The Rabbit

About whataboutism, or whataboutery.

There’s no getting around this brief chat, if we’re truly going to grapple with our difficulties in changing our class mindsets in our old age. Whataboutism is in essence a modern edition of the old adage in the pot calling the kettle black. In more playground grade school terms, it’s a weak-sauce version of “I know you are, but what am I?”

I had to look it up, because I don’t recall many Latin tenets from my studies. It’s a type of fallacy called tu quoque, which basically means, and so are you. It’s an ancient defense mechanism that tries to justify how it’s okay for me to have done a thing, because you, or so-and-so, once did it too, or you or so-and-so did something similar enough to generalize your infraction as part of a greater sum of equitable infractions that were, in your opinion, excused before you committed your infraction.

As the guys at Miriam-Webster wonder, using whataboutism as an excuse for one’s actions is essentially asserting a rhetorical question each time it’s posed: if everybody’s guilty of something, is anybody guilty of anything?