My Article Condemning Racial Segregation Was Removed from a Medium Publication. Huh?

Last October, I published an article slamming the King County Library System in Washington state for holding racially segregated “DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Sessions” — one for “People of Color” and one for “People Who are White”, which you can marvel at here:

Below is the image that made the rounds on social media and prompted me to write the article in the first place:

The image wasn’t fake, as the King County Library System released a statement justifying their decision by claiming that the racially segregated “listening sessions” were voluntary.

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Ahem.

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For those of you who are new to my writing or just like reading my Declaration of Culture War, I’ve made it my own personal mission to fight wokeness, especially in the arts and in our cultural institutions. I don’t do this to score political points for my side; I’m an old school liberal, a far cry from the reactionary right-winger I’m often accused of when I criticize things like, well, racial segregation, especially when it’s pretending to be about fairness and compassion.

I’m against racism from the political right, but I’m also against racism from the political left. And, since I consider myself a part of the political left, I consider it my duty to criticize my own side, regardless of the slings and arrows I take from people whose overall goals, if not their means to achieve them, for the U.S. I largely agree with.

So it came as a surprise when someone from An Injustice! reached out to me about including my article in their Medium publication about “voices”, “values”, and “identities”.

Just looking at their banner image made me think that I was being punk’d, as it represents so much of what’s become the butt of my jokes and the target of my ire as of late. Check it out below:

Did the editors of the story not read the article and, therefore, didn’t realize that the publication was attacking their bastard brand of Social Justice?

Or maybe the editors thought it would be good to finally live up to the “diversity of story and thought” touted in the About section of their Patreon page.

I was calling out racism, yes, but racism from people like them. The activist-minded race-and-gender-obsessed woke cult that believes identity is more important than character.

But what the hell? I thought.

An Injustice! is a relatively large publication on Medium, and I could use the claps. More importantly, it was an opportunity to be a contrarian voice in an ideological echo chamber. Could be fun to be a nasty, steaming pile of heterodox vomit on their steam-cleaned carpet.

So I accepted their offer and waited patiently for the angry condescension to explode in the comments section, as often does with many of my vehemently anti-woke articles.

But for a while, all was quiet and still.

My article got a fair amount of traffic, plenty of claps, and even received a few positive comments.

Huh.

Perhaps the adherents of wokeness are more capable of grappling with opposing viewpoints than I gave them credit for.

Goddamn, have the wokies finally developed the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in their brainpans without going insane?

Are they finally starting to take up the bigotry-parading-as-compassion they’ve been peddling?

Am I fighting a beast that’s lost its teeth?

Heh. No, no, and no, as I’d find out soon.

I’ll let you, dear reader, wander over to my article and see the righteous objections yourself. For those of you who prefer to spare yourselves the eye-hell of woke stupidity that’s spread into the comments section like angry mold, I’ll just say that there are a few too many people there who believe that separating participants by skin color in the workplace is fine and good in the quest for racial equality.

For example, one of the criticisms I received was that, because the King County Library System wanted honest feedback from its employees, it was better that folks were separated by race.

I don’t know, man. Why not just have employees fill out anonymous surveys? Eliminate the melanin element and let employees share their experiences and views freely and privately. And let’s not forget the wretched bitch of intersectionality: which room should biracial folks sit in? Multiracial folks? I’m Latino, but I have light skin; would I be “encouraged” to sit in the “People Who are White” room?

No way, bub. Count me out of any practice that David Duke would endorse even after reading the fine print.

Because the Medium algorithm, like God, works in mysterious ways, I didn’t start receiving blowback until several weeks after my article was published. Featured in a newsletter, shared on Facebook, or pushed by a bored Almighty, I’ll never know.

And then, not long after racists berated me for condemning racial segregation, I was told that my article wasn’t a fit for their publication “at this time”. Maybe next week it’ll be fit, then?

So maybe I shouldn’t expect fine quality control from a publication that puts out articles like “‘Pansexual’: An Etymological Timeline” or “Protect Black Women, but Most Importantly, Allow Us to Be Mediocre” or “The Discomfort of Being a Prude Who’s Also a Feminist”.

Perhaps I should bristle at how unprofessional it was for a publication to eject my article after it’d been up for over a month and attracted a fair bit of attention, both positive and negative. It spurred conversation that was different than the usual kind of mindless agreement most of their other articles provoke. Why not feature more content that rattles some cages? Content that confronts rather than comforts? Treats its readers as adults who can handle challenging ideas?

So fine. I don’t care. I wanted out anyway, ya sanctimonious fucks.

Well, not really. The bump in earnings was nice. I got a few extra followers out of it. And for a brief shining moment there I got to live the dream I never had of being a woke writer. It was weird, but nice. There’s no rush like the rush of waking up every morning knowing, simply knowing, that all I needed to do to fix the world according to my whims was to be loud and wordy. People would simply believe what I told them, because disagreeing with me is like agreeing with Adolf Hitler and Harvey Weinstein.

And now that whitewater rapid rush is gone.

Reality has sunk in.

After looking at the data behind the disparities between genders and racial groups, I’m learning that bigotry isn’t as prevalent as I thought.

Words have clear, consistent definitions in this dull Matrix, and I no longer have the ability to mangle them to win political disagreements.

And I’m realizing more and more that skin color doesn’t really matter to me.

Damn.

The real world blows.

Oh well.

At least I still have that other article in An Injustice!:

Ain’t I a stinker?