Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  The Bundy brothers gathered supporters from all over Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. On January 2, 2016, they converged on Burns, a town near Malheur, for a rally in support of the Hammonds. Without warning, Ammon Bundy and a small group of supporters left the rest of the group and headed to the wildlife refuge. Ammon and his armed crew occupied the refuge offices. The rest of the Hammond supporters—including Ammon’s brother Ryan—were surprised and confused by the change of plan. Ammon would later explain that he had been called to Malheur by God. The next day, Ammon posted a video from Malheur stating that they planned to occupy the refuge for the next several years. Ammon and Ryan issued a list of demands, including that the federal government allow ranchers to return to historical grazing practices (basically just grazing wherever and whenever they wanted to), abolish the grazing permit system, and turn over the Malheur refuge to the county. In the video, Ammon summoned other antigovernment groups and supporters to arm themselves and join the fight: “We are calling people to come out here and stand.”36

  Antigovernment groups, militias, white supremacist groups—basically all your angriest of white men—flocked to Malheur to join the struggle. Soon, the locals found their towns overrun with heavily armed strangers, federal officers, and news camera crews. Locals were not happy to be caught in the middle of the standoff, and the Hammonds themselves were not exactly excited about this “help” that they hadn’t asked for. The Mormon church publicly condemned the Bundys’ actions. But Ammon and Ryan didn’t care. For weeks they camped out in the refuge offices, basking in their righteousness and the media attention.

  The occupation came to an end shortly after LaVoy Finicum, one of the Malheur occupiers, was killed in a confrontation with federal law enforcement on the way from Malheur to a local rally. Finicum, author of the apocalyptic novel Only by Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom, was shot on January 26, 2016, shortly after he was recorded on video shouting at officers, “You want a bloodbath? It’s going to be on your hands.”37 Officers maintain that Finicum was shot while reaching for a gun. Ryan Bundy was injured at the scene and arrested. Ammon was arrested shortly after. A few days later, Cliven Bundy was arrested while trying to board a plane to Oregon to join the fight with his sons. On February 12, forty-one days after Ammon first marched his armed group into the Malheur offices, the last holdouts at the reserve surrendered to authorities, and the standoff was over. Law enforcement officers confiscated dozens of guns and over sixteen thousand rounds of ammunition from the site.

  Members of “patriot” groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters would come from throughout the region to attend Finicum’s funeral. He was laid in an open casket, with an American flag draped across his chest.38

  The Bundys faced multiple charges from both the Malheur refuge takeover and the armed standoff with the feds in Bunkerville two years earlier. The charges were numerous, but the government still had to make its case against the Bundys in court. Instead of freedom fighters, the government maintained that the Bundys were freeloaders. Even though the Bundys enjoyed grazing rights at pennies on the dollar of what the rights would cost if they were leasing private land, they wanted to use and abuse the American landscape for free. The BLM wasn’t exactly known as a group of strict conservationists—actual conservationists often said that “BLM” stood for the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining” because of the extent to which the bureau allowed cattle grazing, logging, and mining on protected lands.39 But despite the low fee and lax rules, the Bundys still sought to violate the scant laws protecting public lands because they felt it was theirs. Further, the Bundys decided on a violent takeover of federal offices in support of two arsonists—a takeover that shut down the Malheur reserve and disrupted the lives of thousands of townspeople for weeks, as well as costing one man his life.

  As justified as the federal government believed it was, the first trial against the Bundys—this one for the Malheur takeover—was a disaster. The state bungled evidence and relied too heavily on a hard-to-prove conspiracy charge. In addition, documented anti-Mormon sentiment from BLM officials severely undermined the credibility of the feds’ case. On October 27, 2016, the Bundys were acquitted of all charges relating to the Malheur occupation. When they were not immediately released from custody, their lawyer, Marcus R. Mumford, threw a fit and had to be restrained by four US marshals.40

  The second trial against the Bundys, for their role in the Bunkerville standoff, ended in a hung jury in January 2018. After two years in jail awaiting the conclusion of their trials, the Bundys were free and victorious. Two weeks after Cliven Bundy was freed, he was giving antigovernment speeches in Paradise, Montana. Ryan and Ammon have both been sought-after speakers throughout the West since their release.

  Later in 2018, President Donald Trump—who counts many antigovernment, angry white men among his political base—pardoned the Hammonds. As a final insult, the Hammonds’ grazing rights were restored. The Trump administration has filled BLM leadership with antiregulation, antienvironmental cronies. In the years since the Bundys were released, BLM oversight of public lands in the West has decreased sharply—with many environmentally sensitive regions left completely to the whims of ranchers.

  When I asked her about the consequences of ranchers being allowed free rein over public lands, Betsy Gaines Quammen lamented, “In terms of changing the ecosystem—the water quality is damaged, there’s overgrazing and erosion, wildlife species are extirpated. It’s really trashing the land.” Amid this environmental destruction, the Bundys and other antigovernment groups and militias look for a stage for their next battle.

  “The militia movement right now is shopping for a cause, and this pardon means that their focus will likely return to public-land politics,” said JJ MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.41

  Quammen agrees. “Right now, we have social media, so these stories are being told over and over again, and the reach of these militia networks is huge,” she explained to me. “They are growing, and they are feeling more empowered. They have people in authority that are either actively supporting them, or you have people who are kind of looking the other way.”

  And so, while many in our government still see “Black identity extremists” as a top threat to national security, the heavily armed and violent white militias and antigovernment groups continue to grow throughout the West. Their battle with the federal government in their quest for unfettered power for white men will likely only increase as they are emboldened and even aided by sympathetic politicians and government officials.

  Lost in this battle between white men is the fact that neither the ranchers nor the federal government has the right to the land around Bunkerville or the Malheur refuge.

  For centuries, the land of the region was lived on and tended to by the Paiute nations. It may be clichéd to say that they lived in harmony with the land, but they certainly knew better than to try to graze cattle in the hot, dry desert. The Paiute people followed the buffalo and other wild food sources through this terrain. Their land-management practices ensured that food would be abundant and that the landscape was protected. (In fact, the current recommended practice of setting controlled light burns to prevent larger forest fires in high-risk areas was for many decades dismissed by white Americans as “Paiute forestry.”)42

  The land was promised to the Paiute people by the federal government in 1872. But the government had no interest in keeping white colonizers from settling there. The Paiute people took their grievances to the US government, and they were rebuffed. White settlers were incredulous that the Paiutes thought they had any right to the land. An editorial in the Idaho Statesman summed up the popular opinion toward Native claims on land: “The idea that the Indians have any right to the soil is ridiculous.… They have no more right to the soil of the Territories of the United States than wolves or coyotes.”43

  Tensions boiled over into open conflict, starting the Bannock War in 1878. The US government
used the fight as an excuse to round up the Paiute people and ship them to a reservation in eastern Washington, claiming their millions of acres of land for white America. The remaining Paiute population was decimated by Mormon adoption programs, which took over forty thousand Native children from their families and placed them in Mormon households.44 When the Bundys took over the Malheur refuge in 2016 and damaged many priceless Paiute artifacts housed there, nobody besides the Paiute people remaining in the area seemed to care, just as few non-Native people seem to care about the damage currently being done to the land the Paiute have called home for hundreds of years.

  “I could go to the Bundys where his grandparents are buried,” said Jarvis Kennedy, the Paiute tribal council’s sergeant at arms, when he was asked how the Paiute people felt about seeing video of Bundy’s clan rifling through their sacred artifacts. “How would they feel if I drove over their grave and went through their heirlooms?”45

  Present-day ranchers like the Bundys are living the Buffalo Bill fantasy of the West: white men, free to do what they please. Ravaging the environment, exploiting and erasing Native people, and pulling a gun on anyone who stands in their way. The idealized American cowboy has been woven through the fabric of American culture, and its impact is keenly felt. The Wild West stage shows morphed into Western movies that glorified the tough and noble white man against racist depictions of Native and Hispanic people. The story of the struggle and victory of white colonizers worked its way into school history books, both erasing the crimes committed against Native people and cementing an idea of American heroism that centered on white male power.

  The story of the cowboy acted out by stage performers like William Cody also created a persona that white men seeking power could adopt in order to project an image for the American public to relate to. Just as it helped Roosevelt in remaking himself and getting elected, the idea of the cowboy as an honest everyman played a large part in the iconography that made George W. Bush so popular with white men in his presidential campaigns, even if his elite family background spoke to an upbringing that was far from rough and tumble (something he has in common with Roosevelt, after all). Even for those who will never don a cowboy hat, the idea of a white man going it alone against the world has stuck. It is one of the strongest identifiers of American culture and politics, where cooperation is weakness and others are the enemy—to be stolen from or conquered. The devastation that the mythological cowboy of the West has wreaked did not stop with the extermination of the buffalo. It may not stop until it has destroyed everything.

  CHAPTER 2

  FOR YOUR BENEFIT, IN OUR IMAGE

  The Centering of White Men in Social Justice Movements

  A few years ago I found myself at a vegan restaurant/punk music bar in one of the whitest areas of Seattle. I didn’t know anybody in the audience except for the one friend whom I had dragged along with me. I didn’t see another Black person in the room. I stayed the entire night and even ate a vegan dinner.

  Why, you may be asking, was I putting myself through this? I was there to support a comedian. A white, male, vegan, punk rock–singing comedian. If you are guessing that this is not my typical sort of comedy, you would be right. But I was happily there.

  I was there because in a sea of white male comedians making jokes in which women and people of color were the punchlines, this dude was making jokes in which those dudes were the punchlines. He mocked the white dudes who couldn’t seem to figure out what consent meant. He made fun of the white dudes who believed that brown people were our nation’s biggest threat and global warming was a hoax. He got out his guitar and sang songs about these men’s fears of their own inadequacy. I, and many others, was grateful to see in his shows evidence that maybe white men didn’t have to be so bad.

  Occupying this unique space, he was able to build a name for himself. His shows sold well, his radio show was popular, and he was often asked to be a commentator on progressive issues—especially those surrounding feminism.

  It is probably less shocking to you than it was to me to find out that this comedian was actually bad. Very bad. First one woman came forward with a story of abuse, then another. Then more stories of sexual impropriety, and just general asshole, misogynist behavior. When we looked to him to explain the allegations, he disappeared.

  To those of us who had supported him, the entire situation was both heartbreaking and embarrassing. It was heartbreaking because we had trusted him, and that trust was violated. It was embarrassing because, well—when we really thought about it—he was never really that funny. His jokes were basic, often consisting of nothing more than angry screeds with no punchline. His music was… not good. If you ever wondered, “What if Bob Dylan’s less poetic brother were a self-righteous, mediocre comedian who tried to get into punk rock?”—this guy would answer your question. Often his jokes and songs spent more time basking in self-glorification about not being one of the “bad guys” than talking about the actual bad guys or their victims. 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.

  When I brought up this comedian to my brother, he simply groaned and said, “Ugh. I can’t believe I once played in his shitty band.”

  We all had egg on our faces.

  A few months after disappearing from the social world, the comedian was back. He had a new schtick, though. He was the “anti-PC” comedian who would talk about how extreme feminism and “wokeness” were the enemy, indistinguishable in their harm from the racism and sexism he once lambasted. He was welcomed into the alt-right/men’s-rights activist world with open arms.

  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. Ego can undermine even the best of intentions, but often, when things like this happen—when someone we trust as an ally ends up taking advantage of their position and then turning against the principles they once claimed to fight for when that abuse is discovered—we find that the intentions were never that great in the first place.

  Whiteness and masculinity are two identities that are built almost exclusively as the inverse of that which their identities oppress. Where whiteness is smart, Blackness is dumb. Where whiteness is successful, Blackness is a failure. Where masculinity is strong, femininity is weak. Where masculinity is analytical, femininity is emotional.

  Identities that are oppressed and constrained by whiteness and/or masculinity struggle to free themselves from their oppressors in order to develop independence. The greatest risks to identities of color or womanhood in a white supremacist patriarchy are the white supremacy and patriarchy that seek to control them. Therefore, the amount of safety, security, and freedom that people of color and women (and other nonmale identities) are able to obtain lies in the extent to which they can gain social, political, and financial independence from patriarchy or white supremacy.

  Whiteness and masculinity are threatened both where their station or behavior begins to approach that expected of Blackness and femininity, and where Blackness or femininity strays from its expected role and no longer serves as a direct contrast to whiteness and masculinity. These dual constraints are important to realize, because while whiteness and masculinity are the two most powerful identities in a white male patriarchy, they are also wholly dependent on the identities they oppress.

  Whiteness is not only threatened when it takes on too many traits of identities of color; it is also threatened when communities of color cease to stay below whiteness, where society’s scripts say they belong. A white family may feel threatened not only when their daughter brings a Black man home for dinner (breaking from what is expected of her as a white person), but also if that Black man makes the same wage as her father (breaking from the expectations of Blackness that whit
eness depends on). The same is true for masculinity. Men may feel threatened not only when their sons declare their love of the color pink, but also when their daughters choose monster trucks over dolls.

  Much of this is subconscious, because the mechanisms of whiteness and masculinity are so rarely critically examined. But the feelings of threat to white male identity often make white men act in ways that are counter to their stated morals and beliefs.

  So what happens when a white man decides to take up a cause that will directly threaten his identity as a white man? Well, sometimes he will subconsciously work to maintain his position above those he is trying to “help” by elevating himself even further above them with his selfless deeds, by recentering the goals of the group to maintain his social and political power, or by quietly exploiting or abusing individuals he is claiming to help—or perhaps a combination of the three. Sometimes this is the conscious goal of the white man in joining these efforts from the very beginning. Such men are predators. But often these men are completely unaware of their hypocrisy because they are not doing anything out of the ordinary by centering themselves when they’ve always been centered, or by taking advantage of those who have always been taken advantage of—they’re just living according to the norms of society.

  But ultimately, if a white man’s abuses are discovered and he’s no longer able to freely center himself or to elevate himself above those he feels entitled to oppress, he will often completely reject his previous declarations of allyship. When challenged, he will go back to the open misogyny and racism that will always put him first.

  THE EARLY MALE FEMINISTS

  Feminism has never been perfect. Even before suffragettes marched the streets in the nineteenth century, feminism has been working out its kinks, only to come up with new ones. We know about the racism, about how early feminists were quick to sell out their Black allies and trade on fears of a fully emancipated Black population in order to try to get the right to vote before Black people. But there are also the classism, the ableism, the transphobia, queerphobia, femmephobia, and a healthy dose of internalized misogyny—just to get the list started. No social justice movement is perfect. Of course one as broad as “equality for women” is going to have myriad different and often competing ideas.