Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

by Ijeoma Oluo

What should have been our moment to come together for the greater good instead turned into antilockdown protests as people gleefully exposed their friends and neighbors to a potentially deadly disease. This was done to assert their right to never be slightly inconvenienced, even to save the lives of their loved ones.

I am not arguing that every white man is mediocre. I do not believe that any race or gender is predisposed to mediocrity. What I’m saying is that 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. I also know that many white men accomplish great things. 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.

By defining greatness as a white man’s birthright, we immediately divorce it from real, quantifiable greatness—greatness that benefits, greatness that creates. White men have assumed inborn greatness, and they are taught to believe that they alone have seemingly infinite potential for greatness. Our culture has shaped the expectation of greatness exclusively around white men by erasing the achievements of women and people of color from our histories, by excluding women and people of color as heroes in our films and books, by ensuring that the qualified applicant pool is restricted to white male social networks.

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.

All you need to be successful as a white man is to be better off than women and people of color. And all you need to do to distract white men from how they are actually faring is to task them with the responsibility of ensuring that people of color and women don’t take what little might be theirs.

Buffalo Bill walks over to Yellow Hand’s lifeless body, takes out his knife, and removes Yellow Hand’s scalp. Buffalo Bill triumphantly raises the scalp in the air. “For Custer!” he declares. The audience erupts into wild applause and cheers. “For Custer!” they cry.

Custer was idiot who was kicked out of the service for going AWOL and only let back in because the service was desperate for men. After Little Big Horn they had 250 less.

Before William F. Cody was Buffalo Bill, he was a lot of other things. Cody had worked as a farmer, a teamster, a trapper, a driver, and a soldier.

A joker, a smoker, a midnight toker...

Cody made the tales even taller in a letter to his wife, Louisa, which was meant to precede a package of his war trophies. In the letter he wrote, “We have had a fight. I killed Yellow Hand, a Cheyenne chief, in a single-handed fight. [I am going to] send the war bonnet, shield, bridle, whip, arms, and his scalp.… The cheers that went up when he fell was deafening.” The package reached Louisa before the letter; when Louisa opened it, expecting a gift from her husband and instead finding a human scalp, she fainted.10

Happy anniversary, Darlin'. Here's a bloody scalp.

The Bundy family rallied around Cliven as government trucks rolled into Bunkerville. When Cliven’s fifty-seven-year-old sister Margaret Houston tried to block one of the BLM’s vehicles, she was thrown to the ground by a BLM officer.

That's "Bureau of Land Management."

In describing his beliefs to a New York Times reporter, Cliven went on a long racist tirade, opening with, “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” which is never a good start. He dug up the common racist tropes about Blacks with nothing better to do than crowd welfare offices. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton,” he ranted. In case anyone might have been wondering if they heard Cliven right and he was as racist as he sounds, he added, “I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

That's it! Dishonor! Dishonor on you! Dishonor on your Mormon ancestors! Dishonor on your cows!

The idealized American cowboy has been woven through the fabric of American culture, and its impact is keenly felt.

Zane Grey actually averts and subverts Western stereotypes. He distains white men but believes women are pure and noble, "Christian" missionaries are exploitative monsters, and the Native American race is noble and sympathetic, but ultimately doomed.

“Do we want to train young people for… living happily ever after in heterosexual matehood, or for living tormented and frustrated lives of homosexuality, frigidity and purposeless promiscuity?” Dell asked.13

Well is it frigidity or purposeless promiscuity? Pick one. And speaking of "purposeless promiscuity", you're one to talk, Dell.

With nothing left to lose, Eastman stopped talking about what needed to change in Russia’s socialism and decided that the atrocities in Russia proved that socialism was, in its entirety, untenable.

Socialism, as Marx imagined it, is untenable because it is too easily exploited by psychopaths who get into power and twist it into totalitarianism. Stalin's Russia is just one example.

Mediocre, highly forgettable white men regularly enter feminist spaces and expect to be centered and rewarded, and they have been. 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.

But when I tell my sons that they should be feminists, I don’t try to sell it to them based on the benefits they will reap. I tell them what I also tell white people who are looking for reasons to be antiracist: Yes, it will offer some real benefits for you. Your life will be better in many ways when we work to end oppression. But it will not always benefit you. Sometimes it may seem like justice is disadvantaging you when the privileges you’ve routinely enjoyed are threatened. But you have to do it anyway, because you believe that women and people of color are human beings and that we deserve to be free from oppression, even when that means you personally have to give some things up.

Many Clinton supporters blamed Sanders supporters, who they believed were so opposed to a woman in the White House that they had voted for either Trump or Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Or Harambe. Idiots.

Not only have things in America not been built for me; they have never been built for me. And although that has been physically, financially, politically, and psychologically disastrous for my community, I have come to see that it is also damaging to be led to believe that everything should be built for you and that anything built with the consideration of others is inherently harmful to you. It is harmful to the individual who believes it, and it is harmful to every system they interact with that is supposed to be built on coalition.

Having practiced on the University of California system, Reagan, once he became president of the United States, took his educational reforms national. He passed sweeping tax and spending cuts that slashed funding for students, making college more expensive and inaccessible to those who needed it the most. Due to the racial economic disparities in America, students of color were often more likely to need the financial assistance and educational programs that the US government had previously funded and were therefore some of the most greatly impacted by Reagan’s funding cuts. But at a time when middle- and working-class white America was dissatisfied with slower economic growth and increased competition at home (from women workers and workers of color) and abroad (from the rise in foreign manufacturing), Reagan was not punished politically for cutting the feet out from under underprivileged students. He was rewarded with reelection and the highest approval ratings since Franklin Roosevelt.

It always goes back to Reagan.

We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange, we’ll train your children to hate our country.… We’ll make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies, underwater basket weaving and, my personal favorite, tree climbing. —Donald Trump Jr.

How would he know? According to his peers he spent most of his college years falling down drunk. And Underwater Basketweaving sounds fun.

At the root of all this we have a consolidation of power and knowledge by the elite, with the intention of keeping the working classes divided and disenfranchised. In Trump’s (and many other conservative politicians’) ideal world, the average American seeks only enough knowledge to fulfill his or her part of a capitalist system, while those born to privilege will learn the ways of world leadership at elite institutions.

Trump and others on the right want to make sure that working-class white men don’t want to go to college and distrust those who do, and conservative educators want to make sure that people from marginalized communities don’t want to go either. All of this works by design. It is to ensure that enough of us keep our heads down, focus on surviving our nine-to-five jobs, don’t ask questions, and don’t demand more from a system that owes us a lot. The death of American higher education will harm the most vulnerable of us first, but its goal is not to harm or oppress only us—that work is fully implanted in all our systems. Its goal is to continue to oppress and exploit white supremacy’s most powerful tool: the angry white working-class man.

In the internet age, this resentment is more easily manufactured and distributed through social media and disreputable news sources. A story of Black crime that may have riled up one white neighborhood can now be used as a warning against integration and diversity across the country. While these sensationalized news stories keep many white people in fear, they also reinforce an aggrieved identity that gives a sense of community and belonging. White supremacy is just good business. Manufactured fear is a cheaper and more reliable driver of clicks and media market share than nuanced and deeply reported news stories.

Slavery and violent white supremacy are the story of the South’s past, its present, and, likely, its future. In 2017, when researchers from Harvard Business School looked at the socioeconomic histories of various regions of the United States to determine which factors supported economic growth and innovation, they found a lot of interesting patterns. They found that places that were more economically and socially open to diversity were more conducive to innovation in business and technology. They also found that having once been a slaveholding state was a good predictor of stagnant economic growth, based on past growth patterns.9

Still, if the South had managed to cling to chattel slavery until it could transition to some other industry, the region would have faced an impossible battle. The North was already far ahead in industrializing,

That's how the North kicked their ass. The South had cotton and the North had factories that made weapons. The Fall of the South wasn't tragedy, it was stupidity.

Only 25 percent of Southern white households owned slaves (man, it is so weird to type that “only” 25 percent of a group of people owned another group of people), and the majority of slaves were held by the wealthiest 7 percent of white households.11

That's still too much.

Northern whites have taken pride in being on the right side of history regarding slavery, which they saw as a Southern problem. It was a Southern problem, however, because Northern whites had apparently expected that freed Blacks would stay chained to the South. When Black people migrated North, whites forced them into areas of concentrated poverty and misery. Then they pointed at the conditions Black Americans were living in—pointed at their desperation—and harnessed it to justify further discrimination.

When I discuss race and poverty, it is a common tactic of white trolls to ask me, “What about Chicago? That’s Black people shooting each other. There’s no white people in those neighborhoods keeping them poor. How do you explain that?” I hear them, and I envision Dr. King being knocked to the ground by a rock flung by white Chicagoans who were angry that he would dare fight for the ability for Black Chicagoans to move out of ghettos and try to improve their lives. I think of Black neighborhoods burned to the ground in East St. Louis. I think about anti-Black violence and terror in Black neighborhoods in Omaha, Houston, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C., and dozens of other cities across the country. I think of the massacre of Black Wall Street in Tulsa. I think of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. I think of all the times that Black Americans had to struggle to build communities and to build an economic foothold for those communities, only to have to start all over again.

The ways in which women have been undercut in the workplace don’t harm only women. When women are denied fair wages, the entire household that depends on their money is harmed. Workplaces that fail to mentor women or build networking environments that are inclusive of women miss out on the talents women offer. Workplaces that refuse to address issues of sexism and sexual harassment suffer not only higher turnover in their female employees but also lower productivity in all employees, regardless of gender. Workplaces that don’t promote women or fully support women in their leadership ranks miss out on the diversity of thought, skill, and approach that having more women in management can provide. 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.

“What’s your major?” That’s a question every college student is asked more times than they can count. When I was in college and would answer “political science,” the follow-up question was almost always: “Are you going to run for office one day?”

I feel that. With me it was always "OH YOU WANT TO BE A TEACHER!!!" As if that is the only thing a history major is allowed to be.

It is psychologically damaging to never see yourself reflected in positions of leadership in your own country. It limits our feeling of citizenship, and it limits the possibilities we see for ourselves and our children. It creates a feeling of unsafety. Growing up, I can count on one hand the number of friends of color I knew who thought that holding political office was a possibility, let alone a goal.

Those of us who have been systemically marginalized in the American political process are certainly not the only people who are frustrated with our current government. We are not the only people who think that our government is out of touch, out of date, sluggish, and uncreative. The system was set up to appear to serve the average white American man while simultaneously working against the best interests of the majority of Americans, regardless of race or gender. But even the pretense of representing the “average white man” holds more appeal than political ideas offered up by those who aren’t white men, even when those ideas could better serve white men.

“Queen” was a reference to the highly effective—and highly racist, sexist, and classist—exploitation of the case of Linda Taylor, the woman who had used “80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers” to obtain fraudulent welfare benefits. While Taylor does appear to have been a very accomplished scam artist (and possible murderer and kidnapper—google her story sometime, it’s fascinating),

Wasn't she also insane?

Let’s look closely at the Green New Deal so we can understand how bonkers the conservative response to it has been. The Green New Deal is a nonbinding resolution to address our rapidly worsening global climate crisis. It consists of multiple goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, like moving to renewable power, upgrading energy efficiency in existing buildings, and investing in electric vehicles and light rail. The deal aimed to accomplish all of this while also protecting vulnerable communities that have economically relied on fossil fuels with job training and economic development goals.41

The constraints of white male identity in America have locked white men into cycles of fear and violence—where the only success they are allowed comes at the expense of others, and the only feelings they are allowed to express are triumph or rage. When white men try to break free from these cycles, they are ostracized by society at large or find themselves victims of other white men who are willing to fulfill their expected roles of dominance. When women and people of color try to free themselves from the oppression of white male supremacy, they are viewed as direct threats to the very identity of white men, and the power structure upholding that identity works swiftly to eliminate the threat.