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by
Ijeoma Oluo
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May 9 - May 27, 2024
This is a book that can sadly be updated over and over and over with the cycles of violence we find ourselves in, whenever systems of white male power are threatened. Treating every cycle like it is an anomaly won’t help us fight it. Recognizing the patterns of behavior that uphold those cycles and the parts we play in them will.
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.
everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.
But I will argue that we condition white men to believe not only that the best they can hope to accomplish in life is a feeling of superiority over women and people of color, but also that their superiority should be automatically granted them simply because they are white men. 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
the effort of enlightenment and connection is an injustice they shouldn’t have to face.
But the expectation of accomplishment is not an accomplishment in and of itself. By making whiteness and maleness their own reward, we disincentivize white men from working to earn their privileged status. If you are constantly assumed to be great just for being white and male, why would you struggle to make a real contribution?
This country’s wealth was built on exploitation and violence, and those who worked hardest to build it were not empowered or enriched by its successes—they were enslaved people, migrant laborers, and domestic workers. Much of this country’s early infrastructure, for example, was built with slave labor, and then with grotesquely underpaid immigrant labor and prison labor. Many of our business and political leaders were freed to dedicate their time and energy to their professional success by the unpaid labor of wives and mothers and the underpaid labor of nannies and housekeepers.
our society rewards behaviors that are actually disadvantageous to everyone.
Elite white men don’t need actual competition from rising and striving average white men. Instead, this status becomes a birthright detached from actual achievement. It is an identity that clings to mediocrity.
Yes, of course our powerful and respected men would be shown to be abusers and frauds—that is how they became powerful and respected.
the act of scalping one’s enemies had existed in European cultures for over two thousand years before European colonizers arrived on the shores of this continent.
actual conservationists often said that “BLM” stood for the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining” because of the extent to which the bureau allowed cattle grazing, logging, and mining on protected lands.
of the strongest identifiers of American culture and politics, where cooperation is weakness and others are the enemy—to be stolen from or conquered.
We were that desperate for a white man to not be trash that we treated mediocrity like it was a masterpiece.
They were two white dudes who came into a movement and made it about themselves. In their activism, they became momentary rock stars, despite having little skill or dedication to the movement itself.
They get to be highly flawed, they get to regularly betray the values of their movement, yet they will be praised for their intentions or even simply for their presence—while women must be above reproach in their personal and public lives in order to avoid seeing themselves and their entire movement engulfed in scandal.
after hundreds of years of white presidents primarily looking after the interests of white people, white Americans couldn’t imagine that a Black president was capable of looking out for the interests of everyone.
white men are finding that the overwhelmingly white-male-controlled system isn’t meeting their needs, how did we end up being the problem?
Our institutions of higher education not only contain the same basic bigotries as the rest of society; they have also been the place where many of those prejudices were legitimized through deliberately biased study.
Universities in America began as religious colleges in the colonies whose purpose was to train wealthy young white men to enter the ministry. This was not necessarily the quiet, humble calling we might think of today. Colonial America was a very religious place, and joining the clergy was the fastest track to social and political power.
This burgeoning diversity created a problem for elite universities: many of the new students were Jewish. By the early 1920s, approximately 21 percent of Harvard’s students and 40 percent of Columbia’s were Jewish.
The Harvard board declined to institute the strict quotas on Jewish enrollment that Lowell wanted. Instead, they changed the admission criteria, opting instead to focus more on things like birthplace and family background. They also looked at subjective qualities: athletic ability and the vague “personality.”9 While Harvard touted these changes as steps to increase diversity, they really gave the school a way to quietly prioritize non-Jewish students by emphasizing traits and criteria, like athleticism, that they assumed Jewish students were less likely to have. They were able to hide bigoted
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Brigham was asked by the College Board to help develop a new test to screen college applicants for academic ability: the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT.
had come to realize that what his tests showed, instead of intelligence, was the test-taker’s ability to speak English, attend good primary schools, and demonstrate a strong familiarity with white culture.
should come as no surprise, then, given the SAT’s racist origins, that since its inception, poor students, Black students, Hispanic students, and Indigenous students have consistently received scores on the test that are double-digit percentages lower than white students. And that SAT scores have long been recognized as poor indicators of actual college readiness.
These HBCUs were denied the needed funding to invest in agriculture and mechanical sciences, the way white land-grant colleges had been able to, so they focused primarily on teaching future educators. The lack of investment in mechanical and scientific programs would hurt the reputations of HBCUs for decades to come and would cut them off from valuable sources of research funding through today.
budget. On the chopping block were after-school programs, funding for textbooks
Today’s college graduate can expect to make over $1 million more on average over their lifetime than someone with only a high school diploma. Even as the average student debt rises above $30,000 per student, college is still a pretty good deal in the long run.
few people on the left like to extrapolate and say these numbers mean that people who vote Democratic are smarter than people who vote Republican. That is an unkind and untrue assumption. It also ignores many of the reasons why people do or do not go to college (or even have access to it) and erases the various ways in which we can define knowledge or talent outside of academia.
is a broken system that can do a lot of harm to marginalized people. Yet it’s the best place in America for our young people to formulate their social and political consciousnesses. How very sad.
People of color—especially Black people, Hispanic people, Indigenous people, and people of Middle Eastern descent—are convenient scapegoats for white people who are disappointed by life’s outcomes. We are also the distraction that those in power point to when they want to avoid the blame for this country’s vast wealth and opportunity gaps.
White men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race. —Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America
In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi reports that the term “white trash” may actually have been coined by enslaved Blacks to describe the poor whites doing the dirty work of wealthy slaveowners.
Between 1910 and 1930, the Black population of Chicago grew by 600 percent. In that same time period, the Black population of Detroit grew by an astronomical 2,000 percent, from a population of 6,000 to 120,000.
The use of covenants was so widespread that by 1940, 80 percent of the property in Los Angeles and Chicago banned Blacks.
It is important to understand that although Wallace had gained notoriety for shouting racist slogans like “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he likely wasn’t much more racist than the average white politician—especially in the South. Above all, Wallace was an opportunist.
During the postwar era, when the government actively worked to increase homeownership, loan programs like the FHA and the GI Bill were of much less use to Blacks. Banks wouldn’t work with them, and Blacks were banned by covenants from living in neighborhoods with the most affordable new homes. The intergenerational wealth lost to Black families who were kept from buying homes during the postwar housing boom was the foundation for the vast wealth gap between white and Black families today.
Domestic work, caretaking, teaching, and eventually secretarial work were “pink collar”: women’s work.
women regularly withstood sexual abuse and exploitation from their male bosses, coworkers, and other men, who took the women’s socioeconomic status as an open invitation to indulge their violent whims.
Workplaces that devalue traits and skills like empathy, communication, and cooperation, which women are more likely to be socialized to have, almost always overvalue traits like hypercompetitiveness, aggression, and impulsiveness, which men are more likely to be socialized to have, even when those characteristics harm a work environment.
pathological need for many men to see their identities as wholly distinct from, and superior to, women’s—especially in the workplace, which has long been a primary source of ego for men in America and is a place that women aren’t even supposed to be. Separation from and degradation of the feminine in the workplace have been reinforced by our popular culture, replicating themselves generation after generation to our collective detriment.
In the public sphere white men rule over people of color, and in the home they rule over women. The extent to which they can do so defines their success as white men. The presence of women in the workplace not only undermines white male authority there; it also lessens men’s opportunity to dominate women at home.
Some claim it was the growing economic disparity in American society and the vast hoarding of wealth by those at the very top. In 1929, the top 0.1 percent of American households held as much money as the bottom 42 percent.
Before the Great Depression, only nine states had laws on the books restricting the employment of married women. By 1940, twenty-six states did.10 The argument against married women working was both economic and moral.
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, and it’s a phrase that was first coined in 2005 by University of Exeter researchers Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam. Their research was inspired by an article in the Times (of London, not New York) that suggested women leaders have a negative impact on stock performance.
They found that women were indeed more likely than men to be in leadership positions at distressed companies, but they also found that the problems were not the women’s fault.
women and people of color were most likely to be placed at the head of a company when it was already at risk of failure; white men were less likely to accept leadership positions when companies were at risk of failure; and when women or people of color failed to quickly turn around the struggling company, they were most likely replaced with white men.
We are never more likely to be given an opportunity to lead than when we will probably fail.
She also eliminated salary negotiations, instead offering prospective employees a choice of compensation packages since research has shown that women are often at disadvantages in salary negotiations, which can contribute to gender pay gaps.
And they do this for less pay than their male counterparts. After all that struggle, women have to jump at fraught and risk-filled leadership positions at failing companies because they know those are likely the only chances they’ll get.
