White Guys Guide to DEI – Page 6 – Michael Karson, Ph.D.

Egyptian democracy is not (just) about free elections

Senator John McCain, who should know better, recommended cessation of aid to Egypt, stating, “We cannot stand by without acting in cases where freely elected governments are unseated by the military arm of those nations.” The confusion has to do with what a democracy is. A democracy, to whom the United States should pledge allegiance, assistance, and fraternity, is not about freely elected governments. It is about protection of minorities. Any system of government will become totalitarian if minority views are not protected. The firmest protection of those views can be found in our First Amendment: religious freedom, free speech, free press, the right to assemble, and the right to complain.

No government, elected or appointed, without these elements, can escape tyranny. Indeed, Madison and Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, teach us that a government in which the executive, judicial, and legislative functions are seated in the same group of people is the very definition of tyranny. What they mean is that a government that doesn’t have to answer to its minority views inevitably tramples those views and the persons who hold them.

Governments that embrace a particular religion must be right and dissenters must be wrong. If religion means anything, it means that. That is why I have called John 3:16 the most despicable verse in the Bible, because it says that belief (rather than good behavior) leads to salvation, and therefore it demonizes critical thinking, humor, and protest, the hallmarks of social justice. It’s the nature of religion that it cannot produce a constitution that protects minorities, because religion equates protection of minority viewpoints with deviltry. Only the separation of church and state, the foundational idea of our way of life, can lead to democracy. (It doesn’t automatically produce democracy of course, as any slave would testify; it is a necessary but not sufficient condition.)

This is why the philosophical basis of our democracy, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, emphasizes the proper role of government and its source of power. The role of government is not to control the people but to secure their rights. Government’s just source of power is not God but the consent of the governed.

Parent worship also produces totalitarianism within the individual. Psychotherapy can be viewed as a way of bringing First Amendment rights to the minority and marginalized voices within the person, so the patient can stop squelching herself.

Categories of One

The latest thing in diversity studies is “intersectionality.” This term reflects the insight that you can’t understand, say, an Asian man by understanding Asians and by understanding men. You have to understand the way the two identities intersect. Being Asian is different for men and women.

I decline to ridicule multiculturalists for thinking this is new. Instead, I celebrate the fact that this mixing of multicultural classifications will destroy the effort to categorize people. Here’s how.

The diversity reifiers used to tell us that when considering sex, you were in a box labeled men, or a box labeled women, or a tiny box labeled intersex. When considering race, you were in a box labeled Asian, or a box labeled White, or some other box. Now they are saying that regardless of what you think you are considering, you have a box labeled Asian Man, a box labeled Asian Woman, a box labeled White Man, and so on.

But there are more ways to categorize people than race and sex. I’m not very good at categorizing people, so I just grabbed a multicultural handbook near my desk, and I see that one must consider age, disability, ethnicity, immigrant status, language, ancestry, sexual orientation, culture, class, religion, and gender identity, along with good old race and sex. I don’t know what the editors of this handbook have against birth order, parenting status, marital status, occupation, criminal history, musical genres, food preferences, color blindness, and sports-team identifications (don’t even try to tell me that Yankees fans are like Red Sox fans). I don’t know what they have against regional accents, hair color, weight, height, intelligence, relationship with alcohol, or history of abuse, not to mention theoretical orientation, illness, parental loss, adoption status, or how long the person spent pursuing a career in the arts before getting a real job. But it seems to me that if you need to know someone’s class and religion to understand them, you need to know about membership in all these other categories as well.

So the problem for the professional multiculturalists, in my view, is that once they acknowledge interactive effects, they start making more and more, smaller and smaller boxes. If you take all the categories one can put people into, and then make boxes that account for interactive effects, you will end up with 7 billion boxes, each holding only one person. And that will be the end of the diversity establishment as we know it.

Misunderstandings of Aggression 2

A friend writes, “When you are direct, bold, provocative, edgy, ambitious, courageous, and challenging, that is very different from being hostile, mean, dominating, or sadistic. I think that women who have a hard time with that first set of adjectives often confuse the two (and also express their own ambitious energy in indirectly hostile ways, but that is another story!).”

I guess I don’t think that direct and courageous are so very different from hostile and mean.

I don’t think the problem is that some people who have a hard time with hostility confuse it with assertiveness and courage; I think the problem is that these people recognize the hostility intrinsic to assertiveness and courage and react accordingly. In fact, I think the only difference between assertiveness and hostility is the preparation of the audience. In martial arts training and tournaments, whacking someone with a sword is assertive; in most other contexts, it would be hostile. Invading another country and killing its inhabitants was hostile when the Germans did it and assertive when the Americans did it (in World War II; it was hostile in Vietnam). Neville Chamberlain is shamed by history for not standing up to Hitler, but standing up to him meant threatening to kill and then killing Germans. Corrective criticism is challenging when the student wants to get better at whatever she’s studying; it’s hostile when the student wants to be validated for already being good at whatever she’s studying.

Further, I believe that the first, endorsable set of adjectives and the second, rejectable set of adjectives come from the same place (call it the will to power, aggressive instinct, status dynamics, or the reinforcing effects of other people’s obedience).

Skinner points out how many of life’s rewards are brought by other people, so that certain social experiences become secondarily reinforcing through conditioning, in an exact analogy to the way money becomes a conditioned reinforcer. He lists attention, affection, approval, and obedience. The first three become conditioned reinforcers only if social relationships are benign, on balance. If other people’s attention is preparatory to rebuke, if affection leads to crippling expectations, if approval is for an agenda that serves the approver but not the individual—then none of these will become reinforcing. But you can always count on obedience. Other people doing what you want them to do, even if what you want them to do is to surprise you, is bound to feel good.

So, even aside from the fact that we are the most innately aggressive mammals on the planet, bending others to our will is bound to become a major force in human affairs given how social we are. The essence of enlightenment values is the recognition of this fact (“power corrupts”; “if men were angels, no government would be necessary”), and the construction of a system that takes it into account.

I think that the employer who calmly “lets go” a difficult employee is tapping the same energy as the employer who feels like beheading that employee. It’s the similarity between the two that leads some employers never to consider firing anyone. If we are not comfortable with our fantasies of beheading people we will resist letting them go unless we can, as my friend implies above, let them go in a way that is so passive-aggressive that it escapes our own detection of hostility. If we are comfortable with our aggression, we are more likely to engage bad employees in a dialogue of frustration, to hear their own frustrations, and to find a solution (which may be to fire them but is almost certain to be firing them if we react to their own frustrations as if they were bomb threats).

So my view of the gender issue is that girls in our country are much more likely to be punished for aggressive behavior than boys are. Punishment never changes the tendency to engage in behavior, but it can change the tendency to disguise it. In my childhood, most boys learned to settle their differences with fists, and this led to settling differences with debate. Most girls were punished for using fists (“unladylike”), and this led to settling differences with backbiting, moralizing, and cutting remarks. Especially moralizing.

I was at a case conference last week to decide whether a mother was unfit to raise her children or whether to pursue reunification.

Me: She’s a bad mother.
Female State Social Work Administrator: That’s judgmental.
Me: I thought we were here to judge her parenting.
FSSWA: We teach case workers to talk about clients like they’re human beings.
Me: Only human beings are bad mothers.

It chills me to think that people would sever a mother’s relationship with her children without even a hint of anger on the child’s behalf, like the high school principal who dully and calmly tells you he’s going to expel your son. To me, that’s inhuman.

[By the way, Webster’s also includes “healthy self-assertiveness or a drive to mastery or accomplishment” in its definitions of aggression.]

Misunderstandings of Aggression

It takes a certain amount of aggression to put yourself out there enough to write a blog, correct a student, or confront however gently a patient who has gone wrong following an outdated psychological map. Many people with the requisite level of aggression find themselves fitting poorly with the culture of psychology; they become lawyers instead. Sometimes the aggression inherent in asserting something or, even worse, questioning someone else’s assertion, is mistaken so thoroughly for hostility that the content of what I say is twisted by the expectation of hostility.

I said to a social worker who wasn’t quite ready to give up on a bad mother, “I disagree, but I have only respect for your point of view.” When a number of people at the meeting stared at me in horror, I asked them what they thought I’d said, and fully half of those present thought I’d said, “I disagree, and I have no respect for your point of view.”

I said to a group of students who came late to the first day of assessment class that there were a lot of reasons why they might have come late, some incidental, some situational, some as a considered choice, and some psychological, so this was a good example of keeping an open mind when approaching the assessment of behavior. At least one of them thought I’d chastised them. Again, it took a certain amount of aggression just to mention that they had been late, and the student seems to have expected aggression to produce chastisement.

I taught a class period on borderline personality organization, and I suggested that you might want to consider borderline functioning if the patient does something that you would never do. I would never murder someone or steal money or smack a child, but I can imagine doing those things under the right circumstances. I cannot imagine any set of circumstances that would lead me to put a cigarette out on a baby or commit a forcible rape. So if someone does something you would never do, consider that their personality may be structured fundamentally differently from yours. The following week, we discussed a patient who had done something I would never do (I forget what). I asked the class what I’d said about that, and an intelligent, likeable student said, “You said they might be borderline if you would never do them.” Presumably, the aggression inherent in calmly discussing burning a baby and committing forcible rape made me seem rapacious. I told the student that if she tracked down and corrected everyone she had misquoted me to, I would not use her name when I told this story for the rest of my life. When I told a forensic colleague (i.e., a colleague comfortable with aggression) the story, she said, “But that’s also a pretty reliable sign of borderline personality organization, if you would never do them.”

Separation of Church and State

NBC News reported, “Pakistan may be one of the world’s three remaining polio-stricken countries but Sartaj Khan has decided that the government-sponsored vaccination campaign is much more sinister than it appears. “These vaccines are meant to destroy our nation,” said Khan, a 42-year-old lawyer in the city of Peshawar. “The [polio] drops make men less manly, and make women more excited and less bashful. Our enemies want to wipe us out.” The belief has turned deadly: Nine anti-polio workers have been killed by gunmen on motorcycles this week. Some of those killed were teenage girls.” (I postpone until some future post my thoughts on why making women less bashful would be tantamount to destroying their nation. I also postpone any concern that the United States is a victim of the same plot; God knows our own men are less manly than they used to be and our women less bashful.) I’ll be curious to see if Pakistan arrests these murderers.

The separation of church and state is a foundational idea for the American way of life, enshrined in the First Amendment along with freedom of speech. As fundamentalists of all religions recognize, for example in Egypt, it is a doctrine that really says that one’s religious beliefs are at best suspect and at worst incorrect. If the beliefs of any religion were definitely true, then the first and only obligation of government would be to ensure that citizens followed those rules. So right-wing historians can talk until they’re red in the face about the Founding Fathers being Christians, but if they were, they were the sort of Christians who simply aren’t sure, or else they would have imposed a religious state. The Declaration of Independence mentions a Creator, but unlike the monarchies of Europe, which claimed to derive authority from God, our founding document says that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That is not a religion-inspired idea. Our Founding Fathers were revolutionaries, not authorities.

Many religions, especially in their infancy and adolescence, like most dictatorships, forbid any speech—or thought—that questions authority. Criminalizing blasphemy and heresy makes sense if one is absolutely certain that the religious creed is correct. If you believe that slurring the Holy Spirit is a sure path to hell, you owe it to your children and to your community and even to heretics to crucify anyone who does this. It makes an example of heretics and offers them absolution. Theocracy and totalitarianism have so much in common that, as our Founding Fathers knew, any theocracy is bound to become a dictatorship, and any dictatorship is bound to become a theocracy. Even atheist Russia fetishized Lenin’s remains, and Nazi iconography is indistinguishable from religious iconography—think swastikas atop Christmas trees. You can identify this sort of iconography by examining what happens to people who desecrate the symbols of authority.

Certainty has been called faith, but it is better referred to as rage, because its linkage to suppression, torture, and killing over the centuries is not accidental. On a very small scale, I have been complaining about the totalitarian instincts in diversity discussions. Look to Pakistan, or any theocracy, to see what happens when certainty rears its ugly head and contrary speech is not tolerated.

The diversity agenda laudably tries to protect scientific truth from idiosyncratic perspectives and political rights from prejudice. When it tries to protect people’s feelings, it’s just wrong. Only offensive speech needs protection, and all offensive speech deserves protection (from political, not social, reprisals). If you don’t like it, say something in reply. If it comes from inside you, say something welcoming and curious. Never shut yourself up unless you are certain that the image of yourself you are trying to portray is divine. If you work for the government, take the opportunity to remind people that freedom of speech is what separates us from dictatorships. Only shut people up if you are certain that your view of what is acceptable is divinely inspired, but then prepare to go to war against people who disagree with you.

Your faith may comfort you, but it’s your doubt that comforts me.

Religion Divides Us

Multiculturalism attempts to unite people by recognizing their similarities and honoring rather than denigrating their differences. (Not all differences should be honored, but that’s a different subject.) The paradox of multiculturalism is that many of the ways with which we think about differences create presently meaningful but ultimately useless ways of sorting people. Race, for example, is a powerful factor in social interaction, but has questionable roots as a legitimate classification. Categorizing people cannot be the solution to problems created by categorizing people.

Religion is a special case, because religious categorizations are often fraught intrinsically with denigration. Whether it is Jews referring to gentiles as dogs, Christians referring to Jews as murderers of God and drinkers of blood, or Muslims referring to infidels as beasts, the essential problem is not just tribal hatred, but the fact that religion is the way to heaven and an aspect of that way, at least for Christianity and Islam, is to despise nonbelievers. (If you don’t think that telling nonbelievers that they will spend eternity being tortured is an act of despising them, then I’m not sure you know what despise means.)

Religion is different from race because if you are from a white, racist family and you make friends with a black person, your family may call you names and you may suffer a revaluation of values (in Nietzsche’s phrasing) and strangers might kill you, but if you are religious and you make friends with a nonbeliever, you will lose your relationship with God and your family might kill you (depending on the religion). If a white daughter marries a black man, a racist parent may be upset and angry, but if she marries an infidel, she has risked her immortal soul and subjected it to everlasting torture, so her parents owe it to her, as Sam Harris points out, to purify her soul and kill her, to ensure her entry into paradise.

Jesus (quoting Leviticus) said to love thy neighbor, but he meant other Jews (and later was made by Paul to mean other Christians). Those who didn’t love Jesus could rot in hell. To the extent that categorizing people is the problem—we reserve complete humanity for those in the right categories and treat everyone else differently—religion is the ultimate categorizer. This is true because categories largely depend on words rather than on evidence. Verbal categories get us to see the world in terms of those categories, which is why race is still a powerful factor even though it doesn’t exist in nature. Nothing elevates words like religion. Only religion would put something written thousands of years ago ahead of contemporary evidence.

I recognize that not all religious people think nonbelievers are going to be tortured for eternity, or that they should be treated badly while on earth. That’s because they are only semi-religious—they believe only some aspects of the written word, not all of it. It’s not a defense of religion to say that it often doesn’t fully take hold. Their faith may comfort the faithful, but it’s their doubt that comforts anyone who has to interact with the faithful.

It takes a lot of mind-bending to look at a cross and not see Roman torture or the Inquisition or the Crusades or contemporary stupidities about geology and the reason for hurricanes and earthquakes, or to look at Muslim iconography and not see suicide bombers and honor killings and jihad. Only in religion will people hold on to iconography despite such desecrations. Oh yeah, and patriotism too. Both raise the question of whether you are going to believe what you are told or whether you are going to be a critical thinker. As someone once said, are you going to love God and Country the way four-year-old children love their parents or the way adults do? It’s characteristic of four-year-old children not only to revere their parents but also to despise anyone who doesn’t.

Intelligence is Good

Nietzsche called himself an antichrist because he tried to restore some values that Christians had discarded. Nietzsche believed that it was once good to be strong and bad to be weak, but in an effort to make the weak feel better about themselves, Jesus had taught them that it was good to be weak and evil to be strong. Much the same thinking pervades the diversity discourse. You’re not supposed to say one worldview is superior to another, regardless of what you mean by superior. You’re not supposed to say that one person exceeds another on any dimension that has a positive connotation. It’s okay to say that one person is more extraverted than another if you are careful to specify that there’s nothing wrong with introversion. You can say that one person is smarter than another if you add words to the effect that intelligence is some sort of parlor trick, and of course less intelligent people are just as worthy as smart people.

But worthy of what? The Nazis undertook to murder people who were not sufficiently intelligent, so if you suggest that intelligence ought to be a factor in college admissions, you will likely be compared to Nazis. The Nazis thought that mentally retarded individuals were not worthy to live. And, yes, that is still the technical term for them, even if professional multiculturalists insist on “people with mental retardation” to emphasize what doesn’t need emphasizing—that they are people. But it’s possible to think that mentally retarded persons, or even people in the lower half of intelligence, are not worthy to sit on the Supreme Court or not worthy to have their ideas about physics carefully considered without thinking they are not worthy to have their civil rights protected.

And yes, I recognize that “intelligence” is bandied about as a substitute for other traits, and I recognize that it is not always easy to measure intelligence (though nowhere near as hard as you might think) and I loved Stephen Jay Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man, about abuses in intelligence testing. But come on, the fact that it is not always easy to tell how smart someone is doesn’t mean that it’s evil to consider the question. Everyone can see plainly that when Will Hunting solves the math problem, it’s a function of his being smarter than most janitors. My mom’s humorous definition of intelligence was “the extent to which other people agree with me,” which captured the problem that Gould wrote about. My definition of intelligence is “how well your brain works.” It isn’t easy to tell how well someone’s brain works, but it’s a concept not substantially different from understanding how well an arm or an immune system works.

“Mentally retarded” has become an offensive term, as have the equally neutral, equally scientific terms that preceded it. These include imbecile, idiot, and moron. “Retarded,” a fancy word for slow, will soon be replaced with “intellectual disability,” and two years from then, you will hear one school kid call another an “I.D.” And then you will refer, in a perfectly professional manner, to someone as a person with I.D., and someone will wag her finger at you and tell you that there’s nothing wrong with being different.

But there is something wrong with being mentally retarded, or well below average in intelligence in a college, or barely average in a graduate school or a profession. The reason the names for being in the bottom 2% (which is the definition of mental retardation) keep turning into insults is that the condition referred to is itself undesirable. That’s what’s meant by the word, disability, which is already in danger of being substituted with “differently abled.”

Some liberals must despise disabled people to go to such lengths to disguise their real impairments with vague language, as if the disability is too horrid to contemplate. Sorry. I should have said, “people with liberal ideas.”

How to stop worrying about resentment

“Perhaps you could say more about how to stop worrying about the frightened, resentful folks?”

I’ll try.

We tend to surround ourselves with friends and partners who respond positively to what we’ve been conditioned to show and negatively to what we’ve been conditioned to hide, since when we first met them, we showed what we show and hid what we hide. If the relationship worked well enough under those circumstances to lead to friendship or romance, it’s often because they liked what they saw and didn’t lose interest when they didn’t see what was hidden.

People also become friends and lovers for reasons other than liking each other; for example, they are thrown together by circumstances, or they over-emphasize physical attraction, or they have an arranged marriage. When this happens, each person tries to impose his or her definition of himself or herself within the relationship by showing or hiding various aspects of the self, and relationships then work well or work badly depending on what is accepted and what is rejected. Showing, hiding, accepting, and rejecting are thus the relevant behaviors that determine how our interpersonal world suits us.

In this respect, it’s not surprising that so many partners resemble a parent. After all, it was our parents who first conditioned us to show certain things and to hide others. To the extent that a partner has the same taste in humanity as your parents, you are likely to experience less conflict around who you are with that person (and less freedom around deciding who you want to be).

The thing to do, if you don’t want to just be a doll created by your parents, is to decide what your own values are, which aspects of the self you think should be treasured, and which managed. Of course, you can only choose among values you have encountered, so if you want to be free, you have to meet a lot of people with different values from yours, possibly by traveling to a lot of different places, possibly by having intimate conversations with the people you happen to meet nearby. You can also get a wide sampling of values by reading literature, history, and philosophy without ever leaving your computer screen. The greatest of these is literature.

Cognitively, the best way to achieve freedom is to learn critical thinking and to apply it to all propositions, not just scientific truths, but also to all propositions about yourself, whether they be emotional, spiritual, or behavioral. (Critical thinking is, in short, a verbal method of testing and contextualizing propositions that values evidence and logic.) Emotionally, the best way to achieve freedom is to spend time with people who value different aspects of yourself from those that you value and to see whether your values are really just ways of pretending that you are not who you are as opposed to ways of ordering and organizing all of who you are. Psychotherapy, when done right, is a place to discover and accept all the aspects of yourself, so you can behave according to your values rather than according to what you are afraid to discover about yourself.

So the way to stop trying to please people who fear or resent you is to treat your happiness, creativity, humor, and insight as you would like a four-year-old child to be treated at home and not as a four-year-old child ought to be treated at a funeral or other ceremonious occasion. Enjoy rather than hush yourself. Then, when someone resents you, you will react as you would react had the person just told you that your four-year-old niece’s fantasy play in her own room was “inappropriate.” You would tell your niece to pay no heed to the strange lady (and then, I hope, your niece would add to her game a disapproving bystander, to whom unexpected and embarrassing things would happen: “And this is the lady that thinks the funny girl is unladylike, but a bird flew by and now she’s a poopyhead”).

Women Who Hate Me

There seem to be three kinds of women in my life, sorted by their reactions when I am smart or funny or gleeful. The first kind appreciates my happy, intellectual, aggressive brand of play, and some of the members of this group even play along, smacking my serves back over the net as it were, putting their own spin on my ideas, making jokes of their own, surprising and being surprised. I am married to one of those. But in this group, even the ones who merely appreciate me, laughing at my jokes and getting my ideas, foster more jokes and more ideas. There are a lot of lesbians in this group, partly because lesbians have, at a much higher rate than straight women, liberated themselves from fairy tale fantasies of daintiness, and are not psychologically allergic to exuberance. Also, of course, lesbians as a rule don’t hate men or male energy—why would they?

The second group of women is afraid of me. Once, when my younger son was three years old, I asked him, “If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?” He said, “I thought we were dragons.” Impassioned speech, unexpected ideas, inappropriate humor—these strike this group of women as interesting, but only from a distance, like fire. They don’t actively avoid me, but neither do they approach me. They’re surprised if I act kindly, but they’re not really irritated by it, because they haven’t built an explanatory architecture around what they make of me or of themselves. When I run into one of them, I see they are watchful and ready to jump out of their skins. I avoid them, not because interacting with them is unpleasant, but because I find them boring unless I am authorized to comment on what is going on between us.

The third group resents me. I mean to use Nietzsche’s term for how the weak feel about the strong, how the unhappy feel about the happy, how the dull feel about those who shine. I doubt they would read a blog I wrote, but if they did, they would bristle at my referring to myself as strong and at my referring to any woman as weak. Generally, they express their resentment by snubbing me, but some of them will directly tell me that I am unaware of my male privilege or my white privilege, as if they think that it is only my maleness and whiteness that makes me funny or clever or lively. (I am not seeking credit, by the way, for my vitality; like feeling grateful rather than guilty for having privileges, I feel lucky to be someone who has good ideas and says funny things.) These are the women who think that if a woman says something smart in a group, it’s proof that women are as smart as men, rather than enjoying what she said, and if a man says something smart in a group, they think it’s proof that he is marginalizing others by taking up air time, rather than enjoying what he said. The only thing they tend to enjoy is a man’s (or an assertive woman’s) comeuppance.

For most of my life, I spent a lot of energy trying to get resentful women to like me. Seven years ago, I promised myself to stop doing that, and I have been much happier since then. If you are yourself a person prone to happiness, cleverness, or humor, you might also want to focus on finding playmates and not on pleasing the frightened or resentful people you are bound to meet.

The advantages of some

“Radical feminism argues that the source of women’s oppression is a patriarchal society. [Patriarchy’s] fundamental premise is the oppression of women [and its] positions of power and authority … are generally reserved exclusively for men.”

You wouldn’t believe the crap I have to read just to make it through my week. I know, I know—women have had to read demoralizing crap for centuries. As if that helps. No, I don’t see how it helps anyone except the professional haters to view the world as men versus women.

And just to be clear: I have nothing against women. Some of my best friends are women. I was raised by a woman. I dated a woman in college.

My point is that many people gain political power and money by drumming up fear and anger, and the best way to drum up fear and anger is to refer to categories of people as if they are all the same. On top of the effort to paint life as a war between men and women, the quotation raises questions about what can possibly be meant by “generally reserved exclusively.” If power is reserved generally for men, that means some women have power; if power is reserved exclusively for men, that means no women have power. And that’s the problem: the conflation of the general and the particular.

There’s a simple cure. Just insert the word, some, into propositions about people. This produces, with the example above, “the source of some women’s oppression is a patriarchal society,” which is still debatable but at least not intrinsically offensive.

Another problem with construing the society as a battle between men and women is that it ignores the fact that the vast majority of men were raised by women. Supposedly, women are made (by men) to hate themselves and to perpetuate sexism, but that’s a perspective that itself defines women as impotent. Conflicts between societies, religions, and tribes can sensibly be viewed either as co-constructed or as a clash of agendas, depending on whether you think, say, the Israelis and the Palestinians are in a system together or in a clash of systems. But surely within a tribe, conflicts between the sexes can only be construed as systemic, as co-constructed. It’s as hard to be a decent man in a patriarchal society as it is to be a decent women (the recent movie, A Separation, set in Iran, is about that very difficulty).

So insist on “some.” When they tell you white people are privileged, ask them to say some white people, on some occasions. When they tell you black people voted overwhelmingly for Obama because he wants to give them stuff, ask them to say some black people. Once the exceptions are noted, they’ll be forced to attach a specific percentage to their generalizations, and their utter lack of data will become clear.