All the Reasons It Wasn’t Your Fault
The fish was going to be pan-fried. The beer Japanese. The anime was one of those quietly absurd farming shows—cows, vegetables, seasonal weather, nothing that asks anything of you. Instead I spent several hours on Twitter arguing with people who were absolutely certain my opinions carried no weight because I’m white and have a dick.
This is how it started. A Berlin activist named Malaika Bunzenthal had spent weeks attempting to publicly discredit a writer named Jana Seelig. Malaika created the hashtag #NotJustSad in late 2014—a space for people to write openly about depression, which found a real audience. Then the media picked it up, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, ZDF, and Spiegel Online all put Jana’s face on the story. Malaika’s explanation for why she wasn’t chosen? The media bypassed her because of her darker skin. Systematic racism. A white face photographed better.
Don Alphonso wrote up the full history of the dispute on his media blog at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and it’s worth reading if you want the specifics. The short version: a fight over who gets credit for a hashtag is not, in itself, a particularly interesting story. What made it interesting was the argument Malaika built around it—and the way that argument closed off any response that didn’t already agree with her.
And that’s what got under my skin.
Yes: men have it easier than women. White people have it easier than people of color. White men have it easier than Black women. These are true statements. They point to real structural problems that require real structural solutions, and I’m not here to argue otherwise. But there’s a move I keep seeing, and it goes like this: because systemic discrimination exists, every individual setback is evidence of that system. Didn’t get the job? Racism. Didn’t get the media coverage? Racism. Got pushed to the margins? Racism. Full stop, no further analysis required or permitted.
The problem with this isn’t just logical—it’s practical. If your gender or your skin color is the only variable you’re willing to examine, you’ve made yourself impossible to help and impossible to satisfy. The world becomes pure antagonist. You become pure victim. And somewhere in there, the actual work of changing things gets lost.
I’m white. I have a penis. In the cosmology of people who need a reason for everything, this makes me a kind of god—someone for whom nothing should ever go wrong, for whom every door should open. But I have a full catalog of excuses ready for every failure, same as everyone else. Too fat for this girl. Too thin for that sport. Too ugly for this photo. Too pretty for that position. The architecture of self-protection is enormous and has infinite rooms. I’m just not permitted to live in the race-and-gender wing.
Offering any of this on Twitter was not my best decision in terms of expected outcomes. One account told me, You just don’t get it. You’re white—you don’t get to define what racism is. Period.
And then: You’re white. A potato.
Another asked, not without a certain logic, You’re explaining to a WoC activist, as a white guy, how she should better handle white supremacy bullshit. Notice something?
Someone called Rudi Riot weighed in: Really sad how you use your privilege.
Privilege. That word came up a lot that evening. The implication was that I should shut up because I have no standing—that my life is so frictionless I can’t possibly understand what it’s like to hit real obstacles. Maybe. But I notice that privilege is often invoked not to end injustice but to end conversations that might complicate someone’s preferred framework. If you can dismiss the argument by dismissing the speaker, you never have to engage with what’s actually being said.
The irony wasn’t lost on me: the people accusing me of exclusion were excluding me. Shut out of the debate because I’m male and white. The very mechanism they claimed to be fighting.
I’m not arguing that Malaika has nothing to contribute. The opposite, actually. I think there’s something real in her—something that could push things forward. But not like this. Not by burning energy trying to establish authorship of a hashtag while wrapping the whole fight in a theory that makes external validation the only proof of worth, and racism the only possible explanation for its absence. That she invested so much effort proving she invented #NotJustSad while simultaneously insisting it shouldn’t be personalized is a contradiction that nobody in her corner seemed to notice.
Systemic discrimination is real. It’s documented. It produces concrete harm. Pretending otherwise is its own form of dishonesty. But systemic discrimination and individual failure are not the same thing, even when they coexist. You can face genuine prejudice and also have made a bad pitch. You can live inside an unfair system and also have been wrong about something. The system being rigged doesn’t mean every outcome is a result of the rigging.
When I fail at something—and I fail at plenty of things—I can usually produce five or six reasons why it wasn’t really my fault. Some of them are even true. But the only way I’ve ever actually improved at anything is by identifying the parts that were specifically my fault and working on those. That requires a kind of ruthlessness toward yourself that feels genuinely awful and is, I think, necessary.
If you let your fear of really trying—against whatever obstacles are in your way—hide behind your gender or your skin color or whatever else is available, then you’re the one choosing the ceiling. Not them. Not the system. Just you.
The fish was still in the fridge when I finally closed the laptop. The beer had gone warm. I never started the anime. I sat with the particular discomfort of having said something I believe, out loud, to people who found it monstrous—which is either a sign I was wrong, or a sign I said something true in a direction they didn’t want it to go. I’m still not entirely sure which.