One of the tortured memories that shows up often in my masochistic mind-carousel is that of Brie Larson telling me that 2018’s A Wrinkle in Time wasn’t made for me:
"I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time," said Larson. "It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color." (source)
She was extremely correct, it was not made for me, nor was it made for any type of person other than babies, who might enjoy it for the colors and sounds (if kept at a reasonable volume). The show was a mess, and everyone not vacuum-sucking the teet of culture agreed.
That is to say, everyone agreed other than this person with this color hair:
I don’t need to revisit this topic, or at least I do not wish to re-litigate the Brie Larsen quote as that moment has already been well-spun through the cultural laundry-cycle. Look it up now and you’ll see that, before the topic was laid to rest, the final verdict was that her quote was of course taken out of context, and that she was really just saying that there should be less “40 year old white men” and more women and people of color as professional film critics. Yes lol, that clears things up.
Actually no, no thank you. I’m not looking to get into the Brie Larsen weeds again, not here on a Monday. I mention this episode only because it plays a major part in the pantheon of moments comprising what I think is an extremely puzzling question I often ask myself: what exactly are white men supposed to be doing?
Asking that question alone is not as much heretical as it is dull. It’s the sort of question asked with rhetorical bluster by my dad and dads everywhere, who can’t quite understand the tectonic cultural shifts of the last ten years. Not because they’re dumb, but because their brains’ occipital lobes were warped by cable television, Miller Genuine Draft, and lack of inflation. So, rather than re-writing their head cannon for the last 70 years of their lives, they just arrive at the most sensible conclusions possible given their generationally strangulated worldview (with Bill Maher helping them along).
This is not what I’m asking. I’m not trying to make a case that “white people are the most discriminated against people in society!” like my dad and dads everywhere would. I don’t even know what metric you would measure that by, and I suspect it’s a.) not true and b.) really just a poor rendition of a more whiny complaint which is, “no one listens to white men’s opinions anymore!”
The latter I think is actually correct, though I’m not sure that spoken opinions are meaningful when issued into the formless online ether from a mouth of any color or gender, and also I think asking for “permission to be listened to more” is an extremely low-Testosterone strategy. But that is not why I am asking the question. I am not asking it plaintively; I actually would like to know what “the resistance” would suggest as the appropriate activities of an average white male in the United States today.
The last four years are the most culturally schizophrenic period of my life, and I suspect of many of your lives as well. The bottle of vile corruptive mind viruses from academia has been fully uncorked and knocked on its side. The cup of post-modern “peer-reviewed” witch-venom spilleth over; it spews forth new meta-myths and progressive incantations on a daily basis. Not so much as a matter of political activity, but more as an ablution. A cleansing ritual, like burning sage or suffocating your cat. It’s out there now. As they say, “you can’t put that anal lube back in the tube.”
As the consolidation of power between media, higher education, corporate capital, and government further calcifies, it only makes it easier for such mind viruses to be dispatched quickly and with murderous precision. Sure, they don’t have hold of the hearts and minds of all of us - but they have at least 70% of people on ideological speed dial. If they wanted most of the mealy-brained citizenry to…I don’t know…to hate Sylvester Stallone tomorrow, for example, they could definitely do it. Just release a few targeted stories on CNN, and then have a few 27-year old non-binary NPR correspondents with vocal fry named “Rokey Tabernacle” or whatever the fuck start they/their report by saying “rumors about Sly have long circulated in the industry but they were once only whispers. Today that rumor mill has burst open with a right hook…looks like Stallone is finally…TKOd.”
(Let’s pray that never happens to our boy Sly for he is absolutely not expendable).
It matters not that many of their ideology bombs - already senseless bullshit at their inception - collide with the logical blast zones of others in contradictions so extreme they leave you as blown away as Oppenheimer was in that scene where he LISTENED TO THE RADIO about the bomb in Hiroshima going off (I’m still angry about that movie but I can’t get into it again, not now). One need only look back at the public perception on gatherings for protests vs. public gatherings for funerals or church services during the hysteric heights of COVID. You remember that, right? When 1200 doctors, med students, and public health officials signed a letter providing guidance on why it’s okay to protest white supremacy but not to go hiking? It’s still Here on Google Drive in case you forgot. Here’s the money shot:
We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives. Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.
LOL holy shit was that dumbest three months in history. “You can protest for what you believe in OBVIOUSLY but as long as its the CORRECT thing OBVIOUSLY which is backed up by SCIENCE, OBVIOUSLY.” Oh, by the way losers, masks didn’t do shit so I guess you “esteemed men and women of science” just ate whatever diarrhea that they pushed into your intellectual tube feeder, and because you’ll never admit to it, that means you are content to just lick your lips and ask for another helping. Remind me next time I need a surgery to go to the filthiest resort clinic I can find in Mexico, because I’d rather have a former short order cook cut into my chest cavity with a steak knife than have someone who went to school for 20 years tell me that my heart attack was caused by white supremacy.
I swear I wish I was still in 8th grade, because if I was still in 8th grade, I would absolutely say that was the gayest shit ever. But I’m a man now, and so I must put away childish things (such as calling stuff gay-ass shit). I would say these people will have to bear the cross of publicly identifying themselves as the ultimate “bend me over and fill me up with you big throbbing ideology”-level cucks of history, but who am I kidding. All of them will probably be identified as the “The Atlantic Coast 1200” in some future Netflix movie chronicling their brave fight in the face of “everyone who tried to silence them...which was basically everybody.” Stars Gary Busey as Trump and Gary Oldman as a fat Anthony Fauci.
For some reason, the ideology bombs I find most devastating are those that brazenly declare that some things just aren’t for white people, specifically white boys and men. There are certain books that aren’t for me, certain movies and shows. There are certain foods I can’t have, music I can’t listen to, jokes I can’t say or even laugh at. There are ways of singing I can’t do and there are places I shouldn’t go. Why? Because when I do these things I “co-opt X culture.” So if you’re reading this and you’re a white dude who just got cornrows, listen up because I have some bad news for you. Do you still have the receipt from your barber? You will need it.
I find the conversations on co-opting cultures about as vexing as any other, but while other conundrums require me only to have the right opinion, this one seems to dictate a list of acceptable and unacceptable actions, or things that are and aren’t right for me to do. I already know I can’t have an opinion on certain things, because my opinion is bound to my supposed worldview, and my worldview is tainted by “whiteness,” which is really just a shorthand for, well…anything? This woman, all the way back in 1993, said it means property. This “psychologist” says it means bias and privilege. The Unitarian Universalist “church” (LOL) says that it is hatred, indifference, amnesia, shame, guilt, “fright,” and a bunch of other things that a fake church of white people says is something other white people (not them) do. It is so interesting reading these things, telling me how I feel, how I think, and not feeling or thinking that way. And then when I tell someone I don’t feel that way, I’m told I am in denial. So I guess they’re right - I must feel the way I…don’t…feel…?
What’s the point in even trying to explain it. It’s not like there’s an argument good enough to put any of this to rest. I have felt this since I first read the extreme, bordering on bizarre projection of W.E.B. DuBois in this famous quote:
On the pale, white faces …I see again and again… a writing of human hatred, a deep passionate hatred, vast by the very vagueness of its expressions…..We have seen, you and I, city after city drunk and furious with ungovernable lust of blood, mad with murder, destroying, killing and cursing, torturing human victims because somebody accused of a crime happened to be of the same color as the mob’s innocent victims and because that color was not white! We have seen…in the name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood…right here in America an orgy of cruelty, barbarism and murder to men and women of Negro descent. (pp 186-187 in Black on White)
Historically he is of course not wrong, but the way this quote is bandied about today as if the America we are living in is even remotely like the one DuBois was talking about - or even the one he lived in - in is particularly galling.
I’m not suggesting DuBois didn’t ever see or experience racial cruelty, but I have always found this passage found bone-chillingly warped, sad, and inescapable, especially when I apply it to white liberals in urban environments today, who would literally cut their own fingers off just to prove they aren’t “one of the bad ones.” It is also the exact same sort of paranoid, reaction-formational mind that creates these sorts of thoughts as the one who takes racism to the extreme ends of the spectrums. But let’s talk about that, too.
I realize today is a tough day for this, as yet again some dumb fuck with a swastika scratched into his gun went and killed three black people in a Dollar General and then, like a true bitch, shot himself in the head to avoid repercussions. Every time this happens, people like me put our faces in our hands because we know that idiots like this are the thing that keep us stuck in this sad stupid carnival forever. Here is a person who imagined he was doing one thing, and instead achieved the opposite thing.
Perhaps you think asking a question of “white culture” today is a mistake. That it is tactless and callous. I might agree, too, if not for the fact that I believe that the question of “white culture” is deeply tied to this phenomena of mass violence. So much so that it is, if not the other side of the same coin, at least one of the five other sides of a six-sided die.
The question again being, what exactly are white men supposed to be doing? is a perfectly relevant question to ask right now, and it will continue being a relevant question to ask from now until the time that a coherent answer to it can be furnished. What are they supposed to be doing? What will please everyone? What was this guy supposed to be doing instead? Yes - yes - I know he should have “not been shooting people.” If you snickered and said that in your head then go stick an RBG candle up your ass, you’re part of the problem. Deal with this question honestly, or deal with this nightmare we are in forever.
What was this white guy supposed to be doing?
What should his interests have been? What should have been his hobbies? Who should he have been hanging around with? What should he have been reading instead the hate-filled screeds online? What movies should he watch? What food should he eat? What music should he listen to? I’m not saying dude shot up a store because he was bored or because he couldn’t open up an Asian-fusion restaurant. I think this man did this because he stuck himself in the corner of the internet where “blood and soil” ideas are repeated over and over and over again, until he was completely surrounded by an ideological vortex that had such extreme gravity at its center that it somehow pull all of its disjointed arguments into something resembling a cohesive center point. Add to that he wanted to kill himself, which, let’s not forget - all of these mass shootings are always mostly that.
He couldn’t find a single thing to pull him off that road. Not a single older man to humiliate him out of his childish ideas and show him how to fix a car instead. Not a single novel that transported him somewhere that he could see himself as the hero or imagine himself in love. Not a single career goal that could have lit him up with so much meaning and drive that he became embarrassed that he ever used to read the websites he did when he was 20. But he never got any of that. And so three people went out shopping today, minding their own business, and now they’re dead. So that this guy could feel like he meant something. It’s tragic and evil. It is tragic and evil, but I will not say the third word that usually comes with that, which is “senseless” There is sense to it, and until we can pull up our pants and talk about it, without devolving into the same childish war of notions we usually get trapped in, then expect for this to continue forever. If we can’t - if we will recline back into our chuckling Chapo Trap House type “owns” that seek to be clever, relevant, smartest, and “first,” then we will get what we have gotten. We will all continue to be miserable, and it will get worse and worse and worse, with the only verbal contributions to the problem being short sentences that are nothing more than snarky Youtube comments spoken out loud.
Can we fix this? Or are we just going to keep saying “uhhhhhhh…how about try not to be racist???” forever?
But perhaps that’s the point? For this to continue forever. Perhaps there is no “correct way” for white men to be in the world. Perhaps no one will ever answer that question with a modicum of compromise or intellectual honesty. Perhaps there is a reason that, rather than coherent, neatly interlocking arguments against white people participating in certain behaviors, activists instead get to pick and choose from a bevy of criticisms that can be slung in any way at any time; just throw them against the wall, and whatever sticks is the crime for which the sentence will be handed down via mob adjudication.
There is a reason that the arguments don’t make sense, and the reason is because “sense” has lost social capital. In this era of Clownus Dominus, the value of sense has been superseded by the value of abundance. Lots of arguments win against good arguments. One critique of my behavior didn’t work? Throw another. Do they contradict each other? Who cares. Throw another. This is why I have to “stop co-opting culture” but also why, at the same time, when I do stop co-opting culture and retreat to a corner of what I consider “my culture,” I am then critiqued for not having enough representation of women and people of color, or for creating a fascist and white-supremacist enclave.
Why is it that Wrinkle in Time isn’t for me, Bros tanked because of me, Charlie’s Angels both isn’t for me AND was ruined by me, Jordan Peele movies can’t star me, I’m watching Barbie the wrong way, and - of course - I’m supposed to see Snow White even though Prince Charming is a stalker, while AT THE SAME time, Warhammer is racist and transphobic, Joe Rogan is “a gateway to to radicalization,” the NFL is now a place of political activism, and reading Infinite Jest means I’m supporting an abusive misogynist.
Where in the hell am I supposed to crack open a cold one with the boys these days?
If I am ever to sit and have a drink (of water, I’m sober), then I certainly wouldn’t be able to have a very long conversation about “white culture.” There isn’t one. Or at least, all it is and all it is allowed to be is genocide, slavery, and oppression. The professional-activist class says as much; there is no white culture because we just stole all of our culture.
Ok…then can I create my own then? I have some good ideas!
If I listen to rap, I’m taking up space, but if I listen to country, I’m a KKK redneck. If I eat with chopsticks, I’m co-opting other cultures, but if I eat the food I like, it’s so poorly seasoned it’s laughable. If I play Call of Duty, I’m a Proto-fascist. If I post on 4Chan, I’m a budding psychopath. If I celebrate fourth of July, I’m a colonialist. If I celebrate Juneteenth, it means I have to spend the day thinking about “the wounds of racism” and then make a list of resolutions of how I won’t be racist in the next year.
Do we see the problem here yet? Do we see what sort of mind-trap we have constructed here? Do we see how unfeasible it is to have a certain group of people - a group who represents the majority of citizens in a country - whose only options for acting righteously include:
Sacrificing their time, effort, money, and livelihoods for your vague causes
Engaging in relentless, perpetual acts of public shame and prostration
Saying nothing and disappearing
But of course, in regards to #3…don’t think you can hide away and play your favorite hobby. That needs to be open to everyone, or else it’s just another racist past time.
Do we think that a cultural narrative, one which shrinks the horizon of possibility for a whole group of people so severely, could possibly ever be successful? Do we think that white boys and men can sate themselves on the innate joy of “being an ally” and “staying in their lane,” instead of pursuing their passions, exploring the world around them, following their curiosities, having big hopes and dreams? Do you think we can create a society of mental health and wellness by creating a curriculum of self-loathing, deprecation, and body mutilation? Humans do not work this way. Our choices and feelings from moment to moment are not connected to over-arching narratives; they are connected to innate human need. I am not thinking about “what is just” when someone sticks a gun in my face while I’m parked at a stop light. I think of my kids being orphans, and not anything else.
In the end, it’s not about Barbie or Warhammer or David Foster Wallace. Who cares. In a context of good faith arguing, I’m willing to concede changes need to be made to any of these to make them a kinder and more welcoming place. But the arguments are not in good faith. They are made in a context of resentment and prejudice. But not hatred. How can someone actually hate me if they don’t even know me? But I wouldn’t be surprised if some people did confuse these things and perseverate on these things and obsess over them so much that they did slowly alchemize into hatred. That is what this shooter did. How could he get it so wrong? He left a manifesto. I won’t read it but I suppose you could find out. I have to wonder, though…if you swapped black for white and white for black in a few places in DuBois quote above, could you not imagine those same words written in that manifesto?
Like the cool version of Lin Manuel Miranda said in another dimension, “Vile is vile is vile is vile.” If the factory of your mind makes vile thoughts, how could you ever expect the mind of another to refrain? If you want to say, “well W.E.B. DuBois didn’t shoot anybody,” then I guess you’re going to be stuck at that step for ever, convincing yourself that some people are good because of their color and gender and some people are bad because of their color and gender. Or you can grow up and have a conversation about how we make this world more of a place where everyone can carve out a place to feel happy and proud of themselves.
I am willing to stop co-opting other cultures and I am willing to change my own culture, but the problem is I don’t think I am allowed to have a culture. I’m willing to make changes to make people feel more welcome and safe in a context where people respect my interests and are actually willing to share theirs. That is called a context of good faith. In that context, I make amends and I make room. But in the context of this current culture, the one in 2023 that says that white men must both stay out of everyone else’s culture and also refrain from participating in or creating a culture of their own, then I say the only thing any respectable person - not white person or male person but person person - can say given those options:
Fuck you.
I actually would like to know what “the resistance” would suggest as the appropriate activities of an average white male in the United States today.
(1) Train with barbells, preferably in your home gym.
(2) Dump the media.
(3) Read the great books.
Embody everything that they hate and fear.