Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  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. 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.

  The path we are on right now is the same one that has brought us only death and despair for hundreds of years. I have seen where this path leads, and nothing is worth continuing in this direction, for anyone. We must break free. We must start making better and more informed choices—with our votes, our wallets, our media, our societal expectations.

  Does this sound like too large a task? Too monumental a shift? I can see that. But I can also see how much work it has taken to create and maintain a system of white male mediocrity in this country. I’ve seen all the creative justifications our society has come up with for the continuation of white male power. I’ve seen all the effort that our society has put forth in order to keep women and people of color from rising to a status that would threaten the comfort of white male mediocrity. And I’ve seen how many people we are willing to sacrifice toward those efforts. I look at how much has gone into maintaining a definition of toxic white manhood, and I do not think that we lack the strength or endurance needed to create a new, healthier version of white male identity. We just seem to lack the imagination.

  Right now white manhood is on a suicide mission. It is standing at the edge of disaster with a gun in its hands, and it’s willing to take us all down with it. For centuries, violent definitions of white manhood have cost countless lives of women, disabled people, queer and transgender people, people of color—and plenty of cis, straight, abled, white men themselves. Now, as we reach the apex of hypercapitalism that makes it harder and harder for white men to hold out hope that all they’ve been promised will actually be theirs, we see their desperation lead to terrorism, self-harm, and the catastrophic destruction of our environment.

  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 this is a human problem. These expectations of violent white manhood were set by people. The centering of white manhood at the expense of everyone else was done by people. These systems of power guaranteeing that a few white men will maintain power over us all, and that the remaining white men will spend their lives clawing toward whatever little power is left, have been built by people. People who were the first to use violence and oppression. People who have worked very hard to convince us that there has never been a time when they were not in charge, and there never will be. 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. We have to find where we have been bonded to these systems, both individually and collectively, and we have to sever those bonds. I believe we can. I believe it because even after centuries of oppression and conditioning, we are still here pushing and fighting against it. After centuries of being told that the cost of standing up to white male supremacy is too high, we still stand.

  We have to have more than just the desire to fight; we have to have the bravery to look at ourselves and see our complicity in the violence of white male supremacy. We have to not only believe that we deserve better; we have to have faith that we can do better. And we have to start now.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The inspiration for this book hit me like a bolt of lightning. When it struck, the first person I told was my agent, Lauren Abramo. I’m so grateful to you, Lauren, for taking a feverishly dashed-off email and running with it. Your faith in my work and your unending support—matched with your unparalleled skills and knowledge in your advocacy for your clients—are the bedrock on which our success has been built. I am so grateful for you, and you are absolutely stuck with me.

  There is no way I would have been able to write a book about two hundred years of white male supremacy in America and have it be (a) less than ten thousand pages or (b) just a bunch of blank, tear-stained pages if it weren’t for my amazing research assistants, Tina Catania and Taylor McCadney. Thank you for your hard work on this project.

  I want to give a special thanks to some of the brilliant experts who spoke to me for this book. Dave Zirin, Betsy Gaines Quammen, Michael Bennett, Ellen Pao, Russell K. Brooks, Carrah Quigley, Imani Gandy, and Robin DiAngelo: You have all made this book measurably better than it would have been without your contributions. Thank you for gracing me with your time and knowledge.

  When I first proposed this book, I was very naïve about the toll this project would take on me. I know it sounds silly to think that, as a Black woman, spending two years delving into centuries of racist and sexist violence and oppression wouldn’t negatively impact me. But having already spent years writing and speaking on contemporary racism in America, I thought I had built a thick enough skin to take on such a task fairly easily. Boy was I wrong. The cumulative effect of this work was compounded by the regular racist harassment that I and my family endured this past year and a half. My work was defined by white male violence, and for a time, so was my home. This one hurt, and will hurt for a while. I’m so grateful for the patience and care that my agent, Seal Press, my publicist, Sharon Kunz, and my editors, Laura Mazer, Emi Ikkanda, and Claire Potter, have shown as I worked to balance this important work and my own self-preservation.

  Thank you to my business manager, Ebony Arunga, for answering every email and scheduling every call and conference that I avoided while working on this book. Now that the book is done, I will… continue to avoid all of those things as usual. You are a gem and the wheels would fall off this entire operation without you.

  When people ask me how I keep going when this work seems like too much, I always point to my kids. Even if you’ve spent all day researching hatred and violence, and you’ve been crying for hours, a kid will knock on your door and remind you that you are out of snacks. Malcolm and Marcus: thank you for keeping me grounded and whole. Thank you for the guidance of your pure hearts. Thank you for your humor and talent and love. This work is all for you and because of you. I want this world to be worthy of your potential.

  Mom, Jacque, Aham, Basil, Lindy—thanks for being the best and funniest family in the world. I love you.

  The month before I was to begin working on this book full-time, I decided on a whim to take a trip to Stockholm. I took a deep breath and asked a friend I had long had a crush on if he wanted to go with me. He did, and we fell in love. He has st
ayed up late at night researching with me. He has listened to me moan and complain about how writing is the worst thing in the world and I’m never going to do it again. He has driven kids to school while I worked to meet deadlines. He has held space for my fear and grief. He has held his own fear and grief for me. We have been locked in through a pandemic together. He has made me laugh at least once every single day. I have never been bold when it comes to my love life and was quite content to be single forever, until the moment that I decided that I was going to ask a guy to fly halfway around the world with me for our first date. There are few risks I’ve taken that have provided such great rewards. Gabriel: I love you. You’re my guy.

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  NOTES

  1. COWBOYS AND PATRIOTS

  1. M. Elias, “Sikh Temple Killer Wade Michael Page Radicalized in Army,” Southern Poverty Law Center, November 11, 2012, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2012/sikh-temple-killer-wade-michael-page-radicalized-army.

  2. E. Blakemore, “The Truth Behind Buffalo Bill’s Scalping Act,” JStor Daily, February 26, 2017, https://daily.jstor.org/the-truth-behind-buffalo-bills-scalping-act/; R. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

  3. B. Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods,” American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (2015): 98–139.

  4. “Scalping in America,” Indian Country Today, October 2, 2017, https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/scalping-in-america-AvU3W-1ae0 W3AjR4BHCvEg.

  5. J. W. Phippen, “Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone,” The Atlantic, May 13, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/.

  6. R. Brooks, interview with author, March 23, 2020.

  7. Phippen, “Kill Every Buffalo You Can!”; G. King, “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed,” Smithsonian, July 17, 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/.

  8. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation.

  9. P. L. Hedren, “The Contradictory Legacies of Buffalo Bill Cody’s First Scalp for Custer,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Spring 2005; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation.

  10. R. B. Smith, “Buffalo Bill’s Skirmish at Warbonnet Creek,” HistoryNet, December 1996, www.historynet.com/buffalo-bills-skirmish-at-warbonnet-creek.htm.

  11. L. North, “Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North,” in Pioneer Heritage Series, vol. 6 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 128.

  12. S. M. Underhill, The Manufacture of Consent: J. Edgar Hoover and the Rhetorical Rise of the FBI (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2020).

  13. P. J. Barrish, The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  14. G. Cooper, “Two Rough Riders Make for a Rocky Relationship,” Chautauquan Daily, July 25, 2014, https://chqdaily.wordpress.com/2014/07/25/two-rough-riders-make-for-a-rocky-relationship/.

  15. W. G. Moss, “Which Presidents—If Any—Did Right by Native Americans?,” History News Network, October 7, 2018, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170123.

  16. A. Townsend EagleWoman, “The Ongoing Traumatic Experience of Genocide for American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States: The Call to Recognize Full Human Rights as Set Forth in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” American Indian Law Journal 3, no. 2 (2015): 437.

  17. G. Gerstle, “Teddy Roosevelt’s Complicated Legacy 100 Years After His Death,” interview by J. Hobson, Here and Now, WBUR, March 21, 2019, www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/03/21/teddy-roosevelt-legacy-100-years.

  18. “Teddy Roosevelt and the Indians,” Native American Netroots, October 10, 2011, http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/1093.

  19. L. S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 215.

  20. “August 26, 1902: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Makes Oregon Debut,” Dave Knows Portland, August 26, 2011, http://portland.daveknows.org/2011/08/26/august-26-1902-buffalo-bills-wild-west-makes-oregon-debut/.

  21. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America.

  22. K. Repanshek, Re-Bisoning the West: Restoring an American Icon to the Landscape (Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2019), 139.

  23. D. Nesheim, “How William F. Cody Helped Save the Buffalo Without Really Trying,” Great Plains Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2007): 163–175, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1504.

  24. B. G. Quammen, American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God and Public Lands in the West (Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2020), 84.

  25. “Testimony in Trials of John D. Lee,” Mountain Meadows Association, accessed February 2020, www.mtn-meadows-assoc.com/johnson.htm.

  26. “Last Confession and Statement of John D. Lee,” Mountain Meadows Association, accessed February 2020, www.mtn-meadows-assoc.com/jdlconfession.htm.

  27. Quammen, American Zion, 87

  28. S. Levin, “Rebel Cowboys: How the Bundy Family Sparked a New Battle for the American West,” The Guardian, August 29, 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/29/oregon-militia-standoff-bundy-family.

  29. J. Pogue, “The Religious Ideology Driving the Bundy Brothers,” Outside, May 17, 2018, www.outsideonline.com/2308761/religious-ideology-driving-bundy-brothers.

  30. B. Gaines Quammen, interview with author, February 25, 2020.

  31. Levin, “Rebel Cowboys.”

  32. A. Nagourney, “A Defiant Rancher Savors the Audience That Rallied to His Side,” New York Times, April 23, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/us/politics/rancher-proudly-breaks-the-law-becoming-a-hero-in-the-west.html.

  33. Quammen, American Zion.

  34. L. Sottile, “Trump’s Pardoning of Two Oregon Ranchers Is a Victory for the Bundys—And an Ominous Loss for Public-Lands Advocates,” Pacific Standard, July 11, 2018, https://psmag.com/environment/trumps-pardoning-of-oregon-ranchers-is-a-victory-for-the-bundys-and-a-loss-for-public-lands-advocate.

  35. Levin, “Rebel Cowboys.”

  36. Levin, “Rebel Cowboys.”

  37. Quammen, American Zion.

  38. A. Templeton, “LaVoy Finicum’s Family Remembers Him as a Man Driven by Family and Faith,” OPB, February 6, 2016, www.opb.org/news/series/burns-oregon-standoff-bundy-militia-news-updates/lavoy-finicums-family-remembers-him-as-a-man-driven-by-family-and-faith/.

  39. K. Galbraith, “What Will Happen if the Oregon Militia Gets Its Demands?,” The Guardian, January 8, 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/08/oregon-militia-standoff-demands-what-comes-next.

  40. C. Sherwood and K. Johnson, “Bundy Brothers Acquitted in Takeover of Oregon Wildlife Refuge,” New York Times, October 27, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/us/bundy-brothers-acquitted-in-takeover-of-oregon-wildlife-refuge.html.

  41. Sottile, “Trump’s Pardoning of Two Oregon Ranchers Is a Victory for the Bundys.”

  42. M. Nijhuis, “How Fire, Once a Friend of Forests, Became a Destroyer,” National Geographic, November 22, 2015, www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/11/151122-wildfire-forest-service-firefighting-history-pyne-climate-ngbooktalk/.

  43. “The Bannock War,” Native American Netroots, December 27, 2010, http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/814.

  44. Quammen, American Zion.

  45. S. Levin, “Fresh Outrage After Militia Seen Rifling Through Tribal Artifacts at Oregon Refuge,” The Guardian, January 21, 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/21/oregon-militia-standoff-malheur-wildlife-refuge-native-american-artifacts-paiute-tribe.

  2. FOR YOUR BENEFIT, IN OUR IMAGE

  1. A. Wald, “When Max Eastman Was Young,” Jacobin, November 2018, www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/max-eastman-masses-eugene-debs-canton-speech.

  2. E. Arnesen, “The Passions of Max Eastm
an,” Dissent, Winter 2018, www.dissentmagazine.org/article/passions-max-eastman-biography-review.

  3. “Floyd Dell: A Respectable Radical,” Postscripts, October 23, 2012, http://notorc.blogspot.com/2012/10/floyd-dell-respectable-radical.html.

  4. “Backwards Glance: Feminism for Men in 1914,” Voice Male, July 9, 2013, https://voicemalemagazine.org/feminism-for-men-in-1914/.

  5. E. K. Trimberger, “Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900–1925,” in Powers of Desire, ed. A. Snitnow, C. Stansell, and S. Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 131–152.

  6. “Floyd Dell: A Respectable Radical.”

  7. Trimberger, “Feminism, Men, and Modern Love.”

  8. J. Neuman, “Who Won Women’s Suffrage? A Case for ‘Mere Men,’” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 16, no. 3 (2017): 347–367.

  9. E. Francis, “From Event to Monument: Modernism, Feminism and Isadora Duncan,” American Studies 35, no. 1 (1994): 24–45.

  10. M. C. Jones, Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911–1917 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 22.

  11. F. Dell, “Feminism for Men,” The Masses, July 1914, http://omeka.ursinus.edu/files/original/36e5c6312e00e0bf06cc21dfa6796f89.pdf.

  12. Trimberger, “Feminism, Men, and Modern Love.”

  13. Trimberger, “Feminism, Men, and Modern Love.”

  14. J. P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1975]), 219.