Dear Fellow White Men
After the Kavanaugh hearings, I want to add my voice to the growing chorus of men in our country who know that we need to talk. What we saw was a grotesque display of patriarchal resentment.
America witnessed the rare moment of a wealthy white man being held accountable for his actions. During a hearing that politically amounted to his job interview, a man thought it was acceptable to cry during the first 20 minutes (if a woman did so in this context, she’d be considered too “emotional” and lacking temperament), frequently refused to answer questions, resorted to blatant partisanship unseen in generations for a Supreme Court nominee, refused to accept an FBI investigation (which should have bolstered his case if he was indeed telling the truth), and disrespected a sitting senator. He used the fact that he was accepted into Yale, played sports, and is the father of two daughters as moral validation.
Meanwhile, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford remained poised, politely responsive, and deferential. Despite living with the trauma that so many sexual assault victims carry, the norms of patriarchal culture dictate that she not be angry or disrespectful if she wants to be heard, let alone believed.
I write you fellow white men because the hearings were a microcosm of the exhaustion of trying to simply be considered fully human and American for so many of us. The vast majority who aren’t among the nearly 91 million straight white Christian men (of 325 million people) should be treated as equal Americans in every political, social, and legal sense, and yet we are still so far from achieving this critical goal.
My friend Rabbi Jason Rodich, who is, like me, a cisgender white man, echoed what others are saying, but too many white men, especially heterosexual white men with class privilege, aren’t hearing:
Imagine if a woman or a person of color or a poor person had gone before a Senate committee and raged and shouted and done things like respond to a senator by asking if they had ever blacked out from drinking when asked this question in a hearing. It is the height of privilege to be able to behave in such a manner, under such circumstances, and not be immediately shot down [and/or] not taken seriously for such behavior. It is the height of privilege to be able to behave this way and it result in empathy from the most powerful men in our country. This is critical, and something that I lovingly and seriously encourage white men to work on “getting” if you have not already.
Many of you may bristle at the words above, but let’s unpack them. Think about how American individualistic culture empowers us to believe that we are each uniquely special and different, that we’re in control of our destinies. Our whiteness and maleness — our privilege — are invisible to us, while we should only judge on the basis of the “content of our character,” to quote Dr. Martin Luther King.
We instinctively hide behind this myth of individuality. While we’re viewing ourselves as full human beings, we never describe ourselves to each other or in our dominant political discourse as “white men,” whereas literally everyone else who isn’t us gets qualified by their identities, no matter what their personal or professional accomplishments. We are socialized this way.
I wish that the issue was only discourse, but the end result is often deadly for countless Americans.
Following last week, I also have questions to ask: Why are we so threatened by the idea of people with a different skin color, gender, or religion having the same power and access as we do? How does sharing this power make us weaker instead of stronger?
As a white man who grew up in Pacific Palisades (Bethesda’s posh Los Angeles cousin), attended college prep school, and never had to take a single student loan, I’ve had a front row seat to Kavanaugh’s wealthy, entitled, bro-culture universe. Like Kavanaugh, I’ve never had to fear suffering at the hands of police brutality singularly due to the color of my skin and gender identity. I have full control over my body, choosing if or when to start a family. I had all of the resources I needed to launch into a meaningful career and have a family that can financially and emotionally support me if there was ever a need for them to do so. But I am also gay and Jewish. I’ve won the birthing lottery and I’ve had a lifetime of grappling with othering. Don’t get me wrong — I’m very proud of both identities — but I know what it feels like to be different by way of entire societal forces denying my legal rights and finding my existence or inclusion somehow threatening to their very being.
With Trump praising Nazis and anti-LGBT forces controlling all three branches of our federal government, being a gay Jew in these dark days is terrifying.
I write you because even as I share your racial and gender privilege, I too am exhausted of trying to prove my worth to you because I have to if I want to succeed in today’s America. Despite sharing many privileges with you, I still fail to check the boxes of a full American citizen: a white, heterosexual, Christian, cisgender male.
If I’m having a tough time, then just imagine what hundreds of millions of others must be experiencing.
Yes, many, if not most of us busted our butts to get to where we are today based on the resources provided to us. Even if we’re white, male, straight, and Christian, we can experience hardships that must be overcome. Acknowledging our privilege doesn’t take away an iota of our life experiences or our hard work — not for a second.
Think about how different Kavanaugh’s own behavior and nomination juxtaposes with that of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Emily Badger of the New York Times noted the difference in a concise tweet:
When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated, there was much talk of how her working-class Bronx background might inform her worldview today. But we seldom talk about wealth, whiteness or male privilege in the same way, as if they’re cultures that shape people.
Privilege is behaving like Kavanaugh did at the U.S. Senate and still being considered for a lifetime job. Privilege is our nation’s laws protecting us most because they were overwhelmingly written by us. Privilege living our lives free of racial, religious, and gender profiling, even though it is white Christian men who overwhelmingly commit acts of terrorism through gun violence in this country.
Based on our own American mythology of individualism, shouldn’t we aspire to end undeserved privileged treatment for the few at the expense of the many?
What will you do with the extraordinary evidence that things aren’t this way just “because that’s how they’ve always been,” but rather because people go out of their way to keep it so?
Imagine a life in which we are freed from the toxic white masculinity that manifests itself in today’s outright celebration of cruelty against those who aren’t white men and instead enriches us by exposing us to entirely new ways of inclusively viewing ourselves and our country.
As Michelle Alexander so aptly stated in her groundbreaking “We Are Not the Resistance” column in the New York Times, I believe that “a new nation is struggling to be born, a multiracial, multiethnic, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters….In fact, the whole of American history can be described as a struggle between those who truly embraced the revolutionary idea of freedom, equality, and justice for all and those who resisted.”
White men have to be a part of this vision for America. No one is seeking to replace us; they are seeking to have a seat at the same tables where we’ve sat since 1776. We white dudes aren’t going anywhere: it’s the ideology of white male supremacy and our (often unintentional) complicity in it that needs to be deconstructed in order for this America to thrive. Yes, it will require us to get uncomfortable and to let go of our blinders, but this frees us just as much as it frees others.
There are dozens of books and columns by women and people of color that articulate these thoughts far better than I do (White Fragility, We Should All Be Feminists, The New Jim Crow, Between the World and Me, The First White President are great, though certainly not exclusive places to start), but too many of us white men don’t read or hear them, so I’m doing my very small part as an ally to bring their voices to you. Let the Kavanaugh hearings be a wake up call for us to listen to, believe, and elevate those voices as we would our own, for our own sake.
