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by
Ijeoma Oluo
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March 15 - March 26, 2022
Mediocre white men who want to be heroes too often feel the need to fabricate villains to justify their imagined role—even if that means vilifying entire populations of people.
Roosevelt claimed for the United States tens of millions of acres previously promised to Native people, land that had been stewarded by Native people for countless generations. They became our national forests and parks.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was not a “show”—it was, according to Cody, an educational event. It was a living history. People would come to Wild West to learn as much as to be entertained. Few questioned the supposed educational value or legitimacy of his project. And the racist, exaggerated stories of white male American bravery, leadership, and righteous victory became a part of our collective understanding of American history; these misleading legends persist to this day.
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.
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.
When that true commitment to equality isn’t there, when white men waltz into social justice movements with their privilege unchecked and expect to feel rewarded and comfortable at all times, they slow us down. They also hurt people, and they compromise the integrity of our movements.
Biden’s argument was that the white Northerners who had benefitted from schools that consolidated white wealth and excluded Black students from sharing in that wealth with legislation that kept their districts (and the corresponding property taxes and PTA funding opportunities) separate were not racist, but subjecting them to the same education that Black students had long been forced to endure would make them racist.
But the unchecked white male privilege of Sanders and many of his followers will guarantee that privilege and oppression are baked into the policies they create and support. A
Along with many other people from marginalized groups, I strive for a day when we will see more people from our communities in leadership and more of the issues impacting our communities addressed by those in power. But I have never had the luxury of shunning everything in our society that does not appear to be built 100 percent for me.
If white men are finding that the overwhelmingly white-male-controlled system isn’t meeting their needs, how did we end up being the problem?
Brigham’s book was used to justify everything from anti-immigration legislation to forced sterilization of people deemed “unfit” to procreate: “The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro. These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows. The deterioration of American intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it.”12 The book was highly influential in American society and academia, and shortly after, Brigham was asked by
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Higher education is not the racial utopia that Republicans are scared of. It is not some bizarro world where students of color wield power over white students and faculty. It is a white supremacist system at its core, like all our other systems are.
Every white supremacist who claims that the United States is a white country knows that white settlers would have frozen to death faster than you can say Pocahontas if it weren’t for Native people.
The fear of Americans of color is almost wholly manufactured by the imaginations of white America. The average white American has always been more likely to be physically harmed by another white person than by a person of color. The average white American has always been more likely to lose their job to another white person than to a person of color. The average white American is more likely to lose a spot at their dream college to a white person than to a person of color. The messaging that claims the opposite has not been created by people like me.
As the federal government quickly ran low on money, it also depleted its will to oversee the Reconstruction of the South, and so Washington handed over the reins to the states themselves. And the states burned it all to the ground.
Poor Southern whites had sold their souls for their sense of racial superiority, and for many, it was all they had. They would not let go easily.
Many white people like to think that racism is really just a Southern problem. Sure, there are ignorant people everywhere, and yes—occasionally—racist incidents happen in California or New York, but those are exceptions. The South was the place that wanted slavery, and the rest of the country fought to end it, right? So how bad can it be once you leave the South? The answer is very bad.
The only thing Seattleites love more than recycling is coming up with new ways to avoid talking about race and the city’s issues with racism.
“Teddy Roosevelt—he was like the prom king of this culture of toxic masculinity in sports and seeing sports as a substitute for the fight for empire and war,” explained Zirin.1
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.
Nobody is more pessimistic about white men than white men.
