Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Apparently, the Emperor Needs an Editor

Well, congratulations, America.

We appear to have reached the next level of authoritarianism: the president apparently doesn’t just want the news. He wants the news edited to his specifications.

Donald Trump has now barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, accusing them of producing “fake news.” The outlets have challenged the ban in court, arguing that the administration is retaliating against them for their coverage. Meanwhile, the remaining television networks have suspended participation in the White House television pool in protest. (AP News⁠)

Because apparently reporting something unflattering about Dear Leader is now grounds for having your press credentials confiscated.

I suppose we’re supposed to be grateful he hasn’t required every reporter to begin the morning by saying, “Good morning, Mr. President. You look exceptionally presidential today. Your hair is magnificent. Your approval numbers are tremendous. And yes, that thing you said yesterday was absolutely brilliant.”

Maybe that’s next.

The whole point of a free press is that journalists aren’t supposed to be the president’s public-relations department.

They’re supposed to ask inconvenient questions.

They’re supposed to investigate.

They’re supposed to say, “Hold on. That doesn’t make sense.”

And, occasionally, they’re supposed to say, “No, Mr. President. That’s not what happened.”

That’s called journalism.

Apparently, we’re now experimenting with court journalism—where the people surrounding the king are expected to compliment the king.

And just when you think the absurdity has reached its ceiling, here comes science.

The administration is reportedly drafting an executive order that would create an outside board with the power to approve or veto National Institutes of Health grants. The proposed board would include political appointees, including OMB Director Russell Vought, with unanimous approval reportedly required for grants. (Reuters⁠)

Let me make sure I understand this.

For decades, America built one of the world’s most powerful scientific research systems around scientists evaluating scientific research.

Researchers submit proposals.

Experts review them.

Other scientists determine whether the methodology is sound, whether the research has merit and whether the work could advance our understanding of disease, medicine, biology or whatever particular rabbit hole they’re investigating.

But apparently we’ve decided that perhaps what science really needs is Donald Trump sitting somewhere with a red pen.

Because obviously the guy who spent years arguing about the size of crowds and whether hurricanes can be redirected with a Sharpie is exactly who I want deciding which biomedical research deserves federal funding.

“Hmm. Cancer research. Very complicated. Doesn’t make me look particularly handsome. Denied.”

“Research involving something I don’t like politically? Absolutely not.”

“Research that confirms something scientists have been telling us for thirty years? Sounds suspicious. Denied.”

And let’s be clear about something.

The issue isn’t whether the government should have standards for scientific funding. Of course it should. Taxpayer money should be accountable. Dangerous research should have safeguards. The administration already has policies restricting federally supported high-risk biological research. (HHS.gov⁠)

The issue is who gets to decide what constitutes good science.

Because science isn’t supposed to begin with:

“What does the president believe?”

It begins with:

“What does the evidence show?”

That’s the entire point.

You don’t get to vote on whether gravity works.

You don’t get to fire the thermometer because you don’t like the temperature.

You don’t get to tell the microscope that it has a political agenda because it keeps showing you something inconvenient.

And you certainly don’t get to determine scientific truth by presidential decree.

That’s not science.

That’s politics wearing a lab coat.

And this is where these two seemingly unrelated stories actually become the same story.

Control the information. Control the people who distribute the information. Control the people who produce knowledge. Then control what information and knowledge are allowed to receive institutional support.

At some point, you aren’t merely governing.

You’re constructing an information ecosystem in which the government increasingly gets to decide what Americans are permitted to hear, what researchers are permitted to pursue and which inconvenient facts receive the oxygen of public funding.

That’s how authoritarian systems work.

They don’t necessarily begin with someone kicking down your door at midnight.

Sometimes they begin with something much more mundane:

“That reporter doesn’t get a credential anymore.”

“That research doesn’t align with our priorities.”

“That scientist isn’t getting the grant.”

“That news organization isn’t welcome here.”

And each individual decision can be rationalized.

Until you step back and realize that the government has gradually replaced independent institutions with loyalty tests.

That’s the dangerous part.

Because democracy isn’t supposed to require the president to be correct.

It is specifically designed around the assumption that presidents will sometimes be wrong.

That’s why we have courts.

That’s why we have Congress.

That’s why we have inspectors general.

That’s why we have scientists.

That’s why we have journalists.

That’s why we have people whose entire job is to look at someone in power and say:

“Prove it.”

The president doesn’t need a press corps that tells him he’s wonderful.

He needs a press corps that makes him uncomfortable.

Scientists don’t need a president who tells them what conclusions they’re allowed to reach.

They need the freedom to discover that the president was wrong.

Because here’s the really inconvenient thing about science:

The universe doesn’t care who won the election.

Cancer doesn’t care about your political party.

Viruses don’t care about your campaign slogan.

Climate doesn’t care about your approval rating.

Gravity doesn’t care how many people voted for you.

And facts don’t become fake news simply because they’re inconvenient to the guy sitting behind the Resolute Desk.

So perhaps the question we ought to be asking isn’t whether Donald Trump is offended by the press or whether he thinks scientists are sufficiently respectful of his administration.

Perhaps the question is much simpler:

Why does someone with enormous political power need everyone around him to agree with him?

A confident president can tolerate criticism.

A secure administration can tolerate investigation.

A government that believes its policies can withstand scrutiny doesn’t need to control who gets to ask the questions—or who gets to conduct the research.

And if your response to criticism is to silence the critic, and your response to inconvenient science is to control the funding, eventually you aren’t defending the truth.

You’re defending the narrative.

And history has a rather unpleasant habit of reminding us what happens when governments become more interested in controlling the narrative than discovering the truth.

But hey, maybe I’m wrong.

I’m sure somebody will tell me.

Assuming they’re still allowed in the press pool.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Maybe “Fix You” Was Never About You

There are songs we hear a hundred times before we actually listen to them.

Fix You by Coldplay is one of those songs for me.

For years, I heard it the way most people probably hear it: as a song about comforting someone you love when they’re hurting. You’ve lost something. You’re exhausted. You’re trying to hold yourself together. And someone comes along and says, I’m going to fix you.

It sounds romantic.

It sounds like rescue.

But the older I get, the less convinced I am that the song is actually about fixing somebody else.

Maybe it’s about fixing yourself.

And maybe that is a much more difficult thing to admit.

The song begins with failure. Not someone else’s failure. Your failure.

You try your best and it isn’t enough. You get what you want, but it doesn’t feel like what you thought it would feel like. You lose something you can’t replace. You become tired, frustrated, and emotionally empty.

That doesn’t sound much like somebody standing outside another person’s life with a toolbox.

It sounds like someone staring at the wreckage of his own.

And then comes the line everyone remembers:

“Lights will guide you home.”

Home.

That’s an interesting word.

Not I’ll carry you home.

Not I’ll save you.

Not I’ll make everything better.

I’ll help you find your way home.

There is a difference.

Because sometimes home isn’t a physical place. Sometimes home is the person you were before life knocked enough pieces off of you that you stopped recognizing yourself.

Maybe “fixing” isn’t about repairing another human being at all.

Maybe it’s about finding the parts of yourself you abandoned along the way.

That’s the uncomfortable part of getting older. Eventually you realize nobody is coming with the magic wrench.

Nobody is going to crawl underneath your hood, replace the defective parts, tighten a few bolts and send you back onto the highway with a reassuring thumbs-up.

Unfortunately, there is no emotional Jiffy Lube.

You have to do some of the repairs yourself.

And that’s where I think Fix You becomes much more introspective than romantic.

The song isn’t necessarily saying, “You are broken, and I will make you whole.”

It can just as easily be saying, “I know what it feels like to be broken because I am broken too.”

That’s a different kind of love.

Maybe even a more honest one.

Because there is a dangerous idea buried inside the notion that we can “fix” another person. It assumes we know what is wrong with them. It assumes we know what they need. It assumes their healing is somehow our responsibility.

But people aren’t appliances.

You can’t replace somebody’s emotional alternator.

You can’t tighten their self-esteem with a socket wrench.

You can’t install a new childhood.

And you certainly can’t love somebody hard enough to make them choose healing if they’re not ready to do it themselves.

What you can do is stand beside them.

You can hold the flashlight.

You can remind them where the road is.

You can say, “You’re not alone.”

And sometimes that’s what love actually looks like.

But the deeper interpretation of Fix You is that the person holding the flashlight may need it too.

Because we’re all carrying things we don’t talk about.

Regrets.

Failures.

Lost relationships.

Things we said that we wish we hadn’t.

Things we didn’t say when we should have.

Dreams that didn’t happen.

People who left.

People we left.

Versions of ourselves that disappeared somewhere between who we thought we would become and who we actually became.

And at some point, you look around and realize that the person who needs fixing isn’t necessarily the person sitting across from you.

It might be the person looking back at you in the mirror.

That’s a harder realization.

It’s easy to believe we can fix somebody else. It gives us a job. A purpose. Something outside ourselves to concentrate on.

Fixing ourselves requires something much less comfortable:

Honesty.

It requires admitting that maybe we’re tired.

Maybe we’re lonely.

Maybe we’re angry about things we thought we’d gotten over.

Maybe we’re still carrying wounds we learned to hide so well that eventually we forgot they were there.

Maybe we’re not actually unhappy.

Maybe we’re just not sure what happiness is supposed to feel like anymore.

And maybe that’s okay.

Maybe healing isn’t some dramatic transformation where you wake up one morning and suddenly everything makes sense.

Maybe it’s smaller than that.

Maybe it’s getting out of bed when you don’t particularly want to.

Maybe it’s forgiving yourself for things you can’t change.

Maybe it’s accepting that some doors aren’t going to reopen.

Maybe it’s realizing that the person you were at twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty doesn’t have to be the person you are now.

Maybe fixing yourself isn’t becoming the person you were.

Maybe it’s becoming comfortable with the person you are.

That’s why I hear Fix You differently now.

I don’t hear a savior promising to repair somebody else’s life.

I hear somebody who understands the wreckage.

Somebody who knows what it is to lose.

Somebody who knows what it is to fail.

Somebody who knows what it is to hurt.

And perhaps somebody finally learning that healing isn’t about returning to the person you used to be.

It’s about finding your way home.

Maybe the song isn’t saying, “Let me fix you.”

Maybe it’s saying:

“I’ve been broken too. Let’s find our way back.”

And at this point in my life, I think that’s a much more meaningful promise.

Because sometimes the person we spend our entire lives waiting for to save us…

is the person we’ve been avoiding in the mirror.

Maybe that’s who we were supposed to fix all along.

Ourselves.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is something almost performance-art ridiculous about the priorities coming out of the Pentagon—or, as Pete Hegseth insists on calling it now, the Department of War. At a time when the United States is dealing with actual wars, military deployments, geopolitical threats and the very real business of keeping people alive, the secretary of war has apparently decided that one of our great national-security emergencies is whether the troops over 30 are getting sufficiently enthusiastic about waking up in the morning.

The Pentagon has now issued guidance requiring male service members 30 and older to be screened for testosterone deficiency as part of their annual health assessments. The guidance lists loss of spontaneous morning erections among the symptoms clinicians should consider. It also allows for testosterone-replacement treatment when medically appropriate. 

And yes, I realize low testosterone can be a legitimate medical condition. Nobody is arguing that soldiers shouldn’t receive appropriate medical care. If a soldier has symptoms, gets properly evaluated, has genuinely low testosterone and needs treatment, by all means treat the damn condition.

That’s called medicine.

What makes this so bizarre is the obsession with turning testosterone into some sort of military masculinity metric.

Because apparently the new definition of a warrior isn’t simply Can you do the job?

Now it’s apparently:

How’s your T?
How’s your muscle mass?
How’s your libido?
And, soldier, completely unrelated question: how’s your morning wood?

Because nothing says military readiness quite like Uncle Sam conducting a quarterly inventory of America’s erections.

Medical experts have questioned the wisdom of blanket screening. Testosterone naturally varies, and established medical practice generally focuses testing on people who have symptoms rather than assuming everyone over 30 has a hormone deficiency simply because birthdays happened. Experts have also warned that testosterone replacement isn’t a harmless performance supplement and can affect fertility and other aspects of health. 

But here’s where the whole thing becomes particularly surreal.

This is the same administration that has made a tremendous issue out of transgender people serving in the military.

The argument against transgender service has repeatedly invoked the need for strict physical and medical standards and the supposed burden of hormone treatment. Yet now the military is creating a system specifically designed to identify testosterone deficiencies and potentially provide testosterone therapy to service members.

A federal judge actually noticed the obvious contradiction and asked the administration to explain why testosterone replacement can be offered to one group of service members while hormone treatment is used as part of the argument for excluding another. 

That doesn’t require a political scientist to understand.

It requires about thirty seconds and a functioning bullshit detector.

And then there’s the larger irony.

We’ve apparently decided that transgender Americans who have served their country for years—people who may have spent much of their adult lives wearing the uniform—somehow threaten the military’s warrior ethos because their gender doesn’t conform to somebody else’s preferred definition of masculinity.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is literally checking the testosterone levels of men over 30 to determine whether they have enough of the hormone associated with being sufficiently manly.

At some point you have to wonder whether we’re defending the country or auditioning for the world’s most expensive fraternity.

There is a profound difference between military readiness and performative masculinity.

Readiness means having trained personnel, functioning equipment, competent leadership, adequate logistics, intelligence, medical support and troops who are physically and mentally capable of accomplishing their missions.

It does not mean everybody has to conform to somebody’s 1950s fantasy of what a warrior looks like.

And if somebody wants to argue that testosterone deficiencies can affect physical performance, fine. That’s a medical question. Study it. Treat people who need treatment. Establish evidence-based standards.

But let’s not pretend that a soldier’s worth is somehow measured in nanograms per deciliter.

The military needs people who can fly aircraft, maintain engines, analyze intelligence, operate communications systems, treat wounded soldiers, command units, write software, defuse bombs, repair equipment and make sound decisions when everything has gone spectacularly to hell.

Some of those people will have high testosterone.

Some will have low testosterone.

Some will be men.

Some will be women.

Some will be transgender.

And none of those biological or personal characteristics magically determine whether somebody can do the job.

Which brings me back to the name.

The Department of Defense became the Department of War in 2025, according to the department’s own history. Hegseth is now officially the Secretary of War. 

I’m old enough to remember when the whole point of having a Department of Defense was that the military existed to defend the country.

Apparently we’ve now gone from defending America to defending the Warrior Ethos, defending masculinity, defending testosterone levels and—presumably if the next memo is sufficiently enthusiastic—defending the sacred right of every 31-year-old infantryman to demonstrate that his endocrine system remains adequately patriotic.

Maybe someday we’ll get around to defending the country.

But first, apparently, somebody needs to check whether Private Johnson is awake.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where we’re spending our national-security genius.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Black Sheep Might Be Onto Something

We have a funny habit as human beings of assuming that the person who doesn’t fit in must be the problem.

We call them the black sheep.

The outlier.

The oddball.

The troublemaker.

The person who just can’t seem to get with the program.

And sometimes, sure, they really are just being difficult. Every family, office, classroom, and group of friends has at least one person who seems to have been issued a completely different instruction manual.

But here’s the thing:

Being different isn’t automatically being wrong.

Sometimes the black sheep is simply the person who looked at the herd and thought, “Um…where exactly are we going?”

And that person might actually have a point.

Progress has never been particularly kind to people who refuse to follow the crowd.

At one point, the crowd believed the Earth was the center of the universe. The crowd thought slavery was perfectly acceptable. The crowd thought women shouldn’t vote. The crowd thought segregation was normal. The crowd has repeatedly demonstrated throughout human history that being part of the majority is not necessarily evidence of being correct.

Sometimes it is just evidence that a whole bunch of people happen to believe the same thing.

There is a difference.

We teach children to conform almost from the moment they can walk. Sit here. Stand there. Do it this way. Don’t question the teacher. Don’t rock the boat. Follow the rules. Everybody else is doing it.

And eventually we grow into adults who are remarkably uncomfortable when somebody asks, “Why?”

Not “What are we doing?”

Not “Who decided this?”

Just “Why?”

That little word has probably caused more trouble throughout human history than almost any other word in the English language.

Because “why” requires us to examine assumptions.

And assumptions are comfortable.

If everybody has always done something a certain way, changing it means admitting that perhaps everybody has always done it the wrong way.

Nobody particularly enjoys that conversation.

So we ostracize the person who keeps asking questions.

We call them difficult.

We tell them they’re overthinking it.

We tell them they’re being unrealistic.

We tell them, “That’s just how things are.”

Which is possibly one of the dumbest sentences humanity has ever invented.

Because almost everything we now consider normal was once something that wasn’t normal.

Somebody had to be the first person to imagine it differently.

The black sheep might be that person.

Maybe they’re not trying to destroy the system. Maybe they’re trying to figure out why the system has a giant “DO NOT QUESTION” sign hanging over it.

Maybe they aren’t refusing to cooperate.

Maybe they simply see something the rest of us haven’t noticed yet.

Maybe their vision is different.

And different vision can be incredibly valuable.

The outlier sees the things the average person may overlook because the outlier isn’t standing in exactly the same place.

That’s why diversity of thought matters.

You don’t need everyone in the room thinking alike. In fact, if everyone in the room immediately agrees, somebody probably forgot to invite the person who asks uncomfortable questions.

The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate the black sheep.

It should be to listen to them.

That doesn’t mean they’re automatically right. Being different isn’t some magical certification of wisdom. Sometimes the black sheep is simply wrong.

But that’s the point.

We should evaluate the idea, not exile the person for having it.

Because occasionally the person standing outside the circle isn’t lost.

They’re standing there because they can see the circle.

And sometimes they’re the only person asking whether we should be drawing a circle at all.

So maybe we should stop treating the black sheep as something that needs to be fixed.

Maybe sometimes the black sheep is exactly what the flock needs.

Because conformity can keep a group moving in the same direction.

But somebody has to occasionally look up and ask whether we’re actually going anywhere worth going.

And if that person happens to be the oddball standing at the back saying, “Guys…this seems like a really bad idea,” maybe don’t ostracize them.

Maybe, just for a minute, listen.

They might be wrong.

But they might also be the one person in the room who sees the answer nobody else has considered yet.

And wouldn’t it be a little embarrassing to discover that the black sheep wasn’t the problem?

Maybe we were just following the wrong herd.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is something almost breathtaking about watching Christianity go from a movement built around a man who preached love, compassion, forgiveness, and care for the least among us to an institution that has, at various points in history, been responsible for some of the most spectacular examples of human cruelty ever committed in the name of God.

That is quite a transformation. Somewhere along the way, somebody apparently decided that turning the other cheek was less practical than turning the other guy over to the authorities.

The first-century followers of Jesus were not exactly operating from a position of power. They were a small religious movement living under Roman occupation, gathering in homes, sharing what they had, caring for the poor, and attempting to live according to the teachings of a Jewish Messiah who had some rather inconvenient things to say about wealth, power, forgiveness, and how we treat people who have absolutely nothing to offer us in return.

Love your enemies. Feed the hungry. Care for the sick. Welcome the stranger. Do unto others.

Pretty radical stuff, especially when your neighbors are living under an empire that has perfected the art of making examples out of people.

And then came Constantine.

In the fourth century, Christianity went from being a persecuted religion to an officially favored one under the Roman Empire. Eventually, the religion that had spent centuries surviving the attention of Roman authorities became entangled with the very machinery of imperial power.

The oppressed had been invited into the palace.

And apparently, they liked the furniture.

Now, to be fair, Constantine did not single-handedly invent every terrible thing Christianity would ever do. The early church was already a complicated collection of communities, arguments, and competing interpretations. And Christianity did not become a single unified institution overnight. History, inconveniently, is rarely as tidy as a Sunday school coloring book.

But Constantine’s embrace of Christianity marked a profound change in the relationship between the religion and political power. The faith that had once existed largely outside the structures of empire was now becoming part of those structures.

And once religion and government discover they can be useful to each other, well, good luck getting them to leave the party.

The religion of the persecuted could now help legitimize the power of the emperor. The message of a Messiah who said that his kingdom was not of this world became entangled with an empire that very much believed in this world, its borders, its armies, and its ability to make you disappear if you became inconvenient.

Eventually, Christianity became associated with crusades, inquisitions, forced conversions, religious persecution, and colonial conquest. People were tortured, executed, dispossessed, and enslaved while men claiming to represent the teachings of Jesus explained why all of it was necessary.

Which is a remarkable theological achievement when your central religious figure specifically told people to love their enemies.

Imagine standing before Jesus and explaining that you had just authorized the torture of somebody because they disagreed with your interpretation of his teachings.

“Well, Lord, technically, we did it for you.”

I suspect the conversation would be brief.

The uncomfortable truth is that Christianity, like virtually every major religion, has been used both to inspire extraordinary compassion and to justify extraordinary cruelty. There have been Christians who devoted their lives to caring for the poor, defending the vulnerable, and challenging injustice. There have also been Christians who used the authority of their religion to build systems of oppression.

The difference is not always the words printed in the book. Sometimes it is who gets to interpret those words, who holds the power, and who benefits from the interpretation.

The first-century followers of Jesus did not have armies, cathedrals, or the ability to summon a government to enforce their theology. They had a message, a community, and a belief that they were supposed to live differently from the world around them.

The later Christian empires had armies, cathedrals, and governments.

And apparently, once you have the army, the cathedral, and the government, you can find a theological justification for almost anything.

That is the part I find most interesting. The original message did not necessarily change because somebody found a new Bible. The political circumstances changed. The people claiming authority changed. The incentives changed.

A movement that had once challenged the powerful could now become a tool of the powerful.

And if you believe the accounts in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John about the Messiah at the center of Christianity, he probably would have had some serious objections to the arrangement.

The man who told his followers to love their enemies would likely have found the Crusades a little difficult to explain.

The man who told his followers to care for the poor might have had questions about the accumulation of enormous wealth by religious institutions.

The man who told his followers not to lord their authority over others might have had a few words for religious leaders who believed their position entitled them to control the lives of everyone else.

And the man who said that whatever you did for the least of his brothers, you did for him, might have been somewhat disappointed by the number of people who claimed to love him while treating the poor, the sick, the foreigner, and the powerless as inconveniences.

But perhaps that is the problem with institutional religion. It is one thing to follow a teacher who tells you to love your enemies. It is another thing entirely to build an institution that must defend its authority, protect its wealth, and maintain its political influence.

The teacher says, “Blessed are the meek.”

The institution says, “Yes, but we have some very aggressive lawyers.”

And so the religion that began with a man who had no palace, no army, and no political office eventually became associated with some of the most powerful institutions in human history.

The oppressed became the oppressors.

The people who had once been hunted became the people doing the hunting.

The message of compassion became a justification for conquest.

And the man who preached love and forgiveness became a symbol that could be placed on banners carried into battle.

There is a lesson in that, although it is probably not the lesson most religious institutions would prefer to teach.

It is not enough to claim allegiance to a teacher. You have to consider whether your actions resemble the teachings of that teacher.

Because if the religion you practice requires you to abandon compassion, forgiveness, humility, and care for the vulnerable in order to defend its power, then perhaps you are no longer defending the religion.

Perhaps you are defending the institution.

And those are not always the same thing.

I have no problem with people finding meaning, comfort, or guidance in Christianity. I have a problem with people using the name of a man who preached love and kindness to justify cruelty, oppression, and the accumulation of power.

If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John got it right about the Messiah, then the question is not whether Jesus would recognize Christianity.

The question is whether he would recognize what some Christians have done in his name.

And I have a suspicion that if he walked into some of our modern churches, he might look around at the wealth, the political power, and the people being told that God wants them to have more, and wonder what happened to the part about loving your neighbor.

Then again, maybe he would just turn over a few tables.

That would at least be historically consistent.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I have a question for my Republican friends who insist they are Christians, have never had a racist thought in their entire lives, and would like you to know that they love everybody equally.

If race doesn’t matter, why is it on the application?

If sex doesn’t matter, why is it on the application?

Why do I have to check a box identifying myself as one of several officially recognized versions of a human being every time I apply for a job, fill out a government form, or do just about anything else that requires paperwork?

And before somebody gets their Christian underwear in a bunch, I’m not suggesting that checking a box makes somebody racist. I’m asking why we’ve built a society that keeps reminding us that race and sex exist, then acts surprised when people notice.

We have spent generations telling people that race shouldn’t matter. Yet the government, employers, schools, and institutions have developed entire systems for collecting information about it.

Now, there is a legitimate reason for some of this. The Census Bureau explains that racial and ethnic data help measure disparities, evaluate government programs, and monitor compliance with civil rights laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says employers may collect demographic information to identify discriminatory hiring practices. (Census.gov⁠)

In other words, you can’t determine whether a system is discriminating against people if you refuse to collect information about who is being discriminated against.

That part makes sense.

But here’s where my question comes in.

If the information is so important that we need to collect it, analyze it, report it, and use it to determine whether discrimination exists, then why do some people act as though the very acknowledgment of race is the problem?

You can’t simultaneously say, “Race doesn’t matter,” and “We need to know everybody’s race so we can make sure race isn’t affecting anything.”

That’s not necessarily hypocrisy. Sometimes it is the practical consequence of trying to correct a problem that society created in the first place. But it does make for an interesting conversation.

Especially when the same people who say race shouldn’t matter suddenly have very strong opinions about who belongs in this country, who gets to play on which sports team, who should receive assistance, and whether certain people deserve the same opportunities as everybody else.

Apparently, race doesn’t matter until somebody wants to talk about race.

Then it matters a great deal.

And sex? Same basic question.

If sex doesn’t matter, why are we still asking people to identify it on government forms, employment records, and other official paperwork?

Again, there are practical reasons. Demographic information can help institutions understand who is being served, identify disparities, and determine whether policies are affecting people differently. But the existence of a legitimate reason for collecting information doesn’t mean every use of that information is legitimate.

The distinction matters.

The problem isn’t necessarily that the box exists. The problem is when somebody checks a box and the system decides that person is worth more, worth less, more qualified, less qualified, more deserving, or less deserving because of it.

And that’s the part my Christian friends seem to have trouble reconciling.

Because if you believe every person is created in the image of God, then the logical conclusion is that the color of somebody’s skin, the sex they were born with, or the category they check on a government form should not determine their value as a human being.

Not their worth.

Not their dignity.

Not their right to be treated fairly.

You don’t get to say you believe that on Sunday and then spend Monday explaining why certain people should have fewer rights, fewer opportunities, or less consideration because of something they didn’t choose.

That’s not Christianity. That’s just selective application of the manufacturer’s warranty.

And before somebody tells me that institutional racism and sexism don’t exist because they personally have never discriminated against anybody, I would like to introduce them to the concept of institutions.

An institution doesn’t need to have a racist sitting in a room rubbing his hands together like a cartoon villain to produce unequal results.

Sometimes it is a policy. Sometimes it is a tradition. Sometimes it is a hiring practice that nobody has questioned in 40 years. Sometimes it is a system designed for one group that never bothered to account for everybody else.

The EEOC recognizes both intentional discrimination and certain policies that appear neutral but disproportionately disadvantage protected groups without sufficient job-related justification. (EEOC⁠)

You don’t have to hate somebody to participate in a system that treats them differently.

You just have to be comfortable enough with the system that you never bother asking who it was built for.

And that is where I think we have confused equality with blindness.

Equality doesn’t mean pretending we are all identical.

It means recognizing that our differences should not determine whether we receive the same basic rights, opportunities, and dignity.

If the system needs to know our race to determine whether it is treating us fairly, then maybe we should stop pretending race is irrelevant.

If the system needs to know our sex to determine whether it is treating us fairly, then maybe we should stop pretending sex is irrelevant.

And if we are going to ask those questions, perhaps we should be honest about why we are asking them.

Not because one race is better than another.

Not because one sex is more deserving than another.

But because history has demonstrated that people in positions of power have not always treated everybody equally.

And if you don’t measure the problem, you can always pretend it doesn’t exist.

Which brings me back to my original question.

If race didn’t matter, you wouldn’t ask.

If sex didn’t matter, you wouldn’t ask.

The fact that we have institutionalized the collection of this information tells us something important: These categories have mattered in the way our society has been organized, and they still matter when we measure whether people are being treated fairly.

The goal shouldn’t be to pretend those differences don’t exist.

The goal should be to make sure they don’t determine who gets to live a full and equal life.

And if that sounds like a radical concept to somebody who claims to follow Jesus, perhaps they should spend a little less time checking everybody else’s boxes and a little more time reading the part about loving your neighbor.

Because apparently, even the Son of God couldn’t get through to some people without a government form.