A Whiter Shade of White, Part I

Hard times for whiteness. First, there's all that snow. Then this year's Oscars, accompanied by the drumbeat that too many of the nominees were white. Add an organized  campaign by allegedly literate people to enlist readers in a boycott of books by white men for a year in order to give more time to reading books by women, people of color, and LGBT. And then there's the full-court press coming from the liberal end of the political spectrum to prove that not only can't white men jump, they can't emote, evolve, engage, empathize, emancipate, or get the eff out of the way. Numerous times a week reputedly progressive websites, like Salon, will run articles with titles like Let's Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is White or Detangling Racism: White Women's Fixation with Black Women's Hair. One cannot begin to imagine the uproar from liberals if that first article expressed hope that the bomber was black or the second article accused black women of being fixated on white women's hair. This broad brush application of white, white, white to an array of real and imagined social injustices appears to be part of some incoherent strategy to fight racism with racism of a different color. Joan Walsh, author of a book that neatly fits this bizarre zeitgeist with its title What's the Matter with White People?, offers tortured witness to her struggle with what she calls her self-loathing whiteness. After her black lover broke up with her (for her whiteness, she believes), she writes:

After my wake-up call, finally resigned to being white, I started speaking out against the casual, mindless anti-white racism I had always ignored. We’re not talking Klan violence here. The vast majority of the people I worked with weren’t racist. But there was a fairly common, reflexive use of white as an epithet — white politician, white funder, white teacher — without modifier or qualifier. White had become shorthand for “arrogant, ignorant, out of touch.” I began to say a polite “Excuse me?” when I heard these casual slights, the way my black friends did at white insensitivity...Early in my awakening I quarreled with an Asian-American colleague who formed a “people of color caucus” inside a do-gooder group that was white-led, but mainly comprising minorities. Why do that, I asked him — cautiously, nervously — why exclude white colleagues and allies, especially when they were the minority? Was there a program goal? He was silent for a moment, then angry. “We’ve been excluded for so long — they should know how it feels.”

"They should know how it feels." All us whiteys, I guess. I don't pretend to know what it's like to walk in the shoes of the un-white, un-male...though I have tried often and openly enough to empathize. Below is a copy of a letter I wrote to the LA Times in 1991. It's more than a little embarrassing to have to dig out evidence that you're basically a good guy, but that's where this blanket condemnation of whites in general and white men in particular is heading. 






















Since I've had some experience with this new, entitled strain of bigotry, I know exactly what the reaction would be if I tried to offer my letter as credential to get on what Korean-American playwright Young Jean Lee calls "the good person list". The reaction I would get would be, "So you wrote a nice letter to the LA Times and now you want a medal for doing the right thing?" (that is almost verbatim what I got when I once tried to establish my credibility on the issue of equality for women). Young Jean Lee, author of the play Straight White Men, knows whereof I speak. She says, in speaking about herself:   

"Because now there's this Asian female playwright who can be a role model for other artists of color, and I'm helping with diversity. And so I can do whatever I want and sort of get on the good-person list. And it occurred to me as I was doing the show, and listening to people talk about straight white men — straight white men don't really have that option."

DoingStraight White Men has been a profound learning experience for Lee, as she describes in an article about creating the play:

"I asked a roomful of women, queer people and minorities, 'What do you want straight men to do? And what do you want them to be like?' " she recalls. Lee wrote down all of the answers. It boiled down to this: They wanted the straight white male character to sit down and shut up. "When you hear that around the table, you just feel yourself sinking slowly into the chair," remembers James Stanley, who plays the character created from the list. The character, named Matt, is a sort of idealized straight white male. He works for a not-for-profit and is guided by a sense of trying not to — in his words — "make things worse." Lee and Stanley workshopped the character in front of the students. Who hated him. "Hated him," Lee said, clearly still surprised. "And I realized that the reason why they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser. [Matt] is exhibiting behavior that gets attributed to people of color, not being assertive, not standing up for himself, always being in a service position."

With my oft-stated affection for irony, I cannot resist the whole conceit of Lee's play. But  then Lee says,  “My nightmare interpretation of the play would be, like ‘Oh everyone just suffers the same … straight white men are the victims.’ Because they’re not. Because as a straight white man, all you have to do to make the problem go away is to not give a shit.”
What I like about that statement is that it echoes what I essentially said in my letter to the LA Times. As a straight white guy I could more easily afford to keep looking for a job than the black woman who got the job instead of me. That is a fact, and as I said in my letter any man who denies it is either dumb or dishonest. On the other hand, for Ms. Lee to suggest that any straight white man can make his problems go away by simply not giving a shit undercuts the wisdom inherent in her play. My father, for just one example from the world of straight white men, could not make the problem of helping to provide for a family of six in the face of chronic joblessness go away just by not giving a shit (I think my dad would've rather been called a "dirty Mick" than privileged…it certainly would've made more sense to him). There are long-term unemployed men all over this country today whose problems cannot be alleviated for all the straightness and whiteness at their command. To claim otherwise…to claim all white men are "privileged"... is no less stupid or false than it is to claim that minorities are not disadvantaged by prejudice. Progressives, once renowned for their sense of nuance, now have difficulty seeing that those two truths are not mutually exclusive. They have bought in to the idea that those two truths are incompatible. In doing so, liberals are willfully becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.