I think I’m beginning to see a pattern here. Someone makes a well-meaning comment that seems pretty obvious. Black Lives Matter. Please consider whether your Halloween costumes might offend someone. We need to have more people of color involved in discussions about how we can improve education for people of color. Happy Holidays.

Someone else takes the comment as a personal affront and posts a nasty screed, and we’re off to the races. Next thing you know, we’re talking about freedom of speech, political correctness, and who is allowed to express which opinion, but the underlying issue gets carefully avoided.

As I suggested in my blog post about Halloween costumes at Yale, the underlying issue that is being avoided is how to live in a post Christian White Male dominated culture.

The latest is a selfie the Rev. Shelley Best took at a training session for educators in Hartford, where she observed the lack of people of color in a workshop discussing the achievement gap. A person in the background took offense, and now we see

Facebook 'Selfie' Provokes Debate On Online Civility, Teacher Diversity

There have been a lot of posts about this, like Susan Campbell’s White people can be unbearably tender.

She ends up with

I would hope the conversation would veer from “But I’m not racist!” to what it means to live in a multi-faceted, multi-cultural world. We could use a conversation like that.

Well, for me, trying to live in a multi-faceted, multi-cultural world, I like having a discussion with my wife about whether we want Thai food or Mexican food tonight. I try to respect other cultures as much as I can, but know that I will continue to say insensitive things as I try to learn about other cultures and weave parts I like into my own life.