The White Supremacy Of Not Caring

The phrase "white supremacist" conjures up visions of Klan robes and shaved heads and swastika tattoos. These days one might also think of a Trump rally. These very obvious manifestations of white supremacy are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. White supremacy is maintained in this country less by openly expressed hate, and more by quiet, subtle, apathy.

One of America's dirty little secrets is that while white Americans by and large don't give a shit about the lives of people of color they don't talk about it much, either. Sometimes silence speaks louder than words. I know a lot of quiet white supremacists who are not vocal Trump supporters, do not express open bigotry, and in some cases are not even conservative. Many of them also don't even really seem to think a whole lot about race.

It's something they'd rather not think about at all. They have internalized the racist hierarchy in their minds, and so feel no need to examine their skin privilege, or even to think that such a thing exists. Their position in society is natural, as far as they are concerned, the product of hard work. When things happen that display the massive levels of racism in this society, they just choose to ignore it and just not care about it.

When Trayvon Martin was murdered, they assumed he must have done something to deserve it. (Repeat this for every time a black person is murdered by the police.) They look at the system of mass incarceration and only think that it's a fine thing that so many criminals are off of the streets. When Flint's water was turned into poison, they just turned the page and moved on. When immigrant children were kidnapped and jailed, they told themselves "well, they were breaking the law" and maybe, just maybe, thought "it's really too bad that had to happen." They heard Trump's racist rants and maybe didn't like them, but still went in to vote for him for a tax cut or an anti-abortion judge on the Supreme Court.

The protests by NFL players are the ultimate litmus test of this phenomenon. While I support the protesting players, I can understand but not agree with those who disapprove of their methods, if and only they are also upset about the police killings inspiring those protests. The thing is, I have never met one of these unicorns. The same people made at the kneeling are, surprise surprise, the same who never said a single word when Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and so many others were murdered. Why? Because they tacitly support the racist system responsible. 

And when you meet these people, you will often find that they are "nice" people. They are friendly, respectful in their speech, and may even have close friends and family members who are not white. Some people are amazed at the stories of white Trump voters whose immigrant spouses were later deported. I am not surprised in the least. White supremacy in America is violently maintained by the state, but those who approve of that system mostly do not do so by screaming "Build the Wall!" but by hearing about immigrant children abused in custody, shrugfully saying "that's a shame," and not giving it a second thought. 

Is The Second Reconstruction Over?

In 1869, at the height of Reconstruction, Thomas Nast imagined an America where people of all races and ethnicities were free and equal. That dream would soon be destroyed.

As the election neared its end, in my dark times I thought a lot about the history of Reconstruction, which proved that history does not automatically move in a straight line towards progress. A breath-taking attempt at creating a multiracial democracy ended in violence, white backlash, and indifference from whites who had once supported Reconstruction. The 1876 election drove a nail in the coffin of Reconstruction, and the Democratic Party's slogan that year was "This Is A White Man's Country: Let The White Men Rule." An eleven year window of rights and opportunities for African-Americans was slammed shut, and legal equality would not be established again until the 1960s, almost a hundred years later.

Of course, we are only talking here about equality under the law, economic and social equality have proved much harder to secure. The last few years have seen a lot of activity pushing against structural racism, and I think it's hardly incidental that this happened with a black man in the White House. As during the original Reconstruction, when black men served in the House and Senate, having people of color in high positions was the most potent symbol of change.

What we see now looks like a backlash against it, and in my darker moments makes me think that the period from 1965 to 2016 may to future generations be akin to that of 1865 to 1877. The parallels are getting too clear for me not to see it. During the 1870s, the Supreme Court whittled away at the 14th Amendment, and when the black defenders of Colfax, Louisiana, were massacred by a white militia, the Court ruled that 14th Amendment protections did not apply, since it was a mob and not the state that had done it. (Even though the mob basically grabbed power in the state through their actions.) This makes me think of the Supreme Court's ruling in the Shelby case, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, and then unleashed a wave of suppression aimed at voters of color.

Leading the charge in the 1870s were the deplorables who called themselves "redeeemers": the KKK and white militias. These days we have our own deplorables, operating with impunity online and one of their leaders is poised to be the chief advisor to the president of the United States. They made themselves known after the election in a campaign of harassment intended to make people of color understand that this is a white man's country.

Those deplorables were always around though, then and now. In the original Reconstruction there was a time when the government stepped in and used the military to suppress the Klan. The Klan was there, but it was being fought and defeated. After 9/11 the deplorables attacked mosques and murdered Sikh men because they assumed their turbans meant that they were Muslim. Anyone who's spent any amount of time on the internet knows that racist trolls have been roaming cyberspace for quite some time. New social media platforms have basically let them run amok and made them so much more powerful.

However, back in the 1870s the issue was not just the "redeemers," but the politicians in the North, who began to back off their commitment to racial equality. They began to see the whole thing as a folly, and in any case, were too invested in white supremacy to be willing to fight to the death against it. They made the decision, consciously or unconsciously, to ignore racial inequality and the fate of freedmen and freedwomen. I am beginning to see the same thing happen right now among white liberals, who have got it in their heads that it is somehow impossible to appeal to the economic anxiety of working class whites while simultaneously advocating for diversity and equality. Exhibit A is Mark Lilla's piece in the Times today. They say "identity politics has failed" when it was a white identity movement that beat them! Not only is their perspective grounded in a massive misunderstanding, it also tends to act as if the concerns of people of color ought to be forever secondary to those of white people. Pieces like Lilla's basically amount to" "Shut up about being shot by the police, there's a mom from Altoona here who doesn't like talking about race!"

We are going to see a lot of this from white liberals in the coming years, I fear. This is why we need people in the streets holding their feet to the fire and holding them accountable. We want to think that there's no going back to pre-1965 America, but that's only because so many of us accept the myth of progress. It's exactly then that most Trump supporters thought that America was "great." The fact that birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, is under assault today should be a big tell. Don't get complacent. Don't assume we've just progressed beyond the evil past. Don't let there be another ninety years of darkness. Don't let history repeat itself.

Trump And German-American Identity

A nineteenth century German beer garden in New York, fun for the whole family

I am a German-American, which is a phrase that very few people of my ancestry use to describe themselves. This would've been surprising back in the nineteenth century, when German language newspapers abounded and German beer halls were a common meeting place for German immigrants in cities across the country. Today, according to some measures, German is the most common ethnic ancestry in America, just ahead of African-American. At the same time, one does not see many outward expressions of German-American identity, not nearly what one sees for say Irish, Greek, Italian, Puerto Rican, etc.

I've long pondered this question, and if I had the time, talent, and resources, I'd love to write a sweeping history of Germans in America. A lot of it certainly has to do with the effect of the world wars, which made identifying with Germany very problematic. My German immigrant great-grandfather, for instance, fought in the American army in World War I, even as his own brother was fighting in the Kaiser's forces. Matters weren't helped by Nazi sympathizer groups like the German American Bund in the 1930s. Those events added urgency to the broader erasure of German ethnic identity, something already common among those groups deemed "white." That process for German-Americans (or at least those who were not Jewish) first began back in the nineteenth century, when German Protestants would often be compared favorably to Irish Catholics by WASP elites. The wave of hatred against German Americans in World War I changed that perception, and accelerated assimilation.

Another thing that probably contributed to the lack of a strong German identity was the fact that Germany was an extremely divided country before 1871, and even after that regional and religious divisions were very stark. One of my ancestors actually emigrated because he did not want to be drafted into the Kaiser's army. He was Catholic, and at the time the church had been attacked by the Protestant Prussian dominated new national state in the name of national unity. Most of my ancestors would have spoken the Plattdeutsch dialect of the swampy northwestern places they came from like Oldenburg and Ost Friesland, which would have been unintelligible to someone speaking "high" German.

The vast, vast majority of Americans of German ancestry spend little to no time thinking about their ethnic origins or know much of anything about German food, culture, language, or history, apart from World War II movies. I grew up in central Nebraska, a very heavily German area, and I didn't get a taste until I took German classes in high school from the son of Volga Germans forced to flee the Soviet Union. No one in my family ever cooked German food or spoke in German or encouraged me to learn or know much about German things. (This despite the fact that two of my grandparents had grown up speaking German in the home with their immigrant parents.) A couple of genealogists in the family were interested in researching the family's German roots, but not really at all invested in a German-American identity. We were certainly not ashamed of it or anything, it just didn't really matter that much. German-Americans, by and large, like my own family, have long fully accepted whiteness.

I get depressed that Donald Trump too is a German-American, but his history with his identity is very interesting and telling, both about him and about German-American identity and the lack thereof. Just today the Times published an article on Trump's immigrant grandfather, and the fact that for years his father Fred and Donald himself had claimed their ancestry was "Swedish" rather than German. His grandfather of course Anglicized his name from "Drumpf" to "Trump" much earlier. The Trump talent for self-fabrication seems to go back really far in his family. His own family history shows the larger story of German identity being shed very quickly in the twentieth century, within a generation of arriving in America. (Donald Trump having a Scottish immigrant mother certainly helped with that distancing, too.)

While the article paints this decision as a way for Fred Trump to have easier dealings with Jewish businessmen, the Trump family went well beyond a change in ethnic origin in its embrace of whiteness. Fred Trump was notorious for building segregated housing, and Donald himself was sued for housing discrimination in the early 1970s. He has gone on to run the most explicitly white supremacist presidential campaign since George Wallace.

While this German-American will not be voting for Trump, I see in his family history the larger, unfortunate dynamics of German-American identity. Take for instance Milwaukee, probably the most German large city in America, and also by some measures the most racially segregated. (Having been there I would not doubt that assessment.) The borders of whiteness are even starker there than in most American cities, and that's saying something. Like other white Americans, German-Americans have gladly accepted the benefits of whiteness and tossed what once made them "other" in the trash, with the usual social, moral and spiritual consequences.

It was not always this way. The first big wave of German migration after the 18th century "Pennsylvania Dutch" came after the failed revolutions of 1848. (This wave included the first of my German ancestors to come to America. He was an artisan, I'd like to believe that he was a political radical, but I have no evidence.) Those immigrants, many of whom were political refugees owing to their commitments to democracy and equality, took their beliefs with them. In Texas, those anti-slavery German immigrants refused to cooperate with the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the north, a large number of German immigrants served in the Union army, including '48er Carl Schurz, who was a general and later Republican senator. Cartoonist Thomas Nast, a German immigrant himself, used his pen to attack slavery, the Klan, and mistreatment of Chinese immigrants and to support Reconstruction. German-Americans helped build up socialist parties and institutions, putting socialist mayors in charge of Milwaukee. And, I would like to add, the antipathy of beer-drinking Germans to temperance forced the Republican party to hold back on the issue for decades, and their proclivity for beer helped undermine Prohibition when it did get put in place.

Nowadays these roots are unknown in American society apart from historians. German-Americans have been melted (with their enthusiastic participation) into the white mass, and Donald Trump is now the most famous German-American in the country. This, I guess, is the ultimate endpoint for opportunistic cultural amnesia, and it makes me despair.

The Other Gun Violence

If I were to say "America has a gun violence problem" you might instinctively think of mass shootings like the tragedy in Orlando. That frame is what drove the sit-in of House Democrats to force a vote on gun control legislation aimed at increasing background checks and barring those on the terror watch list from getting guns. That frame has issues, since mass shootings account for a small number of the tens of thousands of Americans killed by guns every year. 

The murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge at the hands of the police should also be prompting a different conversation about gun violence, one that will not be solved with gun control measures. This is the gun violence perpetrated at the hands of the police. There have been too many prominent instances to count, and they have been outnumbered by the victims whose names did not become hashtags or who did not have cameras present at the scenes of their deaths.

As awful as mass shootings are, we cannot forget that police shot and killed almost a thousand people last year. There's a big difference in how the two are received, however. Nobody defends mass shooters, but huge amounts of political capital are expended to defend killer cops. Prominent publications even write sympathetic articles about them. The blood is barely dry on the ground before stupid memes like "BlueLivesMatter" are all over the place. In Louisiana, the state where Alton Sterling was murdered by the police, the legislature just passed a law covering police as a category of victim in hate crimes. When police are faced with protests over their violence, they blame any street crime on protests, as if the blood on their hands can be transferred onto the hands of others. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, consistently defends the police after they kill, and has proposed a mandatory death penalty for those who kill police officers.

And here's the deal: a very substantial portion of the white American population cares more about assuaging their own fears of supposed black criminality than they do about the lives of black people. In their minds the police are holding the line against what Victorians called "a criminal class," and will support any level of force used against them. If the police are criticized they go nuts because they think the whole dam is about to break. It's in moments like this that I feel absolutely sick, and not just because of the horror and injustice of the killings. I get ill thinking about how this mentality is so common among the people who raised me and surround me. The police are allowed to kill not just because of a political system or legal system, but because of the everyday fear, hate, and contempt nestled deep in the soul of white America. As long as that remains, I fear that the other gun violence will never end.

The White Man's Party

A friend who lives in Texas recounted an interesting story in an email to me today. While waiting in line at the airport, he overheard a conversation about Trump from Trump supporters. Evidently one of them thought that the wall with Mexico was necessary, because without it the influx on Latin immigrants would make it so that the Democrats would always win, and that then the country would be a one party state on the road to dictatorship.

The latter claim is, on its face, ridiculous. However, this person's assumptions say a lot. He assumes, essentially, that anyone who isn't white will be voting for the Democrats, and that his party would rather dwindle into irrelevance rather than appeal to those voters. At base, he is consciously or unconsciously thinking that the Republican Party is the white man's party, and that he wants to keep it that.

It's easy to forget, but George W Bush won substantial percentages of the Asian and Latino vote back in 2004.  There was a time when it looked like the Republicans were going to use values issues and promises of prosperity to lure voters for these groups into their tent. With Trump as the nominee, that has now obviously changed. His appeal is primarily to ethno-nationalism, which is why working class people of color are not attracted by all of his tough talk on trade.

By embracing Trump, the GOP may finally be admitting that they are indeed the White Man's Party. It's not so unprecedented in American life. Back in 1868, when the Democrats were fighting Reconstruction and appealing to the racist whites who now back Trump, they proclaimed themselves thusly:

Of course, times have changed. The shifting demographics feared by that man in Texas make this strategy more difficult. Then again, the reactionaries today are using one of the same weapons used by their Redeemer forbears: vote suppression.

Trump is certainly doing nothing to disabuse anyone of the notion that he represents the white man's party. His campaign even announced that it would only be considering white men to be Trump's veep, since anything else would be "pandering." This statement and Trump's rampant misogyny point to the fact that he is indeed the leader of the white MAN's party, not white people's party. You may wonder if this is a winning strategy, considering that it potentially alienates white women. The thing is, intersectionality cuts both ways, and also interacts with whiteness.  A majority of white women voted for Mitt "binders full of women" Romney, and I would hazard to guess that white women, when it comes to politics, are more invested in whiteness than in their gender.

The fact that a majority of my white brethren will probably vote for Trump in the general election is deeply upsetting to me.  It's also a reminder that, as others more famous than I have said, treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.

Stop With The Narrative That Trump Is The Candidate Of The Downtrodden

In 1970, after the Kent State shooting, construction unions staged demonstrations attacking the peace movement, praising Nixon, and espousing "love it or leave it" nationalism. That nationalism is what drives Trumpism today, don't let anyone tell you it's all about economic despair.

I've written about this before, but I keep hearing the same damn false narrative and I have to respond to it. Today my friend and fellow (much more noteworthy) blogger Chauncey DeVega sent me a Thomas Frank article from a couple of months ago where Frank makes the same false argument that Trump's support lies in the economic slide of the white working class, not in racism. On its face, this just isn't true. If Trump is about soothing economic pain, why are the black and Latino working classes, who have suffered WORSE than the white working classes not voting for Trump en masse? Why aren't they energized by his language about "trade deals"? I mean, the answer is so obvious that I don't even have to say it. A man who does little to disavow the support of the Klan and who wants to deport millions of Latino immigrants and incites hatred against them is not going to get those votes.  There are also a lot of working class whites who do not support Trump, despite living in the Rust Belt. Trump's working class white support also tends to run high in the South, where whites are already disproportionately Republican compared to the rest of the country, with race a big element in that.

It pains me to go after Frank, because he has consistently been one of my favorite political observers. I think this is a case of someone trying too hard to say "see I told you so!" Frank has been saying for years that the Democrats' shift to the middle of economic issues has enabled Republicans to pick off Democratic voters with culture war issues. There's a lot to that, but Frank is misinterpreting the implications when it comes to his thesis. He wants to hit the Democrats for their failures, but Trump's support has a lot less to do with those failures and a lot more to do with the culture war that Frank did not talk about: nationalism.

Frank has discussed so called "values voters" in the past, but the current election has shown us that the real culture war, the one that has sustained itself since Nixon, is not over gay rights and abortion, but American identity. In the early 1970s hard hatted construction workers attacked anti-war protestors and praised Nixon, waving the flag and proclaiming their loyalty to the nation. After all, the one great privilege traditionally conferred by whiteness on lower-order whites is full citizenship, to be "free white and 21." Those hard hats thought of America as "their" country. Forty years later, the Tea Party movement stripped away a lot of the "values" issues to reveal naked nationalism inflamed by the "Kenyan Usurper" being in the White House.

I am sure there are plenty of white workers who think that Trump will somehow bring the jobs back, but they like him because they see him bringing jobs back for people LIKE THEM. Frank says that white working class voters aren't attracted to Trump because they want to support a flaming racist. That may well be true, but that does not change the fact that race is still a huge part of their support. They are well aware of his hate against Latinos and associations with white nationalists. Here's the deal: whites who are anti-racist look at that and refuse to back Trump, no matter his policies. Even those Trump voters who do not consciously respond to his racism are willing, consciously or not, to support him knowing full well that he is a white supremacist. That are okay with that, at the very, very least.

Most of his supporters, however, are willingly or even enthusiastically accepting the white supremacy as part of the total package. Look people, Trump voters are not new. They are the same people who voted for George Wallace, Jesse Helms, and David Duke. (While Duke lost the Louisiana governor's race, a majority of whites voted for him.)  Going back at least to Andrew Jackson there has been a place for the politics of white racial resentment pitched to the white working class, and working class whites more than happy to turn out in support. Trump is part of that tradition, but has incited more support than the likes of Pat Buchanan due to his novelty, political savvy, and media manipulation.

There are plenty of working class whites who do not respond to Trump's poison. Those are the voters that Democrats need to cultivate, the ones willing to be part of a multi-racial coalition. As far as those whites that don't, they just aren't needed anymore, and it would be insulting to the people of color who vote Democrat for the party to court that vote.  The Democrats rode the New Deal coalition of white workers, southern whites, African Americans, and educated liberals to victory for over three decades. That coalition was broken (after years of weakening) by Nixon's Southern Strategy and culture war appeals. Now the Democrats can forge a new, equally powerful coalition. African Americans, Latinos, Asians, the youth of all races, educated liberals, a big chunk of white workers, and a large portion of white women (still not a majority) vote for the Democrats. Instead of wooing whites who cling to skin privilege, the Democrats should build this other coalition, which has the potential to leave Trump battered come November.

Trump's Supporters Are Not The Dispossessed

Jesse Helms' infamous "Hands" ad is just proto-Trumpism in its appeal to white racial resentment

One of the most notable things about Trump is his political thievery. His slogan “Make America Great Again” was basically stolen from the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980. He’s also fond of speaking of the “silent majority,” which was Nixon’s great rhetorical turn of phrase.

Trump may be ignorant of a lot of things, but he’s not dumb. He knows the message that has worked for conservatives in the past, and is using it. His combination of nationalism, white racial resentment, and anti-global populism brings together some well-worn strands of conservatism.

What gets me are the pieces that talk about Trump’s supporters as the dispossessed. The way that the narrative goes, Trumpers are all working class whites who are angry at an economy and political party that has left them behind.

No.

Trump may draw more working class whites than his primary opponents, but he still draws large numbers from middle and upper class whites. Not to mention the fact that a sizable number of working class whites –especially outside of the South- are Democrats. I would easily bet that a majority of working class whites to have voted in the primaries thus far have voted for someone other than him, whether it be Clinton, Sanders, or one of the other Republicans.

Trump’s supporters are the same type of people who have supported similar figures in the past. Trump's white supremacy combined with nationalist militancy and an attack on elites is the same stew that drew so many to Andrew Jackson back in the early 19th century. More recently, the same type of person who voted for George Wallace is the same time who votes for Trump.  His voters also tended to be working and lower-middle class, and they were also driven by white racial resentment and nationalism. Trump was just savvy enough to know that those voters were out there and that no one was trying to reach them directly with the red meat they wanted to eat.

The news media has made the mistake of assuming that because the white working class has suffered under the neoliberalization of the last 40 years, that that economic angst is the primary engine of white working class support for Trump. There is correlation, but not necessarily causation. Trump is playing with the same populist nationalist politics that others have before him, pure and simple.

Some of the media's misconceptions might stem from the well-meaning but untrue myth that the poor are inherently more virtuous than the rich. They are in fact people like anyone else, and thus susceptible to appeals to the darker side of their nature. Many wealthy conservatives express their sociopathic tendencies through a libertarianism hell bent on getting them more money at the expense of others. Less affluent conservatives, on the other hand, lower their sights onto those just below them on the social ladder, with promises to keep them down. It's an impulse that's been there in American history from the New York Draft Riots to the 1920s iteration of the KKK to the Southern Strategy.

Trump's supporters are thus NOT the dispossessed, but those who want to keep what they've got, and a lot of what they've got is white skin privilege. That privilege has been tenaciously guarded throughout this nation's history, we shouldn't be surprised to see a demagogue rise who speaks to the anxiety of its loss.

Tamir Rice and the American Police State

I don't watch videos of police shooting suspects anymore because I watched the Tamir Rice video when it was first released.  I have never, ever seen anything so absolutely horrifying in my entire life.  The image of a 12 year old boy being shot down by a police officer in about two seconds has been burned into my mind and I cannot get it out.  From time to time over the last year it has bubbled up to haunt me whenever I hear about new cases of police violence.  I think about my students, many of whom fit Tamir's profile, yet older apparently more "dangerous," and get sick to my stomach with fear and anxiety.

By all accounts the officer who shot him was an incompetent, trigger-happy shithead.  The fact that he was allowed by the city of Cleveland to have the power of life and death over a child is in itself a crime of epic proportions.

Yes, there were some odd circumstances, namely that the dispatcher had made the situation sound much more dangerous than it actually was.  But even if Tamir Rice was holding a real gun, there's nothing, absolutely nothing that can explain the fact that he was left laying there, bleeding out, without any medical help, other than the complete and utter disregard that the officers on the scene had for his life.  If do not think he race had anything to do with that lack of regard then I don't even want to bother talking to you.

Of course, he didn't have a real gun.  He didn't point it at anyone.  Tamir lived in an open-carry state, where it is not a crime to carry a gun openly.  Watching the video, it is completely obvious that there is no way that Timothy Loehmann was able to properly assess the situation.  He was intending, perhaps from (or before) the moment he arrived, to shoot and kill Tamir.

And yet, there is no indictment.  Indictments are so easy to procure that lawyers like to joke that "you can indict a ham sandwich."  Yet in Ferguson, New York, and now Cleveland, it seems impossible to indict a white police officer who kills an unarmed black person.  It's almost too obvious to state this, but so many people in America don't want to believe it, so here it goes: when it comes to African Americans, the United States is a police state.  Any police officer who kills an African American will not be punished, because white society is so deeply invested in its fear of black people and its desire to enforce white supremacy.  Few white people will say that openly, of course.  But their lizard brains react in terror when they see black people taking to the streets to protest brutality, and those same lizard brains automatically search for ways to exonerate white police officers who kill black people.  Anything that challenges the status quo of radical residential segregation with black ghettoes patrolled by police officers who are above the law in their ability to use violence makes their fear reflexes go off the charts.

And yet white people are vastly overrepresented in the militia, open carry, and anti-gun control movements.  Many of them are constantly fearful of a "big government" that they think is trying to control their lives, all while endorsing that government's surveillance of Muslims and mass incarceration of people of color.  The crime rate goes down, but they freak out nonetheless about a perception of rising crime.  That perception is merely a barometer of their own fear that white supremacy is being undermined.  Again, they are not fully conscious of this fear, because in "post-racial" America the only racists are the ones wearing white sheets, and they think that to notice and talk about race makes someone the "real racist."

The anxieties around white supremacy are so deeply ingrained in the backs of the minds of white people that even I have to tell my own lizard brain to shut the fuck up from time to time.  (The implicit bias tests get at this issue.)  That's just how powerful this mental disease is.  Until it is eradicated, and more white people can choose humanity over fear, I worry that the American police state will be able to maintain itself, killing more innocents as it goes along.

America 2015 (A Year On The Brink)

"So It Goes" by Nick Lowe seems to be an appropriate song for this year

Every year about this time I take stock of what's happened, both in my personal life and in the larger world.  This year, 2015, will either be seen in the future as an important turning point (a la 1968), or a momentary outbreak of change that quickly subsided (like 2011, the year of Occupy.)

The thing that dominated the political scene in America this past year was the color line.  In regards to the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests related to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 did not quickly become a thing of the past, as unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray showed. In that case the attorney general actually secured indictments, but the trial process has been difficult.  Movements against racism went well beyond the police.  In Chicago the mayor himself was implicated in covering up a cop's murder.  At the University of Missouri students actually managed to get their president to resign for not doing enough to address racism on campus.  Pressure was put on Democratic candidates for president, and now Bernie Sanders is explicitly endorsing the movement's goals. The Democrats rely on black votes to win elections, and the BLM movement might thus finally break the two-party consensus of "tough on crime" dating back to Clinton.  Despite the setbacks recently in Baltimore and the continuing headlines of police shooting unarmed African Americans, the new anti-racist movements could be poised to bring about some major changes.

Of course, whenever the color line gets challenged, white people spring forth to its defense, and fight that defense more fervently the more that line gets challenged.  The Republican Party has been using racial resentment against president Obama for years, but in 2015 that coded resentment was out and proud, thanks to Donald Trump.  His campaign initially benefited from him being perceived as a straight-talked who would upend traditional politics.  He achieved staying power, however, by going after Mexican immigrants in openly bigoted terms.  The success that this has brought him has forced many other Republicans to follow suit, leading to the opening of an Overton Window.  Trump has advocated mass deportations of millions, the kind of thing carried out in only the most repressive states, and yet his popularity keeps rising.  Fear and resentment of Muslims has grown in staggering fashion, so much so that Republican officials fell over themselves to be the first to castigate Syrian refugees and proclaim that they weren't welcome.

In a sign of the times, the violent white supremacists are coming out of the sewers and out into the open in ways I've never seen in my lifetime.  Some of them shot four black protesters in Minnesota, and the protests at the University of Missouri were partially spurred by white supremacist graffiti. Anti-Muslim hooligans have been defacing mosques and Muslim centers all around the country.  Trump is speaking to these and their grievances, and white power groups and figures have now endorsed him.  Trump may very well go down as a historical oddity, like Boulanger in France in the late 1800s.  But like Boulanger, Trump represents deeper forces at play.  Just as France in the fin-de-siecle was a place of extreme political and cultural divisions, so is America.  In both cases reactionary elements have a romance with authoritarianism and removing "internal enemies."  The anti-Semitism of the late 1800s has been replaced with Islamophobia and racial resentment, but both rooted in the desire by a particular group to "take our country back."  If 2014 finally ended the fatuous talk in the media of a "post-racial America," 2015 was the year that openly expressed white supremacy came back into the national discourse.

In the midst of all of this, guns played a big role in 2015, from San Bernardino to Umpqua. This past year confirmed something we already knew after the Newtown massacre: gun control is just not going to happen.  If a room full of dead children wasn't going to move the issue, nothing else ever would.  Something most progressives don't seem to understand is that for a large group of people, guns are a crucial element to their very identity, and many of those people think gun ownership is a bulwark against government tyranny.  Beyond the headline-grabbing massacres, the open carrying of guns at protests has gone from something that once caused great alarm a few years ago to a commonplace occurrence.  America was always a heavily armed society, but it is now one where guns are allowed almost everywhere, and where they are being used in protests to intimidate and imply the threat of violence.  Americans now think that in response to the threat of terror that we need MORE guns, not fewer.  Banning assault weapons used to have huge amount of support, now only a minority would back it.  2015 may very well go down as the year that the NRA's interpretation of the role of guns in society actually became conventional wisdom.

Looking forward I try not to let my usual pessimistic tendencies predominate.  There are levels of political action and activism by young people that I have not seen in my lifetime; it's the kind of thing I so sorely wanted to be a part of in college where I formed a club with a handful of friends to that end because there were no organizations on campus for social activism.  While Bernie Sanders will likely not get the nomination, the fact that he draws the level of support that he does is heartening.  Anti-racists are making the likes of Rahm Emmanuel run for cover and are forcing many institutions to confront structural racism.  Years of activism by the gay rights movement paid off this year with the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage.  Transgender people are getting rights and recognition when they used to only get scorn and mockery.

At the same time, I can't escape the thought that these green shoots of progress will only prompt a much stronger reaction, uprooting them violently.  Trump is leading the Republican race as a quasi-fascist, and even if he doesn't win, his army of supporters is still out there, ready to act and ready to listen to another demagogue.  There is still no justice for Sandra Bland and countless others.  The most fearful among resentful white people are literally sticking to their guns.  2015 was a year on the brink in America, 2016 will likely decide whether that brink will be breached or not.

We STILL Need To Talk About White Male Pathology

I woke up this morning to the horrific news of the terrorist shooting in Charleston.  Following the story today, I have seen yet again how the killer/terrorist is presented as an "isolated case" detached from larger society.  This is the way it tends to be with white men when they commit these acts.  The folks at Fox News are even spinning this as some kind of anti-Christian thing, despite the fact that the terrorist liked to sport apartheid symbols and justified his attack to one of the victims with noxious racism.  Many white people in this country are so afraid to admit the persistence of racism even when it has manifested itself in the most violent way possible.  If this is not an act of racist terrorism, what on earth is?

In the aftermath of the horror of the Newtown shooting I wrote about how America needed to confront the pathologies of white masculinity, and returned to the topic multiple times afterward.  A Slate article today provides a list of the many, many terrorist acts committed by racist white men in the last twenty years, a truly scary litany of murder and hate that most white people refuse to see as anything more than a set of unconnected "isolated incidents" with "lone wolf" perpetrators.  They will also likely blame "mental illness." as if someone cannot be both mentally disturbed and a terrorist.  Furthermore, they will not wonder why mentally ill white men often respond to their illness by murdering other people (often people of color) in large numbers, when other types of people don't.

For an illustration, take a foreign example, that of the xenophobic Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik (the president exaggerated today a little about the uniquely American nature of mass shootings.)  He murdered 77 people in a highly planned bombing and shooting spree all on political grounds as an enemy of the Left.  (He targeted a social democratic youth camp for reasons similar to Roof's targeting of a prominent and politically powerful African American church.)  Beyond his politics, Breivik fit the stereotype of the maladjusted, aggrieved loner.  The American media does not have a problem characterizing Breivik as a politically motivated actor.  Why then the reluctance to do so with Dylann Roof?  The answer is pretty simple, namely that it would raise all kinds of uncomfortable questions.

The fact that Roof presented himself online wearing patches of the apartheid regime flags of Rhodesia and South Africa is telling.  He was obviously "radicalized" at some point, since knowledge of those regimes' symbols isn't common among most American 21 year olds.  He didn't commit his act in just any predominately African American church, either.  He chose the church founded by black freedom fighter Denmark Vesey and pastored by Clementa Pinckney, an elected official who had called for mandatory police body cameras.  It is the first AME church founded in the south, and due to its history is a national landmark, official or not.  I can't imagine that a person who was aware of Rhodesia's history would not have been aware of the significance of this particular church.

Will the government start entrapping fellow white supremacists to pre-emptively get them in prison, just as they have with followers of radical Islam?  Will the government be committing psy-ops on white supremacist web pages and forums, as they do with Islamist ones?  Don't hold your breath.  The hatred Roof expressed to justify his shooting is very extreme, but sadly it is not rare.  Go to practically any traditional white barber shop in large swaths of this country for a day and you will likely hear a variation of it.  God knows I have.  It is an everyday hatred that is not taken seriously by many whites, just listen to Roof's roommate.  But don't worry folks, it's just an isolated incident by a quiet loner.  Move along, move along, and don't forget to keep buying stuff.

****

Here's what I wrote in 2012, most of it still sadly relevant:

Whenever a horrible event like the massacre in Newtown takes place, we try to find ways to explain it. This is often a futile exercise, because many people merely superimpose their larger beefs with society onto these events, rather than examining them with any real analytical and factual framework.  Hence, we have people like Louie Gohmert saying the teacher should have had her own assault weapon, or Mike Huckabee lamenting the loss of God in public schools.  We should be very careful of monocausal explanations that oversimplify things.  There are a lot of factors at play in the Newtown massacre, from the perpetrator's mental state to the availability of semi-automatic weapons.  However, I would like to echo others out there in the blogosphere who want to examine the role of white masculinity in all of this.
Of course, there have been other mass shootings in other countries, and the worst such shooting in this country was perpetrated by a Korean student.  That being said, this country has witnessed the lion's share of mass shootings, and disproportionate seventy percent of the shooters have been white men.  I hardly think the connection is coincidental.  Ever since the Aurora tragedy this summer, I have been contemplating this issue, trying to connect the dots to explain the connection between white masculinity and mass shootings.  I finally feel like I have some speculations worth sharing.
Masculinity more generally in this society is defined to a great extent by violence and control, and violence used as a means of maintaining control.  I have long been amazed and appalled by how many public figures in this country who have abused their wives and girlfriends have been allowed to stay on the pedestal.  That sad fact is to me evidence that masculine control through violence is implicitly accepted as legitimate in America.  Action movies predominate at the box office, and the orchestrated violence of the NFL is America's most popular sport.
Furthermore, white men in this country are taught that they are the masters of their own destiny, and are usually not confronted with the same limitations of possibility that men of color are.  When white men fail, an experience our society gives them few resources to confront,  they often lash out at those they hold responsible, or turn inward and commit suicide.  Most mass shooters seem to want to do both, as Adam Lanza did.
The completely atomized nature of white middle class society contributes as well.  Shooters are usually described as "loners," men disconnected from others and hence unable to empathize with the human beings they kill.  We are an increasingly individualized society, which means that those mentally unstable, frustrated white men with access to deadly weapons are so rarely stopped before they kill.  They sit on the margins, alone, without any kind of cohesive social structure to bring them in.  Adam Lanza had stopped going to school and interacted with few outside his home, Eric Harris was able to plan his rampage in a home where his parents took evidently little interest in his doings, James Holmes had been expelled from his university and lived alone in a city far from home.  While atomization is occurring in all groups of American society today, in middle class, white culture it has probably been the most egregious and damaging.
We have a situation where white men are socialized to be the masters of their fate and able to use violence to maintain control over their lives.  These same men lack the tools to handle adversity, and are often left to their individual resources, even if they are mentally disturbed.  When some of the most mentally unstable of these men experience soul-shattering setbacks and are given access to semi-automatic weapons, we can only expect the worst.  We need to educate young men (especially white men) to not see violence as the answer to their problems, or to phantasize violent solutions.  We need to equip them with the tools to withstand failure, and to keep the more troubled of their number from slipping through the cracks.  Last, we need to talk seriously and openly about the nature of American white masculinity, and stop pretending that it isn't problematic.

Scalise and a Peak Behind the GOP Curtain

With all of the crazy and violent events going on in the world right now, it's easy to forget the news that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise once spoke to a meeting of out and out white supremacists.  Despite the calls for "minority outreach" by the likes of Rand Paul, it appears that Scalise will retain his position after the bigwigs rushed to his defense.  In the aftermath of it all David Duke even declared that he isn't a racist, thus proving the observation many archly have made that there are no longer any "racists" left in 21st century America, even among Klansmen.  And yet racism still persists.  Hmm.

Scalise's real crime in all of this was that he was stupid enough to try to appeal to white racists directly instead of cloaking his appeals in thick rhetoric and deploying dog whistles rather than trumpets.  Since the days of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968, the Republican Party has masterfully deployed white racial resentment in order to garner the votes of conservative Dixiecrats in the South and the denizens of white flight suburbs in the North.  Fifty years later, the former Solid South stronghold for the Democrats has become the Republican heartland, and with the defeat of Mary Landrieu, no white Democrats from the South remain in Congress.

The effects of all of this are obvious in Scalise's home state of Louisiana.  According to one report, the ideas put forward by David Duke in his infamous 1991 campaign are now broadly accepted in that state.  Duke himself even understood that he could go far by chucking the white sheets and assailing welfare recipients and affirmative action.  It is hardly a mistake or coincidence that such policies slashing social funding and building prisons are disproportionately harmful to people of color.  These policies do the work of white supremacy under the cover of "smaller government" and "law and order."

I am not surprised that the Republicans refused to dump Scalise, mostly since they have profited from a policy of never admitting that they are wrong. Our compliant media turns it into a case of "he said-she said" and forgets about it the next week.  Trent Lott's political demise is an exception, but his enemies in the party had been sharpening their knives before his gaffe.  Speaking of Lott, he committed much the same crime as Scalise by openly praising Thurmond's segregationist campaign of 1948 when to that point he had been subtly advancing its ideals under the cover of the usual conservative slogans.  He paid for his stupidity with his job, but his party kept hitting the bong of white racial resentment.

Low level Republican officials typically lack the discretion and care of their Capitol Hill counterparts when it comes to advancing a white supremacist agenda without making it too explicit.  These bush leaguers often get caught sending racist cartoons of the president and watermelon-themed emails about the White House.  Scalise's scandal is proof that their more sophisticated and powerful counterparts in the party are pretty much cut from the same cloth.  Don't worry though, the Scalise affair is already forgotten, and the game of promoting white supremacy and profiting from it at the polls by Republicans will continue on unabated.  With all of the white fear, backlash, and reaction against the protests in Ferguson and New York, conservatives will have plenty to work with.

The White Male Pathology Files: Sports Hooliganism

This is the second installment in my series, The White Pathology Files.  The series is prompted by the false narrative that the pathologies of black people are what's to blame for their economic and social inequality in American life, not systemic racism.  There are plenty of pathologies out there that are overwhelmingly associated with white males, and sports hooliganism is one of them.

In many European countries soccer matches are marred by violence between fans and racist and homophobic chanting.  The whiteness of the participants in hooligan culture is rarely discussed, whereas I would bet that if black sports fans were involved en masse in such behavior that race would very quickly become a part of the discourse.

Of course, Americans like to point to the embarrassing violence and hate they see among European soccer fans and feel smug, as if that kind of thing doesn't happen in this country.  It does, but in a much more random and less organized fashion.  Just take a look at our college campuses.  Michigan State University is infamous for its post-game rioting, where students have a tradition of lighting couches on fire in the street after big games.  Earlier this year a student mob at the University of Arizona had to be dispersed by riot police after their team lost a basketball game.  When Penn State fired Joe Paterno for having protected serial abuser and rapist Jerry Sandusky, students rioted, tearing down lamp posts and throwing rocks at police.  (Guess what?  The police did not bring in military vehicles, point rifles at the students, or use tear gas.  Gee, I wonder why?)  If it were young black men and not white men doing this you can bet that couch burning would be turned into an epidemic by Fox News along the lines of the bogus "knockout game."

Or take the NFL.  Each year the indispensable sports site Deadspin does their hilarious "Why Your Team Sucks" series where one of their writers disses each NFL team and readers submit their own reasons.  If you read the comments section (which on Deadspin, is actually quite good) you will see story after story about violent, drunk, and racist fans attending NFL games.  I can't count the number of instances when fans of opposing teams were physically assaulted without any repercussions.  Those responsible are almost exclusively white men.

When Michael Brown was killed, the police did everything they could to paint him as a hooligan, including deliberately misrepresenting video of him at a convenience store.  The implication was that if he was a "thug" he must have done something to deserve being shot six times while unarmed.  Young white men, however, are free to commit hooliganism without getting gunned down by the law.  Yes, they may have to go to court and face punishment, but never the ultimate punishment.  When it comes to sports, white men have a space where they can be drunk, violent, and out of control, and seem to feel entitled to it.  As always, the pathologies of white men are linked to their inborn superiority complex, which entitles them to things others don't get.  It's time to call it out when it comes to sports hooliganism, and to stop pretending that it isn't intrinsically linked to whiteness and masculinity.

The Pathological White Masculinity Files: 4Chan and Feminists of Color

Editor's Note: After having written on this topic so many times, I am starting a series I am calling The Pathological White Masculinity Files.  Since the Newtown massacre I have kept pushing for a real, national conversation on the dysfunctions and pathologies of white American masculinity.  It's not just big events like mass shootings that show this problem, and so I plan on exploring less bloody but nonetheless horrific examples of white American masculinity at work.

In case you haven't heard, users of the 4chan site have basically admitted to creating fake Twitter profiles posing as feminists of color in order to sow discord among feminists and to embarrass the women's movement, in particular the non-white women's movement.  This included the manufactured hashtag #EndFathersDay, something that some people at Fox News actually took seriously.  Using the #YourSlipIsShowing hashtag, activists have been outing those fake Twitter profiles.

I don't know all of the details, but I do know that this is taking typical troll behavior in an even more dangerous and threatening direction.  Trolls are probably the worst thing that the internet has given us, and I have been lucky to only occasionally have been trolled.  (Those words still hurt, even if they were being lobbed by pieces of human garbage.)  Of course, I'm a white guy, and women and especially women of color commonly face violent, aggressive, threatening trolling intended to silence them that makes what's happened on this blog look like child's play.  The so-called "Operation Lollipop"attempted the same, but in a much more organized and systematic manner.  I've heard it compared to a kind of non-governmental COINTELPRO, and I think that's an apt comparison, since the FBI used agents provacateurs and informers to silence similar movements back in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the worst things about pathological white American masculinity is that it carries with it white supremacist assumptions.  Regardless of anything else, the fact that white men are to be the rulers of society is not to be challenged or questioned.  This is a big reason, naturally, why the fact of Barack Obama's presidency has caused unprecedented disrespect for the office and intransigence in Congress.  The same goes for the Internet.  The computer world has long been heavily white and very masculine, and the trolls at 4chan aim to keep it that way.  They just don't want black and brown people, and especially black and brown women, to be using "their" space.  Their upbringing and this society's assumptions about white masculinity make them feel not as if this is a terrible thing they are doing, but simply defending their birthright.

The pathologies of white masculinity are at their worst when white men feel cheated of the privileges they think are rightfully theirs.  This leads them to attack others whom they hold responsible, sometimes with words, sometimes with bullets.  Hence the actions of Elliott Rodger, who felt he was "owed" the sexual favors of women.  This pathology comes out with gunfire, but it also happens every day via rhetorical violence on the Internet.  Operation Lollipop is only one of many examples of what will be added to the Pathological White Masculinity Files.

Still Waiting For That National Conversation About White Masculinity

The death of Jordan Davis has rightly and obviously triggered discussion of racism, "stand your ground" laws, and our broken justice system.  In addition, it should also be prompting a discussion of white masculinity and its dysfunction.  Michael Dunn appeared to have been inflamed by some sort of slight to his masculine honor by black men, who also supposedly posed some kind of threat to him deserving of death.  I am having a hard time separating his easy readiness to dispatch violence in this manner from his sense of offended white masculine honor, but few out there have been commenting on this.

White American masculinity is seriously messed up.  It is based around fantasies of control, subjugating others, and using violence to solve problems.  I said as much in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook horrors, since white men disproportionately account for the perpetration of mass shootings.  These shooters are often failures who can't reconcile their inability to measure up to the expectations that white masculinity has laid out for them.

The case of Richie Incognito and his racist bullying has got me thinking about this, too.  White boys are  taught that they are the masters of the universe, and implicitly understand that they have the power and right to do violence to others to maintain their positions.  The justice system and institutionalized racism have had a lot to do with Michael Dunn's acquittal on murder charges, but the patterns of thought and lived behavior that allowed him to pull the trigger and then go about his business as if nothing happened ought to be critically examined, too.  Until we have that needed national conversation and start acting upon it, more will die.

SantaCon Is The Ultimate Expression of White Privilege

The media and blogosphere has been burning up over the last few days over Megyn Kelly's stupid and racist assertions about the whiteness of Santa Claus and Jesus.  I can't come close to skewering or analyzing her statements as well as others, so I thought I'd focus on another manifestation of whiteness this Christmas season: SantaCon.

In case you don't know about SantaCon, it is a St. Patrick's-type event where drunken revelers dressed in Santa costumes spend a Saturday bar hopping as a mob, leaving a trail of puke, piss, and disorder in their wake.  It appears to be a way for monied twenty and thirtysomethings to transform Christmas into a time for the kind of stupid drunk partying they loved in college.

Now, you would normally think that a mob of disorderly drunks might be countered by the police, but no less a personage than NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly has given SantaCon his approval.  That's right, the same guy who gives fiery justifications for stop and frisk is openly supportive of roving, drunken gangs of former frat boys.  Evidently being a black or brown person going about your daily business is reason enough to be harassed by police, but if you're white you can cause disturbances and paint the streets yellow with your urine to your heart's content.

Can you imagine the reaction of the police if 30,000 people of color in Santa suits descended on lower Manhattan, roaming from bar to bar acting in an obnoxious fashion?  It would be called a "wilding" and the cops would be sent in to break it up immediately.  30,000 predominately white people can do that, and the police actually openly support it!  Beyond the whole frat-boy groupthink party culture element of SantaCon, its reliance on white privilege leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Post-Newtown, We Still Need to Have That Conversation About White Masculinity

After the horrors of Newtown, I hoped that it would not become yet another blip in our national consciousness and get sucked down the memory hole.  Sadly, what's happened has actually been worse.  Responding to the public outcry and the revival of the gun control movement, the NRA and gun proliferators have hit back so hard that the new gun legislation actually makes it EASIER to get them.  This week I was glad to see the president and brave loved ones of the victims of our gun violence epidemic call on the nation to do something, and that Michael Bloomberg has been using his money to push the issue in campaigns across the country.  Maybe we can actually get something done.

That said, there are issues even deeper than gun control which desperately need attention, but are pretty much being ignored.  I was reminded of this today through a chilling and thoughtful article in the New York Times Magazine by Jay Caspian Kang.  He discusses one of the many forgotten massacres in this country, the one that took place last April in Oakland at a nursing school.  Instead of being the usual post mortem, however, Kang discusses the feelings in the Korean-American community about the fact that the shooter in Oakland One. L Goh, and the murderer at Virginia Tech, Seung-Hui Cho, were both Korean immigrants.  Kang wonders whether the tendency to repress emotions and feel intense, barely-suppressed rage in Korean culture might have played a part.

Reading this piece, I was struck at how little white people in this country have done to ask themselves why it is white men who are overwhelmingly and vastly disproportionately the ones to massacre large numbers of people with firearms.  One of the great powers of whiteness is that it bequeaths individuality to its holders.  If you are white, you are an individual person, judged only on your own standards.  Your actions do not reflect on other white people, or are interpreted as part of a larger pattern of white behavior.  Korean-Americans, on the other hand, do not have this status, and hence are more capable of asking difficult and soul-searching questions in the aftermath of shooting tragedies.

After Sandy Hook, I wrote about the dysfunctions of white American masculinity, and how they contribute to violent shootings.  A few other folks -namely David Sirota and Chauncey DeVega- did too, but that conversation quickly petered out, or was treated with outright hostility.  It is good that gun control is back in the public eye, but if we really want to prevent future Newtowns, we need to have a serious and meaningful conversation about the problems of white masculinity in this country.

It's Time to Talk About the Dysfunctions of White American Masculinity

Whenever a horrible event like the massacre in Newtown takes place, we try to find ways to explain it. This is often a futile exercise, because many people merely superimpose their larger beefs with society onto these events, rather than examining them with any real analytical and factual framework.  Hence, we have people like Louie Gohmert saying the teacher should have had her own assault weapon, or Mike Huckabee lamenting the loss of God in public schools.  We should be very careful of monocausal explanations that oversimplify things.  There are a lot of factors at play in the Newtown massacre, from the perpetrator's mental state to the availability of semi-automatic weapons.  However, I would like to echo others out there in the blogosphere who want to examine the role of white masculinity in all of this.

Of course, there have been other mass shootings in other countries, and the worst such shooting in this country was perpetrated by a Korean student.  That being said, this country has witnessed the lion's share of mass shootings, and disproportionate seventy percent of the shooters have been white men.  I hardly think the connection is coincidental.  Ever since the Aurora tragedy this summer, I have been contemplating this issue, trying to connect the dots to explain the connection between white masculinity and mass shootings.  I finally feel like I have some speculations worth sharing.

Masculinity more generally in this society is defined to a great extent by violence and control, and violence used as a means of maintaining control.  I have long been amazed and appalled by how many public figures in this country who have abused their wives and girlfriends have been allowed to stay on the pedestal.  That sad fact is to me evidence that masculine control through violence is implicitly accepted as legitimate in America.  Action movies predominate at the box office, and the orchestrated violence of the NFL is America's most popular sport.

Furthermore, white men in this country are taught that they are the masters of their own destiny, and are usually not confronted with the same limitations of possibility that men of color are.  When white men fail, an experience our society gives them few resources to confront,  they often lash out at those they hold responsible, or turn inward and commit suicide.  Most mass shooters seem to want to do both, as Adam Lanza did.

The completely atomized nature of white middle class society contributes as well.  Shooters are usually described as "loners," men disconnected from others and hence unable to empathize with the human beings they kill.  We are an increasingly individualized society, which means that those mentally unstable, frustrated white men with access to deadly weapons are so rarely stopped before they kill.  They sit on the margins, alone, without any kind of cohesive social structure to bring them in.  Adam Lanza had stopped going to school and interacted with few outside his home, Eric Harris was able to plan his rampage in a home where his parents took evidently little interest in his doings, James Holmes had been expelled from his university and lived alone in a city far from home.  While atomization is occurring in all groups of American society today, in middle class, white culture it has probably been the most egregious and damaging.

We have a situation where white men are socialized to be the masters of their fate and able to use violence to maintain control over their lives.  These same men lack the tools to handle adversity, and are often left to their individual resources, even if they are mentally disturbed.  When some of the most mentally unstable of these men experience soul-shattering setbacks and are given access to semi-automatic weapons, we can only expect the worst.  We need to educate young men (especially white men) to not see violence as the answer to their problems, or to phantasize violent solutions.  We need to equip them with the tools to withstand failure, and to keep the more troubled of their number from slipping through the cracks.  Last, we need to talk seriously and openly about the nature of American white masculinity, and stop pretending that it isn't problematic.

White Like Me: Romney's Not-So-Secret Weapon

Some news sources have been discussing the narrowing of the "gender gap" in presidential polling this year, which is awfully surprising given that one candidate signed an equal pay for equal work measure into law on his first day in office, and the other represents a party full of Bible bangers obsessed with controlling women's bodies.

One thing we're not hearing much, however, is that the erosion of the "gender gap" might be greatly explained by the growth of the "race gap."  In Florida, for example, Romney leads by 30 percentage points among white without college degrees, despite Romney's support for policies totally antithetical to the economic interests of the working classes.  This matches the numbers across the South, where in 2008 Barack Obama won 98% of the black vote and 11% of the white vote in Mississippi.  The gap is getting bigger, and as Chauncey DeVega at WARN has pointed out, Romney is gaining among white voters even after losing two debates!  There seems to be an implicit, lizard-brain notion among many white people that Romney is inherently more worthy of being president because he is white like them.  Charles Blow's recent blog backs up that interpretation with poll numbers that show a significant chunk of (white) voters who think Obama is more trustworthy than Romney, but will be voting for Romney anyway.  That, my friends, is white privilege at its most fearsome.

Occasionally some public figures just come right out and say what they're really thinking in regards to the fact that Romney is white like them.  Take for instance Thomas Friedman, that oracle for suburban businessmen who are too busy to actually formulate real thoughts about the global economy.  He recently commented that many (white) voters decided for Obama in 2008 out of the novelty of having a black president, and are now willing to try "something new," as if Romney is in any way "new." The subtext was clear: "it was an interesting novelty to have a black president, but now let's give the White House back to the type of person who really belongs there."  Sarah Palin's "shuck and jive" nonsense came out of a more overt dehumanization of the president via his race.

I'd long known that voting for Obama put me in a minority as far as white males were concerned.  Obama won only 41% of white male votes, and this was considered a "strong" performance.  It now looks like Romney is leading among white women as well, and, as I have mentioned, is getting a lot of support from the white working class.  When you think about the numbers, it's a little crazy that only 41% of white men voted for a candidate who won a decisive election, and that in the the last month Obama has polled as little as 32% of white men.

I'm proud to be a part of that 32%, but I am saddened by the implications of the numbers, since they confirm my pessimistic gut instincts.  White men are fiercely guarding their privilege, and despite his outright lies, constant flip-flopping, and lack of any specific policy plan, Romney is still one of their own, and Obama is not.  I can only hope that that enough of what Harvey Milk called "the us people" show up to the polls to counteract the aggressive defense of whiteness.