The interesting thing here isn’t necessarily the back and forth between the two. She seemed to present him with an ill thought through question — and he deconstructed the semantics of it — and then ignored the implications (quite rightly).

What is more concerning is the current vogue for trending off ‘feelings’. How I ‘feel’ about something has very little moral weight, it doesn’t bear relation to objective facts and it is increasingly given more and more credence. Society has shifted the dialogue away from what someone has done… in this case, skilfully avoiding a banal question into how that action impacts the feelings of others.

We are a society forming the deterrents of weaponised offence as part of the social contract. The implicit contract is ‘be nice to me and I won’t denounce you in public as committing the crime of making me feel uncomfortable’. Weaponising offence in this way is retrograde and even Medium curates away from offending others. Discourse falls away, echo chambers are built and every movement has equal philosophical validity and complete stagnation.

It was a shit question. It has nothing to do with her being a woman and him being black. A shit question is a shit question — retreating into weaponised offence as a form of self defence instead of reflecting on what journalistic skill was lacking is Katie Couric’s main flaw. She’ll get over it.

Great article. Very enjoyable.