Reflections on David Brooks' "Speaking as a White Male" - by Sean Davidson

Thoughts on David Brooks' recent op-ed in New York Times, "Speaking as a White Male."...

A friend suggested to me the other day that Brooks is pretty much like any other white male. He can't stand being told to sit down and shut up.

That could be true ... It probably is true on some level.

I think there's more going on, though.

My sense is that Brooks doesn't want *anyone* to be told to sit down and shut up. He's concerned not simply for himself and his own freedom. In the spirit of Enlightenment, he'd hope for everyone to have their say as they follow their best lights and contribute to the commonweal.

The problem is that he fails to appreciate how suppression and silencing happen in the context of Enlightenment rationality. Appealing to reason alone was about giving everyone a voice--at least potentially. In practice, it looked more like European men dictating how things are going to be.

This is the blind spot for generally thoughtful and caring people like Brooks. They struggle to appreciate how their voices have overridden other voices, even when they are touting the virtues of equality, inclusivity and tolerance, etc.

Identity politics can see through all that and refuses to capitulate. Instead, it fights back with the same weapons of exclusion and silencing, though in a more direct and forthright way, zeroing in on white cis-gendered males as colonizing oppressors.

The conundrum for someone like Brooks is that he's deeply sensitive to injustice though he struggles to appreciate his complicity. And he regrets the militant tactics of identity politics though he fails to see how Enlightenment set the stage for it.

With Brooks, I regret those same tactics, but I'm learning to appreciate where the harsh critique comes from and why.

I think it's really important to hear people speak of their experience on their own terms rather than overriding their stories and plotting them in a different narrative.

At the same time, I don't think it's helpful to typecast people based on identity and exclude/silence a targeted group as a matter of course.

This is what Brooks is wrestling with--not that white males would be asked to stop and listen to the experience of others, to honor the stories of those others, and to give freedom for new social, political and economic arrangements; rather that they'd be written off entirely, on principle, in every context, because they bear the signs of colonial oppression in their skin color and ostensible sex/gender.

Ad hominem was the dirty secret of Enlightenment rationality. It's now become the chief weapon in a fight for justice.

God help us find a different way ...