Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

by Ijeoma Oluo

Ours is a society where white culture is normalized and universalized, while cultures of color are demonized, exotified, or erased.

“Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” When writer Sarah Hagi said those words in 2015, they launched a thousand memes, T-shirts, and coffee mugs. The phrase has now become a regular part of the lexicon of many women and people of color—especially those active on social media. The sentence struck a chord with so many of us because while we seemed to have to be better than everyone else to just get by, white men seemed to be encouraged in—and rewarded for—their mediocrity.

white male mediocrity is a baseline, the dominant narrative, and that everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.

The rewarding of white male mediocrity not only limits the drive and imagination of white men; it also requires forced limitations on the success of women and people of color in order to deliver on the promised white male supremacy. White male mediocrity harms us all.

When I talk about mediocrity, I talk about how we somehow agreed that wealthy white men are the best group to bring the rest of us prosperity, when their wealth was stolen from our labor.

I can guarantee that women would be able to handle equal pay or a harassment-free work environment right now, with no ramp-up. I’m certain that people of color would be able to deal with equal political representation and economic opportunity if they were made available today. So for whose benefit do we need to go so slowly? How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?

The man who never listens, who doesn’t prepare, who insists on getting his way—this is a man that most of us would not (when given friendlier options) like to work with, live with, or be friends with. And yet we have, as a society, somehow convinced ourselves that we should be led by incompetent assholes.

Perhaps one of the most brutal of white male privileges is the opportunity to live long enough to regret the carnage you have brought upon others.

Nothing says “American” like a boy making a woman struggle so that he can seem independent.

A political movement that focuses on class and ignores the specific ways in which gender determines the financial health and well-being of women in this country will be a movement that maintains the patriarchy. Reproductive justice, job discrimination, health care discrimination, educational bias, gendered violence, sexual harassment—none of these issues are addressed in a class-only approach. A class-only approach will help some women financially, but not much beyond the degree that their economic status is tied to white supremacy. It will not help women of color much at all.

It is on those campuses where they first learned how our political systems and our political identities work. And it’s on campuses where they learn that those systems and identities can be used to consolidate political power for those who are willing to play on the base racist and sexist fears of white men and of those who benefit from their proximity to white men.

Although white people in our progressive cities and towns may pat themselves on the backs for having never called anyone a nigger, many of them also hope that we will not notice the strict racial segregation of neighborhoods and schools, the overpolicing of Black and brown neighborhoods, the job discrimination, or the persistent racial wealth gaps.

Southern Strategy. Shifting the focus of the campaign to one of law and order, protecting state’s rights, and promises of returning America to the average workingman, the campaign employed clearly recognized codes (which are still used to this day) for “we will restore your position of superiority over Black people.”

When you can’t keep women out anymore, and you can’t force them all to become secretaries or teachers because modern social politics demand that you at least pretend to support gender equality in the workplace, what can you do to keep women out of powerful positions in business? You can set them up to fail—or, to be more accurate, you set them up to fall. It’s called the glass cliff,

Many of the hardships women face in the workplace are due to the overvaluing of white men. How many times in recent years have you heard the argument that a white man shouldn’t be fired for sexual harassment or other gross misconduct because it would “jeopardize his future” or “waste his potential”? Every white man in business is pure potential. Every white man from unpaid intern to CEO could be our next great leader, our next great innovator. To harm the trajectory of any white man—no matter how incompetent, no matter how many women or people of color he stepped on or groped along the way—would be a risk too large to take. But what are women worth? What would it look like to value us and our potential? What is the risk of destroying our careers before they even start?

To be a white man—a straight, abled, cisgender white man—in public office means never having to say you’re sorry and still getting reelected.

Whereas Chisholm’s candidacy had been ridiculed and dismissed, the white male candidates ended up making history for their embarrassing levels of incompetence and corruption.

While we like to give lip service to the diversity and open opportunity of our political process, the truth is that much of white America completely ignores the political lives of people of color—especially women of color. We are often seen as a reliably Democratic voting bloc, to be pulled out each election cycle to vote for a mediocre white Democratic candidate and then put back in storage until the next election.

climb, shouldn’t have to struggle, as others do. It’s the idea not only that they think they have less than others, but that they were supposed to have so much more. When you are denied the power, the success, or even the relationships that you think are your right, you either believe that you are broken or you believe that you have been stolen from. White men who think they have been stolen from often take that anger out on others.