Whataboutism

Pointing fingers is a big problem that society has almost normalized, a type of it is whataboutism. Everyone has used it at least once, it is the last resort when you have no response, but it is not right. It has been called out before, for example people who claim “All Lives Matter” or when somebody says not all men, these are all whataboutism that you see in your daily life, but it needs to stop.

“Whataboutism is the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.”

Basically, whataboutism is an attempt to change the subject while deflecting the conversation towards your opponent, using the sentence “what about x”.

A variant of the ‘tu quoque’ fallacy is whataboutism or whataboutery and it dates as far back as 1978. It was used politically in newspapers and books, and it was said over human rights abuses and oppression.

But there are two types of whataboutism. Number 1 is a tactic people use in a conversation to re-direct the accusation or criticism towards someone or something else, but meanwhile not addressing what they were blamed for. For example:

Person 1: You have not done the dishes yet.

Person 2: What about you? You did not take out the garbage.

This is hypocritical, they can simply create a valid argument or debate, but they refuse to justify their point by addressing the fact that someone else did this and that, making them think what they did is okay.

Number 2 is using the term whataboutism as a reply instead of discussing. Often, it is used when a person is hit with a non-defensible argument, which drives them to call it whataboutism, thus leaving it a non-debatable argument, no matter how correct one side may be. For example:

Person 1: Person 3 is horrible; he throws trash on the ground.

Person 2: Don’t you do that too?

Person 1: Quit your whataboutism.

Sometimes people confuse what whataboutism is, quite often a person is just contextualizing, that is when it is NOT whataboutism, and they are just giving you a valid point. If you are justifying what you did or said and not trying to change the topic or deflect the conversation towards someone else, it is not whataboutism.