by Ijeoma Oluo
And so these white men often end up clinging to a disturbing construct and blaming those with less power for its shortcomings. This seems for some like a better option than questioning the promised great reward ahead of them. After the wealthiest white men take their cut, there is never enough left for the average white man to have his crown. But we, as a society, continue to tell white men that their coronation is just around the corner.
Too many women and people of color have experienced the rage of a white man who had been patiently waiting in line to be the next president or CEO. When he finally realizes that his turn may never come, he looks around to see who is to blame for taking his place—he thinks his loss is the cost of opportunity for others. But he never looks up at the elite white men he has been striving to emulate. If we look under the feet of many of the white men to whom we grant so much power, we will see the masses crushed by their failures—including other white men.
While we would like to believe otherwise, it is usually not the cream that rises to the top: our society rewards behaviors that are actually disadvantageous to everyone. Studies have shown that the traits long considered signs of strong leadership (like overconfidence and aggression) are in reality disastrous in both business and politics—not to mention the personal toll this style of leadership takes on the individuals around these leaders. These traits are broadly considered to be masculine, whereas characteristics often associated with weakness or lack of leadership (patience, accommodation, cooperation) are coded as feminine. This is a global phenomenon of counterproductive values that social scientists have long marveled over.
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.
This patriarchal elevation of incompetence has a special flair, however, in capitalist and individualist societies like the United States. When wealthy white men hoard power among themselves, they also need a cost-efficient way to keep the masses from threatening the status quo. How do you keep the average white male American invested in a system that disadvantages him?
You give them whiteness. You give them maleness. You give them an identity that will provide a sense of victory in good times and bad. 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.
White male identity is not inborn—it is built. This identity is not designed to be its most intelligent, most productive, most innovative self. The aspirational image of white maleness is meant to be far less than that. Elite white men don’t need actual competition from rising and striving average white men. Instead, this status becomes a birthright detached from actual achievement. It is an identity that clings to mediocrity.
I don’t think it has ever been easy to be a woman of color in America, but these last few years, since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, have been harder. Every day, we face a new onslaught of white male anger, aggression, fear, or incompetence. My friends and I stare at each other in wonder over it. How did we get here? is the question everyone seems to be asking. Is it Trump? Are all these men just angry at Obama? Is it the internet? Is it the decline of public education? Is it going to get worse? How did we go so wrong? These questions kept bubbling up at the dinner table at our writing retreat.
What I do know is that the impact white men have been having on my life and the lives of so many others is not new. What we are seeing in our political climate is not novel or unexplainable. It works according to design. Yes, of course the average white man is going to feel dissatisfied with his lot in life—he was supposed to. Yes, of course our powerful and respected men would be shown to be abusers and frauds—that is how they became powerful and respected. 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.
Sitting at the dinner table with those women, talking about angry, entitled white men, I started to see part of these men’s design. Part of the road that was deliberately laid down before the angry white men we see today. I saw them encouraged by every hero, every leader, and every history book to be what they became. And I saw that the path that began far before our last presidential election, far before any of our current political leaders were born, extends into the future regardless of who wins the next elections. And I wanted to see the entire map. I wanted to see if there was a way for us to pick a different path before it was too late.
And so I looked. I started with today’s titans of white male mediocrity—the arrogant, entitled, irresponsible, willfully ignorant bullies who have risen to power and prominence while dragging us into disappointment—and I worked backward. I started looking for their earlier incarnations, through each generation, at every turn of our country’s past.
I started looking for where and how we, as a society, have encouraged and idealized the traits of these white men, even at great political, economic, and social cost.
As I looked back through our history, I started to see patterns. I started to see how time and time again, anything perceived as a threat to white manhood has been attacked, no matter how necessary that new person or idea may have been to our national progress. I started to see how reliably the bullying and entitlement we valued in our leaders led to failure. These are traits that we tell our children are bad, but when we look at who our society actually rewards, we see that these are the traits we have actively cultivated.
In sharing some of these stories here, I aim to draw a portrait of what white male mediocrity in the United States looks like and how it attempts to perpetuate itself—in our education system, our sports teams, our businesses, and our politics. I want to show the ways in which we have been trapped in cycles of self-harm that have cost countless lives and have held us back economically and socially. With a clear view of our past, we may then consider trying something new for our future.
Looking through these stories, I saw parts of myself as well—not only where I had suffered at the hands of those in power, but also in my attempts to fulfill the role assigned to me in the hopes of gaining my own personal power. We’ve all been instructed to value and strive toward the white male version of success. I saw how strong the messaging has been, and how susceptible we all are to it.
When we consider the privilege hierarchies of race, gender, and class, it’s clear that some of us have played a larger role than others in perpetuating this harmful image of white maleness. But I also think that all of us, regardless of demographic, have played a part in upholding white male supremacy. We are all told to aspire to the largest bite of our piece of the pie—no matter how meager our piece may be.
The mediocrity of the constructed white male identity is not only disappointing for them, but devastating for those of us who are the first to be sacrificed when the predictable fruits of mediocrity come to bear. Those of us who are not white men are the labor to be exploited, the scapegoats to blame, the bags to punch. All this anger distracts us from noticing how we’ve built a system that has never benefitted anyone except the most powerful white men, the select few who hoard the profits made from the systems of race and gender and class. We must realize that whom we look up to and what traits we cultivate as a society can change, and they must if we are to survive.
For now, let’s journey through the creation of the white male America we are living in today. Let’s look at how today’s results come from our past decisions. Let’s look at how the glorification of white male aggression brought about the brutality of westward expansion, how the disdain of wom
en workers exacerbated the Great Depression, how the fear of racial integration drove the Great Migration, and many more examples of how white male America was built and solidified at a devastating cost. We can then see how the decisions that were made decades—even centuries—ago in the desperate preservation of white male supremacy have led us to the brink of social and political disaster.
Let’s tell these stories, so that we may learn how to write better ones to come.
CHAPTER 1
COWBOYS AND PATRIOTS
How the West Was Won
We all have that one relative, the one whose name is never said without a sigh of frustration or a groan of dread. The one relative who is always quick to offer inappropriate commentary, in his outdoor voice, at the dinner table. For our family it was someone I’ll call Brian. Brian was one of the rare Fox News viewers in the family. He would spout conservative talking points that he heard on cable news, and when he ran out of memorized semifactoids, he would make up arguments to defend his point. Sometimes he didn’t seem to have a point beyond “I disagree loudly with whatever it is you are saying.”
You didn’t have to be talking about politics in order to suddenly find yourself dragged into a convoluted political debate. You could be talking about your new cell phone and everyone would be commenting on what a nice phone it was, and suddenly Brian would interject with how his cell phone provider was better than yours and how the reason you were with such and such company was because of a vast liberal news conspiracy designed to “fuck you over.” Brian was pretty sure that a lot of things were trying to fuck us all over—cell phone companies, banks, car companies, universities—and somehow it was all liberal media’s fault.
Luckily for us, Brian was a distant relative; we only had to endure him at weddings, funerals, and occasional Christmas celebrations that brought the extended family together. We could give our fake smiles and try our best to change the subject, knowing that we would be able to return home, far away from Brian, and forget about him until someone else in the family died.
This all changed with social media. Suddenly, Brian was everywhere, and he was so much more Brian online. Everything was amped up—the conspiracy theories, the forced debates, the made-up talking points—all in caps lock. I didn’t think it was possible that online Brian could be more annoying than real-life, interrupting, bloviating, creepy-joke-telling Brian, but—here he was, somehow even worse.
As my writing career began to take off, Brian decided that I would make the ideal sparring partner for online debate. I had muted his posts early on, so I was no longer subjected to his daily rants about illegal immigration or his fearmongering about how Obama was going to take away all of our rights, but he insisted on bringing his very loud opinions to my social media pages. He would show up on random status updates to challenge me to a debate of wits (literally, saying: “I challenge you”) on issues I had no desire to debate. Every time, I would either ignore him or politely decline and wish him a good day. Sometimes he would try to debate others who interacted with my social media posts, and I would ask him to please go away.
I couldn’t understand what Brian was getting from all this online antagonism. Almost nobody took him up on his debate challenges; nobody thanked him for his uninvited opinions. The sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, racist politicians and policies he supported were not only in stark contrast to the beliefs of the family he seemed to genuinely love; they also hurt many members of our family and put many of them (especially those who were queer, Muslim, or people of color) at risk.
One day, after he left a particularly long comment on my Facebook page telling me that he supported Trump because all the Democratic candidates were weak on immigration and terrorism, I took the bait. I asked him how he could support someone who literally put his family in danger, why he insisted on spouting Fox News nonsense even when some of his closest family members had made it clear that his doing so hurt them. He responded that his own family—even the brown, Muslim family members—weren’t at risk because they weren’t the terrorists Trump was after. He talked about how liberal media had blinded me to the dangers that were out there waiting for me if Democrats gained control of the government.
Weeks later, after yet another horrific mass shooting in the United States, he showed up on my social media page again, this time in defense of gun rights. The story he shared was quite illuminating. He told about a fateful night when he was walking alone to his car and a “thug” with a “hoodie” confronted him with a gun. “It was him or me,” he said. But luckily, Brian was packing. If it weren’t for Brian’s weapon at the ready, he would have been dead. He insinuated that the “thug” got what was coming to him and that he would always do what was necessary to protect himself and his family.
What made this story so revealing is that I’m pretty sure none of it happened. Lemme draw you a picture of Brian. Brian is a late-middle-aged white dude who lives in the Midwestern suburbs. He tucks his Disney T-shirts into his jean shorts and pulls his white socks up to his knees. Brian is a dude who has had few adventures in life, and even fewer friends. I’ve never seen him in the general vicinity of a gun. And if he ever shot a “thug” in the street, I’m sure I would have heard about it before then.
But none of Brian’s so vigorously defended political beliefs were based in reality. No “thug” had tried to take his life in the street, and yet he still clung to his belief that he needed access to guns in order to protect himself. He had never encountered any Muslim terrorism in his Midwestern suburb, but he was still convinced that there were terrorists eager to cross the border to bomb his subdivision. From these made-up horrors, these fictionalized enemies, he had created a villain worthy of the violent bravado that he imagined he would display if confronted by said villain. This web of racist lies was what he needed to make himself seem like a man. He invented a story about bad guys who were out to get him, and he repeated it to himself and others until he believed it. Then he made up another story—of himself as hero, defending himself and his family against this violent threat—and he repeated that one until he believed it too. Brian wrote himself into his own American western, a world of cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. And for a man with no job, few friends, and a family that couldn’t stand him, pretending to be a main character in violent American mythology was as close to belonging as he was ever going to get.
I thought about every Black person who has had the cops called on them for trying to cash a check at a bank, for trying to shop at a store, for trying to exist in public—and I wondered what stories the frightened white people must have told themselves to justify their fears. I thought about the story that George Zimmerman must have been telling himself as he shot seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin for simply walking around a gated neighborhood as a Black teen. I thought about what story Michael Dunn must have been telling himself as he opened fire on a car filled with Black teenagers because their music was too loud, killing seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis. I thought about what story Wade Michael Page (who was likely radicalized by anti-Muslim propaganda while he served in the US Army)1 must have been telling himself as he opened fire on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, killing forty-one-year-old Paramjit Kaur, sixty-five-year-old Satwant Singh Kaleka, thirty-nine-year-old Prakash Singh, forty-one-year-old Sita Singh, forty-nine-year-old Ranjit Singh, and eighty-one-year-old Suveg Singh.
I’m so glad that Brian probably doesn’t actually carry a gun, and I hope he never will. 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. Their dreams of grand adventures are mere whims and fantasy, but the violence such white men visit upon others is often very, very real.
A COWBOY IS BORN: BUFFALO BILL TAKES THE STAGE
Buffalo Bill is onstage engaged in fierce battle. He and his scouts are fighting a ferocious group of Cheyenne warriors. The audience holds its breath as the terrifying Cheyenne appear to be gaining the u
pper hand. But just when it seems all hope is lost, Buffalo Bill—dressed in an elegant black velvet, lace-trimmed, Mexican vaquero suit—takes aim at the Cheyenne war chief Yellow Hand and fires. Their chief shot dead, the Cheyenne are defeated. 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.
In Buffalo Bill’s stage show The Red Right Hand: or The First Scalp for Custer, the scalping of Yellow Hand was an act of justice. George Armstrong Custer was the celebrated army general who was killed, along with his entire command, during the Indian Wars at the Battle of Big Horn in June of 1876. The infamous battle would become known as “Custer’s Last Stand.” Custer was beloved in white American culture for his leadership in battle, but he was known to many Native people for his role in their forced removal from their land onto reservations. In July 1876, just days after the Battle of Little Big Horn, Buffalo Bill had taken revenge against the brutal Indians for killing Custer, using their own barbaric methods against them. He had scalped one of their leaders to avenge the death of one of his own.2 By the end of the year, Buffalo Bill would begin reenacting the scalping of Yellow Hand for the entertainment of paying audiences.
The idea of scalping as a Native act of barbarism is one that persists. But the act of scalping one’s enemies had existed in European cultures for over two thousand years before European colonizers arrived on the shores of this continent. And since the early days of European colonization in the Americas, the scalping of Native people by European settlers was not only encouraged but rewarded.
