The author’s name is Rebecca Stevens.
https://rstevensalder.medium.com/?p=dac81dbc8418
Here is her article on Paragliding.
Ms. Stevens is really good at capturing the specific nuances that make encounters with racism so painful and frightening. You can’t really see this in the paragliding article. Because it’s about getting away from racism, it describes racism in vague terms. This is what most writers about racism do all the time. Ms. Stevens, however, does this relatively rarely. She is at her best when she describes things that actually happened to her with vividly concrete details. Many is the time I have read the title of one of her articles and thought “oh come on! That isn’t racist!”. Then after I read the article, I realize that anyone in her situation, having gone through what she went through, would have reacted the same way. There are a lot of things I no longer do or say because she has made me aware of how my actions and words could be (mis)interpreted. Her sense of both crucial details and underlying moods is a model that any writer would do well to emulate.
Nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed your “flights” of rhetorical abuse and I hope she can take them in the same spirit I did. Britain has a long tradition of privileged people taking verbal potshots at each other, which can be all in good fun as long as there is unspoken respect all around. Unfortunately, marginalized people cannot take this respect for granted, which is why they often cannot respond to cruel jokes as cavalierly as the privileged. That includes those who have the privilege to occupy the body of an imaginary flightless bird, and thus allegedly escape their personal histories.
Wittgenstein more or less said that if a real penguin could talk, we couldn’t understand it. Thought-experiment Penguins, however, can built straw-creature arguments and go wherever their flights of fancy take them, at least for a while. But this particular straw-creature can be easily brought down to earth. Ms. Stevens’ recurring point is that even when she is as rich, accomplished and successful as she is, she still has to deal with racism: On the job, in the street, and in countless social interactions. Read her other articles if you want to find out how painful those can be. If one of your poor-white charges at the soup kitchen became as affluent as Ms. Stevens, they would not have to deal with racist abuse: abuse that Ms. Stevens will never be able to escape no matter how rich she gets. Conversely, if the hand of God touched the forehead of one of your most wretched white social work cases, and made that person black, No matter how bad it is now, their situation would become even worse.
At this point, most Wokesters would say “No one has ever said all white people are better off than all black people.” But there is no statement that hasn’t been believed by someone, no matter how self-evidently false it might be. I have seen Medium articles which have said that the poorest White Person is better off than the richest Black person. Chris Rock said “No white person would want to change places with me, and I’m rich.” Personally, I would gladly be black if I also received his talent and perceptive insight. (And I wouldn’t mind having his money, either.). So your argument (a kind of prolonged Reductio Ad Absurdum) still works against some people, even though there is a good answer to it.
One more thing. I follow Stephen’s articles, and I’m glad to have his perspective. But he’s only 23, so he hasn’t learned to write with any where near the skill or perceptiveness of either Ms. Stevens or Steve QJ. I think he will someday be at their level, but we shouldn’t overpraise a writer just because we agree with their conclusions. In another comment I’ll recommend and critique some of my favorite writers on issues of Race and Privilege.
