How White Men Think (Election Edition)

by

They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. 

I thought it was bad when I dredged through the birth certificate crap, but then came the Muslim comments and the alleged terrorist ties and the welfare queen stories. With elections right around the corner I’m thinking back on the first half of this year, remembering that I’ve sat and watched speech after speech of these rich white people talking about how President Obama is the worst thing since sliced bread, has single-handedly ruined our country, and needs to be removed from office at once or we’re all going to hell. 

To be fair, I haven’t been at all satisfied with our foreign policy affairs and military actions during this presidency, but I understand the reality of the situation and that it would be ridiculous to blame President Obama – who took office in 2008 – for something that happened under President G. W. Bush for eight years. That would be like blaming Bush for DADT (it just doesn’t make sense). I don’t like that we’re still in Afghanistan and I think our tough guy approach to securing overseas assets is ruining our reputation with the world (although, some would argue that we have no reputation to ruin other than our overt use of military force). The money spend on the enforcement of marijuana laws would be better spent toward state medical and education programs. When it comes to my pacifistic priorities over the past four years, President Obama has not delivered. 

That being said, there have been efforts toward making the middle class more viable and positive social strides for women’s rights, but when it comes down to who gets what and who really benefits from the past four years, nothing has had a positive impact on my personal social advancement for one reason and one reason alone: I’m a white-skinned male.

Hear me out: The Lilly Ledbetter Act did nothing for me, repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell didn’t make my days in the Marines any easier, the POTUS endorsing same-sex marriage and increasing minority access to business startup-capital did nothing for me, I didn’t benefit from the additional funding for the Violence Against Women Act, the Matthew Shepard Act doesn’t make me feel any safer, and birth control and abortions have nothing to do with me. Out of all of the strides of social advancement under President Obama, I get something from zero percent of them. 

The only way to explain it is reverse sexism. After all, I’m the one expected to raise my children, I’m the one whose insights are instantly dismissed when my sex is revealed, and I’m the one who is subjected to harsh sexual objectification in every facet of my life. So where’s my help from the people who underpay me, who under-appreciate me, who pay me less because subconsciously they feel it is their biological duty to dominate me?

Or maybe it is reverse sexual discrimination. I mean, I’m the one who is afraid to be myself in public because others like me were victims of violent hate crimes and are now dead. I’m the one who is in a committed relationship just like yours but mine is not legally recognized, and I’m the one who is considered wrong, disgusting, and immoral. So where’s my help from people who want to hurt me for the color of my skin and for my choices in sexual partners, from dated legal systems that don’t recognize the relationship between me and the person I love, and where’s my president’s endorsement of my choices? 

No, no, it’s reverse racism. I’m the one who can’t get loans because banks literally draw circles around my neighborhood and declare me “non-investable.” I’m the one who gets told that I’m “well spoken” whenever I can form a complete sentence but still regarded as a lazy child-producing welfare queen, and I’m the one who is still suffering from the cultural fallout of a make-believe emancipation that may have legally freed me but left society still looking down on me. So where’s my help from companies who don’t want to lend me money, from people who treat me like I’m less than human, and from a culture of businesspeople who consider me and everyone like me incapable of comprehending such refined concepts? 

Oh that’s right: I’m not a woman. I’m not gay. I’m not a racial minority. I understand that. I understand that me not being someone else means that I have no idea what they feel and what they go through. I understand that I can do things and get away with it solely because of my gender and color of my skin because this country was founded by white men who built their riches on the backs of slaves and docile, submissive women. I understand that gay people are afraid of dying when they go out to parts of town that are known to be “socially conservative.” I understand that I can do things and go places and not have the music stop playing or people stopping to look at me just because I have white skin. I understand that I have the privilege of not having to worry about someone else having grown up thinking that I was not as equally important to this life as he or she is.

These weren’t things that were taught to me; I was born with these privileges and if I wanted to, I could just pretend they didn’t exist and life would go on just fine and dandy. For me, that is. For women, for gay people, for racial minorities, not so much. 

So when I look out onto a wealthy white presidential candidate’s crowd and all I see are a bunch of white people, I start to realize what people are voting for in this election. Mitt Romney represents the old ways, the conservative, Grand Ol’ American spirit, when you could hit your woman and call a Black man a n****r and fill up your pickup truck all before lunch. Just who in the hell is “Us” in that picture above? It’s obvious: white people who hate black people. 

For the other racial minority groups, I understand that my talk of Blacks and whites erases all other people, but the conservative mindset calls for nothing more. It’s impossible to speak in terms of multiple groups because the very nature of their arguments is founded solely on the idea of good versus evil. Using religion as warrant for the argument against civil liberties, sexual and reproductive rights, and immigration, they have propelled the nation into a state of bipolar discourse for every possible minority group imagined. When it comes to people with brown skin, you’re either a terrorist or an illegal immigrant from Mexico. If you’re Black, you’re a welfare queen. If you wear anything other than a hat with an American flag on your head you’re a Muslim. There is no logic behind it other than a simple, reductionist one: you’re either good or evil, black or white, terrorist/illegal or American.

One thing all baseless and illogical arguments have in common is that they radically bisect the positions on the table so that the proponent of the argument is always right and the opponent is always wrong. If you’ve ever argued with a bigot then you know exactly what I am talking about. In the case of Romney’s voter bloc, the only logical explanation for support from middle-class Americans is a rampant and incognito bigotry toward people who are different – and that includes women (remember when Republicans fiercely opposed reauthorizing the VAWA earlier this year?), racial minorities, gay people, and the economically disenfranchised (although much of the middle class is economically disenfranchised, to which I say that America has a rabid case of cognitive dissonance). 

It makes me sick to my stomach to look at pictures of Romney’s crowds and see a trove a white people all excited to get the Black man out of office. Anyone who is willing to support the disempowerment of women over their own bodies, the proliferation of military forces, and the defunding of education and social programs while simultaneously wanting tougher borders, anti-abortion constitution amendments, and a federal ban on gay marriage is not just a hypocrite, they’re also completely oblivious to the fact that voting against your best interests purely because your candidate of choice isn’t Obama only says one thing about you. 

Both Democrats and Republicans profit off of this perpetual state of left vs right, and it’s surely not going away anytime soon. The only thing you can do is trust the facts and believe in the power of asking questions. If we all started questioning the things that we believe to be true and really understood why and how we started believing something in the first place, we might just realize that our sources were only trying to make a buck. 

I’m sick of people profiting (economically and politically) off of sexism and racism, aren’t you? 

Image courtesy of ChimpPlanet.

  • Jon

    I appreciate the sentiment in the article, but for salesmanship, it doesn’t do a whole lot but cheer for our side and ignore the complexities of the other. Our side being the “enlightened” liberal side of the force. The dark side of the force has their values, morals and understanding of the world reduced to a bunch of -isms. Sexism, racism…um, classism? Homophobia? Ok, I guess that doesn’t really work. Anyway, if you are interested in changing minds, which I think you should be, you might want to consider a more nuanced view of how the right and conservatives think and what motivates them. Hit them where it counts, as they say. Just calling them names, even if the names mostly fit (which I don’t think they do), only alienates and angers them. I think our side needs to educate, but within the context of what matters to the ‘dark side’.
    As an example, look at the state of our prisons and what happens to prisoners once they enter the system. It is cheaper for the US to actively engage, support and educate a potential criminal (i.e. 8 year old from a broken home) than it is to pay for his care in prison, pay for his welfare and food stamps afterwards (because if he’s a felon, chances are, few people will be willing to hire him) and pay for his medical care when he’s broke,old and homeless. 7.5 million people are in prison, on probation or parole. We complain about 9 million people without jobs in the US. But we don’t complain about 7.5 million people who are an economic drain on this country-all the time, even when the economy is doing well? Those people should be working, but they don’t have the life skills, education or support to do what every republican considers a fundamental right and duty- that is- to bring home a paycheck and take care of oneself. We can approach what is fundamentally a problem of racism and class warfare but frame it as a problem of economics, and thus more understandable to a white middle class male. What is “moral” is relative and hard to pin down from person to person, but what saves money is pretty concrete.
    Anyway, with the exception of abortion, I think most of the across-the-aisle roadblocks can be at least partially weakened when we really try to think about what will truly win over conservatives rather than trying to appeal to a system of values they do not share with lefties.
    Sorry to write half an article. I did like what you said, by the way.

    • http://www.lawsonry.com/author/jesse Jesse Lawson

      Thank you for your comments.

      It’s difficult to be bipartisan with a lot of self-described conservatives these days because conservatism to me is what I have always felt. You see, I’ve always considered myself conservative in that I was always trying to “conserve” the strides and efforts in progress that American history has put on the table. This includes progress for labor, for social justice, for equality, and for fiscal responsibility.

      Over the past forty years, Conservatism has clearly turned into a way of conserving ignorance rather than progress, and it’s no longer what a truly conservative party is (unless by conservative you mean fascist, but even then, there are stark differences between the two models of political attitude).

      Everyone has morals and attitudes and partisan rhetoric never gets us anywhere except further rooted in our own holes, but there comes a point when it’s impossible to uproot the weeds in your garden — when you must stop lying to yourself and stop trying to ignore them and pretend they’re vegetables, because they’re not.

      • Jon

        I get angry with the right as much as the next guy, and I certainly don’t want to sugar coat the fact that the beliefs frequently espoused by many on the right ARE racist, misogynistic and homophobic. But we can’t choose who our political peers are. We MUST work with what we’re given. We can not wait for a better day when suddenly everyone is unburdened by ignorance, willful and otherwise.
        The point of my comment wasn’t that you should change how you view the right (I don’t call them conservatives. They are not true conservatives, at least in the historical sense). I simply believe that the left, if they actually want to accomplish anything, need to show the right how the social goals of the left actually fit in with the goals of the right. Thus my example of the prison system.
        The right call us ‘bleeding heart liberals’ and they think it’s an insult. Why is having compassion a weakness worthy of derision? It isn’t, obviously. But the way we frame debates about issues is from our bleeding heart. If you are arguing with someone who thinks compassion is a liability, then you’ve lost the debate before it even began. Instead, I think we need to be more creative and find ways to appeal to at least the more centrally located republicans. If their worldview is filtered through economics, then use economics. Stop pretending that the bible is actually the cause for peoples hatred of homosexuality. The bible merely strengthens a fear, or hatred, that was already there. Find out what the true cause is, then work from there.
        Anyway, thanks for your response, Jesse.

  • http://www.facebook.com/jeremy.montano Jeremy Montano

    “To be fair, I haven’t been at all satisfied with our foreign policy affairs and military actions during this presidency, but I understand the reality of the situation and that it would be ridiculous to blame President Obama – who took office in 2008 – for something that happened under President G. W. Bush for eight years. That would be like blaming Bush for DADT (it just doesn’t make sense).”

    I’m sorry, but I really wish this line of thinking would finally go away. Obviously, consideration should be taken for the fact that Obama inherited a lot of things that were not his doing. With that said, he’s the president. The president maintaining “assassination lists” and running illegal drone programs. The one continuing to wage wars we have no business being in, and even starting new ones (Yemen, Libya, et al). The one signing off on the NDAA with its sections on allowing the government to indefinitely hold American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial or charge (he threatened to veto unless that was put back in) and then adding a signing statement that, of course, HE’LL never use it. Which is great because (to quote Jon Stewart) he’ll ALWAYS BE PRESIDENT.

    Obviously, take everything in its context. This White House inherited a lot of truly scary policies and challenges. But they have pushed for even scarier policies and strengthened existing ones (it recently came out that illegal wiretapping has gone up significantly since he took office; the rise has been much sharper than it was over the Bush years). Bush also inherited plenty of problems, including an uncooperative dictator in Saddam Hussein (whom Clinton was often bombing) and an economic bubble that was finally bursting just as he arrived in office; I imagine you’d agree that this still doesn’t excuse the Iraq invasion or the Bush tax cuts. At some point, the guy who’s been in office for four years has to take some responsibility for what’s happened in that time, and as a raging liberal myself, it’s getting harder and harder for me to take much of the left seriously when it continues to make excuses for this president rather than holding his feet to the fire. We voted for change, not excuses.

    • Bobby Buck

      I would argue that that you have some points about some of the disappointing failings of the current administration, (except starting a war in Yemen and Libya). However I would also urge that a reasoned analysis of historical events should lead many people to the conclusion that a Presidential term doesn’t occur in a chronological void. I think there’s a significant difference between the Iraq War and the Bush tax cuts. The Iraq War was constructed on false pretenses to forward the interests of the administration and their friends. Many of the new and strengthened policies of the Obama administration are born out of the resulting environment. We had a lot of different options following September 11th. We chose to start two wars in the Middle East. It might not be a bright idea, but once you throw a rock at the hornets nest, you’d better keep an eye on the hornets.

      All of that being said, the differences between “excuses” and “realistic expectations given geopolitical realities” really lie in the eyes of the beholder.

  • Cloyver

    “How White Men Think” – a demographic that spans the entire globe and whose constituents can be found in all sorts of circumstances, from wildly rich and happy to desperately impoverished and suffering, they all think in terms of us politics and bills despite them being completely irrelevant to the majority of white men because they don’t live in the us?

    Honestly there’s a lot of merit to the sort of complaints you’re making but you had to go and give it an ignorant title, a worthy warning for the paragraphs of bile that followed. I can’t fault your intentions but you have an utterly warped and closed-minded grasp of reality.

    • http://www.lawsonry.com/author/jesse Jesse Lawson

      To think that politics in America does not favor rich white men is ignorant, not the title. Please reread the article and see that my grief is about American politics, not “the entire globe whose constituents can be found in all sorts of circumstances.” Global political issues is an entirely different subject, but if you don’t think that white men had the majority of power and privilege all throughout history, then I don’t know how we can have a conversation.