Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

by Ijeoma Oluo

The average Black household in the United States has one-thirteenth of the net financial worth of the average white household; the average Hispanic household has one-eleventh. One-third of Black men in America are expected to be imprisoned in the course of their lives.

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.

How often have you heard the argument that we have to slowly implement gender and racial equality in order to not “shock” society? Who is the “society” that people are talking about? I can guarantee that women would be able to handle equal pay or a harassment-free work environment right now, with no ramp-up. I’m certain that people of color would be able to deal with equal political representation and economic opportunity if they were made available today. So for whose benefit do we need to go so slowly? How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?

And yet we have, as a society, somehow convinced ourselves that we should be led by incompetent assholes.

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.

And yet, at the time, we had eaten it up. We were that desperate for a white man to not be trash that we treated mediocrity like it was a masterpiece.

The assumption that women would vote for women for no other reason than their gender is insulting to all women’s intelligence, as is the insinuation that women candidates who focus on “women’s issues” are not also concerned about economic or health care issues. In this statement also lies the quieter yet just as harmful assumption that white men only vote for candidates that center their own white male interests.

the Center of Southern Politics and Society found that, even though sexism was more common in white Republican men, “roughly 11 million white male Independents and Democrats feel enough animosity towards working women and feminists to make them unlikely to vote for one of them.”55

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

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.

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?

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.

higher education was now easily attainable for working- and middle-class white men. The GI Bill (and military service in general) hadn’t been made widely available to women yet, and the majority of colleges enrolled few, if any, Black students.

In July 2017 the Pew Research Center found that a whopping 58 percent of Republicans and right-leaning Independents thought that colleges and universities were having a negative impact on our country. That number had increased from 37 percent in just two years.

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.35

Across the Northern and Western United States, people of color seeking a better life for themselves and their families were pushed into smaller, less desirable, and more crowded areas. The use of covenants was so widespread that by 1940, 80 percent of the property in Los Angeles and Chicago banned Blacks.27 Housing projects that were built to provide shelter in Black neighborhoods were soon dangerously overcrowded, filled with families who had nowhere else to go.

When setting out for a national run in 1968, Wallace recognized that the same anger that had motivated Alabama voters was widespread among white working-class men across the country—especially in places that were adjusting to an influx of Black industrial workers, and especially among white Southern migrants up north. Wallace revised his language to broaden his audience, but if you listened closely the message was still the same. “The dangers of integration” was replaced with more respectable stand-ins like “a need for law and order” and “fighting school busing.” “Evil commies and civil rights activists” became “evil commies and hippies.” “Northern aggressors” became “Washington elites” and “the liberal, know-nothing press.”

The final section of the pamphlet—titled “Some Attempts to Solve the Women Problem”—lists possible ways to deal with women workers after the war, including those who wanted to keep working. Possible solutions include treating housework and child-rearing more like “a profession” and establishing training programs on household management. Another is to pay women not to work. The prospect of women staying in the workplace so long as men helped them with household chores in order to lighten their burden is briefly floated but immediately dismissed as too upsetting to the “traditional scheme of things.”

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. 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.

A study by the University of Missouri found that, even though women make up only 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, activist investors are more likely to target companies helmed by women with the intent of directing their management decisions, even when controlling for company performance. This means that activist investors are seeking out companies that are led by women with the goal of taking that leadership from them—because they are women.45

How many times in recent years have you heard the argument that a white man shouldn’t be fired for sexual harassment or other gross misconduct because it would “jeopardize his future” or “waste his potential”? Every white man in business is pure potential. Every white man from unpaid intern to CEO could be our next great leader, our next great innovator. To harm the trajectory of any white man—no matter how incompetent, no matter how many women or people of color he stepped on or groped along the way—would be a risk too large to take. But

White men can run for office on their deeply held, most daring beliefs—or they can run on the most jaded of party lines. Either way, they are unlikely to see the entirety of their personal life used against them; they are unlikely to face an endless barrage of threats for daring to believe they should be heard. They will be able to be the most radical without being branded as too radical. They can be the most violent without being branded as violent. The most racist without being branded as racist. They can focus almost exclusively on the needs of white men without being branded exclusionary or divisive. Women, people of color, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people—they are afforded no such grace. Those of us who wish to hold office must have personal lives beyond reproach; we must be sure to moderate our political views. We must hold degrees from traditionally white institutions, or be able to prove that our education at schools of color did not radicalize us. We cannot appear to ever be angry. We must always prove that we are willing to prioritize the concerns of white men in our work no matter how few are in our constituency. So

Guinier was concerned with the impact that the concepts “one man one vote” and “winner take all” voting were having on the political representation of people of color. Unless minorities in an area were especially politically aligned with the majority in the population, they were never going to have elected representatives that actually represented their needs. If a candidate needed more than 50 percent of the votes to win, then it would almost never be a good idea for the candidate to prioritize the needs of a minority group when that group’s numbers would not give the candidate enough votes to achieve victory. In winner-take-all elections, an elected official can represent 51 percent of their electorate and not represent 49 percent of their electorate, and it would still be considered a representative democracy. Further, because there are often only two choices in systems of simple majority rule, each candidate is forced to establish positions as far away as possible from their opponent’s views on select hot-button issues to ensure that they don’t lose undecided voters to the other side.

it would be less conducive to the extreme division of current two-party politics, because instead of an alternative third candidate spelling potential doom for the candidate they are closer ideologically to, they are instead a viable third option that can secure enough votes from a wider geographic area while not stealing votes from main candidates.

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.

Although a lot of white commentators decried the athletes’ protests, demanding that the athletes “focus on the game,” it is important to remember that social causes are not new to professional sports. Professional leagues, including the NFL, have given money and time to raise breast cancer awareness, to fight hunger, and to provide toys to poor children. When we look at the response to peaceful, unobtrusive protests against the killing of unarmed Black men, we need to ask ourselves why so many white Americans saw these protests as an insult.

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.

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.

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.

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 need to do more than just break free of the oppression of white men. We also have to imagine a white manhood that is not based in the oppression of others. We have to value the empathy, kindness, and cooperation that white men, as human beings, are capable of. We have to define strength and leadership in ways that don’t reinforce abusive patriarchy and white supremacy. We have to be honest about what white male supremacy has cost not only women, nonbinary people, and people of color—but also white men.

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.