Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

by Ijeoma Oluo

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.

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

give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.”

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.

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. Plenty of people of color have met the white antiracist who is all for Dr. King’s dream until people of color start asking white people to make actual sacrifices for racial justice.

Eastman and Dell are not special outliers. 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. Then they wreaked a little havoc before deciding to set fire to the building as they left.

in that lack of singularity lies the problem: their story is a common one. 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. Even in today’s feminist movements, there is a push to show men what they will get out of supporting feminism. You should be a feminist, we argue, because it will also benefit you. And it’s true that feminism can help men in many ways. As the mother of two sons, I’m constantly trying to protect them from the damaging patriarchal messages that tell them that their only power is in domination, that the only emotions they can feel are lust and anger. I see firsthand what harm the patriarchy can inflict on men and boys as I watch my children and their peers battle to be whole people in a society that tells them that “men” can only exist in one particularly violent way.

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 peo...

History is very kind to the memory of mediocre white men.

But if you care about addressing racial oppression in this country, you should want a president who will give far more focus to issues facing communities of color than our past presidents have.

I have had to find a way to enjoy movies and television even when the script is not written for me and the only characters that look like me are peripheral to the main action because I would like to see more than a few movies in my lifetime.

I have had to find a way to work in offices that don’t see me as management material while still believing that there is a chance I can get a promotion anyway.

I’ve had to study history that erased my culture from its pages and know that it did not actually erase me. I’ve had to learn laws that weren’t written to serve me. I’ve had to learn to write and apprecia...

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, as with the 2016 election, we were drowning in talk of how we were going to make working- and middle-class white men feel included in order to defeat conservative forces. But I must honestly ask: 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.

Politics that does not always center white men is something that white men can get used to—and they must.

The average white person in America has less than one friend of color.

Getting to know people of different backgrounds and identities is one of the best ways to build empathy and community with them.

Issues impacting communities of color will not seem like your issues if you do not consider any people of color a part of your community. It is far easier to see the interests of marginalized communities as competing with yours instead of a part of yours. A white American perspective will seem to be the “normal” one, and everything else will be “other.” Accommodations will feel like sacrifices—or even worse, theft. When the majority of people from communities of color and LGBTQ+ communities vote Democratic because they believe it is the party that gives some ...

It could truly be the place that angry white men hate and fear if it put in the effort. It could be a place that dares to believe that the world does not revolve around white men. It could be a place that promotes the idea that people who aren’t white men have just as much right and ability to shape our future in their image as white men have. It could be a place where we learn to respect consent and pronouns, where we learn about intersectionality, where we learn the truth about our corrupt systems and begin to demand change, where we learn to respect and appreciate people who are different from us, where we start demanding justice for the oppressed, where we investigate our histories of bias and bigotry. Higher education could be all of that, and the world would be better for it.

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.

Even the most virulent American racist has to wrestle with the fact that the United States would not exist were it not for people of color. The blood that soaked this soil so it could be called America came from Native people. The earliest agricultural techniques were taught to white colonizers by Native people. The farms were worked by people of color. The buildings, roads, and railroads were built by Black Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans.

Most white Americans have exclusively white friendship circles; three-quarters of white Americans have less than one friend of color.

White America does not need us merely for what we contribute to culture, science, or the arts. It needs us as an outlet for its rage.

Why do these white men need to be angry at us? 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.

places that were more economically and socially open to diversity were more conducive to innovation in business and technology.

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.

So while just about every flavor of white man in America is going to have at least a few representatives in their government, the rest of us are lucky if we have any. One Latinx person in office is supposed to represent the needs of all Latinx, Black, Asian American, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander constituents. One woman in office is supposed to represent all women of varying races and ethnicities, sexualities, classes, and political ideologies.

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

many white Americans have decided that to stand for police accountability is to be antiwhite, and that those who offer real solutions to end police brutality are the enemy.

Many white men see a political landscape dominated by white men and think it is that way because white men are just more politically minded. They think that the absence of women and people of color from powerful rooms is due to self-selection. They do not question how unwelcoming the room they have built might be. They do not question whether or not the discussions they are having in that room are inclusive and generate productive discussions for women and people of color. They don’t ask if there are other, equally important conversations happening in other rooms. And they don’t even bother to ask if anyone unlocked the door. They look at the room and say that women and people of color aren’t in it because women and people of color aren’t interested. Then they cite this supposed disinterest as proof that women and people of color are too unqualified to even be invited in.

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. At least that’s how white Democrats see us. Many white Republicans also see us as a reliably Democratic voting bloc, to be prevented from exercising our right to vote at all costs. Sure, one is worse than the other, but both are pretty shitty.

I don’t want to bring a chair to an old table. This is the time to shake the table. This is the time to redefine that table. Because if you’re going to come to this table, all of you who have aspirations of running for office. If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need Black faces that don’t want to be a Black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice.44

Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley, and Omar are public figures and elected representatives. Some would say that by running for office they chose a life of public scrutiny and comment. But they are also human beings, and no human should have to weather the torrent of hatred they have endured.

“I think we have a beef with almost anyone here because there’s a lack of courage. It seems like we’re all radical because we deeply care about the people we represent and we want to throw down for them.”49

When I think about the trajectory our social progress is supposed to take—the way we’ve been taught in school that it should work—and I look at how little it tracks with how we treat women of color who dare challenge the political status quo, I am dismayed. 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. We celebrate progress, and we talk about increased diversity within our government. Yet our Congress is still overwhelmingly white and male; our presidency is still overwhelmingly white and exclusively male. And the important advances that Shirley Chisholm fought for in 1972—issues like environmental protections, protection from government surveillance and invasion of privacy, campaign finance reform, and equal pay for women—are all changes we still fight for today. It’s as if when we continuously pass up the opportunity to listen to those most affected by the shortcomings of our systems, and instead continue to reward those who benefit most from those systems, we end up making no progress at all.

Studies have shown that pretty much any time a white man talks about equality and justice, he is praised. It is seen as proof of his broad leadership abilities and his magnanimousness. But women of color are never praised. They are seen as bitter, divisive, vindictive, and self-serving. This view hurts women of color in politics, in the office, and in academia. We are often the most harmed by the failures of our systems to address structural inequality; we are often the first sacrificed to political compromise; we are the vote taken for granted in every single election; we are often the only group standing between an electorate and the next white supremacist representative—and yet when we try to advocate for policies that won’t have us scrambling to save everyone’s asses in the eleventh hour, we are ignored or attacked.

To me, the idea of sitting around watching a bunch of Black bodies crash into each other to the delight of white team owners and managers is not entertaining. Even though I can respect and appreciate the great efforts the athletes put forth, the sport has long represented to me the exploitation of Black labor and Black bodies, and little else. But I have come to value (if often with dismay) the way in which we can see the reflection of American racial attitudes through the sport.

White male identity is in a very dark place. White men have been told that they should be fulfilled, happy, successful, and powerful, and they are not. They are missing something vital—an intrinsic sense of self that is not tied to how much power or success they can hold over others—and that hole is eating away at them. I can only imagine how desolately lonely it must feel to only be able to relate to other human beings through conquer and competition. The love, admiration, belonging, and fulfilment they have been promised will never come—it cannot exist for you when your success is tied to the subjugation of those around you. These white men are filled with anger, sadness, and fear over what they do not have, what they believe has been stolen from them. And they look at where they are now, and they cannot imagine anything different. As miserable as they are, they are convinced that no other option exists for them. It is either this, or death: ours or theirs. I don’t want this for white men. I don’t want it for any of us. When we look at the history of white male identity in this country, it becomes clear that we are only stuck in these cycles of reactionary violence and oppression because we have not tried anything new. We have become convinced that there is only one way for white men to be. We are afraid to imagine something better.

I do not believe that these white men are born wanting to dominate. I do not believe they are born unable to feel empathy for people who are not them. I do not believe they are born without any intrinsic sense of value. If I did, this would be a very different book. I believe that we are all perpetrators and victims of one of the most evil and insidious social constructs in Western history: white male supremacy.

We have to investigate the way in which all of us, regardless of race or gender, have been conditioned to uphold white male supremacy. We are expected to support white male supremacy in order to get a promotion, to be respected by our peers, for our children to succeed in school. We must ask ourselves what we are willing to give up in order to be free. We must question what we value as individuals and as a society. Leadership should not look like one race or gender; power shouldn’t either. We must look at how our votes, our money, and our individual privilege are tied to making sure that white men remain in power over us.

We must start asking what we want white manhood to be, and what we will no longer accept. We must stop rewarding violence and oppression. We must stop confusing bullies with leaders. We must stop telling women and people of color that the only path to success lies in emulating white male dominance. And those of us with privilege of race or status have to divorce ourselves from the lure of proximity to white male power—whether that privilege comes from being a white woman, a light-skinned person of color, or a wealthy person of color—even when those white men are our friends, our husbands, our fathers, or our sons. Instead of seeing humanity as a competition for status, we could all have faith that full equality can allow for esteem and respect to be spread universally.

We must break free. We must start making better and more informed choices—with our votes, our wallets, our media, our societal expectations.