Snowflakes
I’m a fragile snowflake. So are you. I don’t mean this ironically, and I don’t mean it in the same sense as “We’re all racist.” I mean that, in the eyes of someone else, someone who doesn’t know you, you’re too sensitive about something. So am I. Most of my friends and social media contacts…