Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

by Ijeoma Oluo

We saw how women were, once again, forced out of the workplace in large numbers as their partners, and their bosses, saw their jobs as more expendable in times of crisis.

But the truth is that many white men have long known that they can commit violent, even treasonous, acts with impunity in this country. As long as they are doing it in the service of white male power.

Now, exiled to Florida and banned from pretty much all social media, Trump feels like our past, and yet our future doesn’t seem much brighter.

Although the phrase may seem alarmingly coldhearted, it is our way of reminding ourselves that the greatest evil we face is not ignorant individuals but our oppressive systems.

These injustices are not passed down by God; they are not produced by any entity greater than ourselves. These oppressive systems were built by people—with our votes, our money, our hiring decisions—and they can be unmade by people.

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.

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.

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?

How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?

White men have often had the sneaking suspicion that the American dream is a fiction. At the same time, white men have always feared the potential of losing that one great superiority—the better than. If all you have is better than—better than women, better than people of color, no more and no less than that—why would you willingly give up the one prize you never had to earn?

And yes, the average white male voter (and a majority of white women voters whose best chance at power is their proximity to white men) would see a lewd, spoiled, incompetent, untalented bully as someone who best represents their vision of America—he does.

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.

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.

We were that desperate for a white man to not be trash that we treated mediocrity like it was a masterpiece.

Plenty of women have met the “male feminist” who can quote bell hooks but will use those quotes to speak over you.

nobody voted against Obama because he focused too much on Black people. It was because 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.

But I have never had the luxury of shunning everything in our society that does not appear to be built 100 percent for me.

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.

What exactly do people who aren’t white men have that could be more inclusive of white men? We do not have control of our local governments, our national governments, our school boards, our universities, our police forces, our militaries, our workplaces. All we have is our struggle. And yet we are told that our struggle for inclusion and equity—and our celebration of even symbolic steps toward them—is divisive and threatening to those who have far greater access to everything else than we can dream of.

In 1890, Morrill sponsored a bill to increase funding to land-grant colleges. The bill specified that states would be denied the money for their institutions if they discriminated against African Americans in their admissions. In order to make this provision a little more palatable in the post–Civil War South, states were also given the option of educating Black Americans in separate institutions, provided that funding was “equitably divided” between Black and white institutions. While “equitably divided” was a term vague enough to allow Southern states to give a disproportionate percentage of funds to white schools, the funding did lead to the establishment of sixteen Black land-grant institutions. 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.

For the working-class white male who missed the days when a man could get a good-paying job at a factory with no need for a college degree, a politician willing to blame it all on a liberal college system getting rich off taxpayer money so that it could turn your children into hippies and position women and people of color above you was almost guaranteed to gain conservative support.

Having a college degree makes women and people of color less of a socioeconomic threat to you. This may sound highly cynical, but it is perhaps the most important factor in why whites who have a college degree are less likely to vote Republican.

Southern whites tried multiple tactics to get Blacks to stay. They cut the wages of Black workers so they couldn’t afford transportation north. They refused to cash paychecks for Black workers if they had a suspicion that the money would be used to finance travel north. Lawmakers made the recruitment of Black workers to the North illegal and started jailing recruiters who showed up in Southern cities. They printed horror stories of Black Northern life in local papers. They refused to sell bus and train tickets to Black travelers. They arrested Black people at bus stations on vagrancy charges. They started beating Blacks whom they caught leaving.6

White supremacy is, and has always been, a pyramid scheme.

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.13

We find more dudes named John at the heads of top companies than women.38

Women and people of color are often only given the opportunity to steer ships that white men have already rammed into icebergs. Then, when the ship sinks, the media reports that women make bad captains.

Why do white men decrease their level of performance when a woman or person of color becomes CEO? Because suddenly they feel less connected to the company.40

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.

I’m dismayed not only because it appears that women of color currently working in politics are treated with the same, if not more, disdain, blatant racism and sexism, and outright hatred that Shirley Chisholm faced—but also because the status quo they are blasted for challenging has remained so unchanged.

Almost every day I get a message from a white person saying, “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” As if I haven’t been writing for years. As if Black women and women of color haven’t been saying what is wrong with this country for centuries.

It is likely that there were not enough Black people in management meetings to tell the administrators. The disconnect between NFL administration and Black players was plain to see in the numbers. Whatever diversity had reached the NFL team rosters had certainly not reached NFL leadership.

Kaepernick met with a military veteran. The man asked Kaepernick to kneel instead of sitting for the anthem, as a way to protest injustice against Black people in America while still showing respect for US military vets. Kaepernick took the veteran’s advice and began kneeling in protest instead of sitting.34

We saw our fathers, our sisters, our babies killed, and their killers almost without exception escaped justice. To see prominent, powerful Black athletes protest for our lives on national television during America’s game—it gave us some hope that people might start paying attention.

For Donald Trump, who campaigned in 2016 on white male racial anxiety, the NFL protests were a dream come true.

These men wanted me to know that they were miserable, they felt screwed over, and they felt demonized. They wanted me to know that the only option available to address white male patriarchy was either to maintain the status quo that was making us all miserable, or death. They wanted me to know that they were not capable of growth or change and that any attempts to bring about that growth or change would end them. Nobody is more pessimistic about white men than white men.

How many more mass shootings will we be able to endure? How many more economic recessions? How much more climate crisis? How many more wars? How many more pandemics? How many more people can live in poverty? How many more of us can go without health care? How many more can be locked away in prisons? I don’t think we can withstand much more. I don’t think we are withstanding what is happening right now. We are coming apart as we grow increasingly polarized and as our power structures work to further insulate themselves from any responsibility to the people they claim to serve. We are running out of time to fix this. I have to believe that it’s not too late, and I hope you believe that too, because we have so much to do.

But these people were no smarter or more special than us, and they depend on us, on our continued participation in the systems of oppression they have built to maintain their power.