#COURAGEOUS CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE CHAPTER 10 FULL#

#COURAGEOUS CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE CHAPTER 10 FULL#

I needed the full week for this one.īut a funny thing happened that week. This fear of writing about this topic seemed like it was an important part of the topic. I never felt scared to write about anything before. I also noticed that I wasn’t feeling the normal confidence I felt when I started a new post. But why was all of this happening now? Was the problem related to social media? To politics or current events? Was it some broader cultural or psychological phenomenon? There were a bunch of bad trends: Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives. I’d knock out a draft tonight, give it a read tomorrow, and publish it.īut nothing came out. So I opened WordPress to write a little post about that cloud I felt hovering over my other post topics. A mini-post is much chiller-I just open WordPress and type what’s on my mind, and post it.

I bathe in the topic for a little while, dread writing it for a little while, then finally pump it out, draw the drawings, give it a read, and post. Wait But Why articles are long, and they go deep. So I decided to write what I call a “mini post.” And a good compass for me had always been that if something was incessantly on my mind, it was probably a good post topic. The fun thing about being a blogger is you can write about whatever the fuck you want. It felt like we were losing our grip on something important. Something seemed off about the society around me, like there had been a subtle, foreboding shift in the balance between reason and madness. There was a different feel to the world than there had been in my previous blogging years.

I believe at a deep level that the future is going to be an amazing, exhilarating ride, and nothing is more fun than learning about cutting edge developments that can offer clues into what magic might lie down the road.īut on June 18, 2016, I didn’t feel excitedly optimistic. My urge to write about the future comes from an excited optimism that’s fundamental to my personality. But lately, it felt like there was a cloud hanging over all these topics. So many of the post ideas I was scanning through were about the future.

On the afternoon of June 18, 2016, I was sitting on the couch engaging in a familiar ritual: looking through my list of future post ideas, trying to pick my next topic. Wait But Why had been around for three years, a stretch during which I wrote about 100 blog posts on dozens of topics. Obama was president, the Cavs were on their way to beating the Warriors in the NBA finals, Game of Thrones was still good, and I was 34 years old with my whole life ahead of me.

Courageous conversations about race chapter 10