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Consider
the lives of White males. If we use the media as a framework for their definition
and portrayal, then White males are the greatest things since
sliced bread. They are promoted as heroic, they are allowed
to age on television, they are the gatekeepers, they are the
analysts, and they are the “experts.” According to a 2000-2001 Children
Now report, in terms of defining white male status on television:
-
Of
the top five occupations shown for various racial groups,
only people of color filling the domestic worker, homemaker,
nurse/physician's assistant and unskilled laborer positions.
The Children Now report
also indicates that:
As
America's primary storyteller and chief cultural exporter,
television provides messages and images that contribute to
the worldviews of millions. When certain groups are privileged,
others subjugated and still others altogether excluded, prime
time sends skewed messages to viewers – especially young ones – that
these groups are valued differently. This in turn affects the
way viewers perceive themselves and interact with particular
groups. And youth want to see the diversity of their lives
reflected on the prime time screen. As one Native American
youth told us, "It makes you mad because you wish other
people could get in there and not just whites, because they're
on everything."
In essence, white
males are taught from birth via the media and in everyday life
by family, friends, and society that they are supposed to
be leaders, they are expected to be leaders, and that
they are the most valued people on the planet because it
is the natural order of things. For white men, failure
is not an option, and if they do fail, it is easier for them
to get bailed out (an example of this would be that non-white
men usually serve longer sentences than white men that commit
the same crimes) or have their failures explained away (drugs,
physical, imbalances, stress=Rush Limbaugh), or forgiven, or
even reach celebrity status (explore the life of John Gotti). In
short, white men have the right to what I like to call “the
divine right to rule” because they have centralized power in
all institutions, which allow them to make the rules. White
males are not taught that they are “in da club,” they are the
club with all the trappings the club has to provide. Membership
has its privileges, from the lowest member to the highest.
An article by James
McPherson (2003) in Perspectives
Online, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, nicely
summarizes white male privileges and expectations:
If
one looks at a longer perspective of time, however – which
we as historians of course should do – there is more than one
side to the affirmative action puzzle. I offer myself as a
case study. I was born into a middle-class family of WASP ancestry.
My parents prized education and sent all of their children
to college. During my undergraduate years in the 1950s, American
culture encouraged female students to look toward school teaching,
nursing, or marriage as their careers. Many of my male classmates,
on the other hand, received a great deal of support from faculty
and families to aspire to a career in business, or as lawyers,
medical doctors, clergymen, or college professors. As for African
American, Hispanic, or Native American classmates – I had virtually
none. And the same was true of most mainstream colleges and
universities a half century ago. The cultural environment that
encouraged white males to hope for careers at the top of the
professional and business pyramid but discouraged, inhibited,
or prohibited women and minorities from doing the same was
a more powerful form of affirmative action than anything we
have more recently experienced in the other direction.
White
men hold 95% to 97% of the high-level corporate jobs. And
that’s with affirmative action programs in place. Imagine
how low figures would be without affirmative action.
This
brings us to George W. “Chicken Boo” Bush. Conservatives like him (whom,
by their very nature, seek to maintain the status quo), are
on a daily mission to counteract the arguments for, say, affirmative
action, love to invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. and twist his
vision of a society where the content of one’s character would
be sufficient to exist and thrive in society. However, Bush
and others of his ilk conveniently ignore King’s argument for
affirmative action and other remedies to address structural
racism, which King calls “compensatory consideration.” In
one of his greatest books, Why We Can’t Wait, King defines
the argument and need for something like affirmative action:
Among
the many vital jobs to be done, the nation must not only radically
readjust its attitude toward the Negro in the compelling present,
but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration
for the handicaps he has inherited from the past. It is impossible
to create a formula for the future, which does not take into
account that our society has been doing something special against the
Negro for hundreds of years. How then can he be absorbed into
the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special for him
now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete
on a just and equal basis.
Whenever
this issue of contemporary or preferential treatment for
the Negro is
raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro
should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask
nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but
it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is
entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years
after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible
feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.
Let
us fast forward from King and go to the present and “Chicken Boo” Bush. Why
do I call him that? Well, the origins of his moniker come
from a Steven Spielberg cartoon series called Animaniacs. One
of the skits within this hilarious series involved a character
named Chicken Boo. Chicken Boo was this 6-foot chicken that
played a variety of heroic or popular roles: a politician (well,
maybe that’s not heroic), a rock star, an actor, and so on. In
each cartoon skit, throngs of people mindlessly fawn over each
incarnation of Chicken Boo and marvel and cheer at him when,
all the while, Chicken Boo says absolutely nothing. However,
the most comical and provocative aspects of this cartoon always
involve one person that tries to point out to the adoring Chicken
Boo crowd that “He’s a chicken!” Again and again, this one
person in the crowd screams, “But, he’s a chicken!” The
crowd only realizes that Chicken Boo is a chicken when he loses
the garb of the rock star or other character and runs away,
only to come back as a new character in another episode.
George
Bush is the real-life version of Chicken Boo for a number
of reasons: he
is not a cowboy (he just plays one on television), he is not
an intellectual (he has merely been exposed to the tools – Yale
and Harvard – that could nurture his intellect), and so on. He
does not even read newspapers – he believes they are too elitist!
Like Chicken Boo, Bush says things that amount to nothing or
have little definition. Nevertheless, his empty phrases and
slogans are easily embraced by white America, especially white
males. White males like the slogans because they ease their
racist consciences and prejudices, emit an air of progressivism
with just a touch of arrogance. Let us examine the true meaning
of some of his phrases and slogans:
“Compassionate
Conservatism” actually means “racism with a smile.”
“Affirmative
Access” essentially
translates to “non-white people will be allowed to continue
to walk through the front doors of public, and some private
domains.” A second translation could be “Bush and other conservatives
will continue to affirmatively kick non-white asses economically,
politically (in part by buying off black ministers by dangling
federal funds in their faces), legally (the nomination of Thomas
Pickering and other conservative jurists – in blackface and
brownface, as well – to federal courts), and educationally.”
“No Child Left
Behind” – a policy that ultimately leaves all non-white
children behind educationally in terms of limiting funds
to public schools, which could be used to strengthen infrastructures,
promote safety (in case non-white children get notions of
building bombs in their garages like their white counterparts),
hire more principals, teachers and support staff. However,
in defense of the president, he does support education on
a limited basis. You see, vouchers can be used to allow
poor non-white students entrance into private, usually Christian
religious schools. (Hmm, talk about religious tolerance! What
happens to the poor students that practice Judaism or Islam?)
Wow!
“You’re
Either For Us Or Against Us” – this statement has a number of
meanings: a false sense of machismo where manhood is linked
to the size of your missiles, that the United States is led
by a lone cowboy ready to take on the world, and that the
president likes to hide behind the flag and feign patriotism
to deflect criticism and dissent. (President Bush has had
help in limiting dissent from a timid or ultra-nationalist
corporate media [like Fox “Fair and Balanced” News] and a
ridiculous amount of attention to the trials of two black
men – Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson.) The statement is
also a warning to black and brown people: you’d better be
quiet; we know that you don’t trust the government and that
most of you don’t agree with this “war” but, you’d better
be quiet, anyway.
“Shock
and Awe” – the
code phrase for the military action against Iraq. This is,
perhaps, Bush’s most interesting phrase because it could illicit
a number of responses: 1) cause people to believe that our
troops are fighting to “liberate” Iraq (I thought God was the
only being that could liberate man, but I digress), and 2)
encourage us to celebrate our own “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMDs)
via the elimination of Iraq’s alleged WMDs. Actually, the
correct translation for this military action is “Shocked
and Aww, Shit” because our troops are being picked off
daily; Bush and Congress are committing $87 billion to the
rebuilding of Iraq, monies that will be taken from needed social
programs; and racial profiling has been expanded to include
those of Middle Eastern descent or with Middle Eastern-sounding
(Islamic) last names. But fear not, black and brown people,
there are enough resources to make sure that we are continually
followed and harassed!
This brings us to
why white males (and some white females) love George Bush: he
is the defender of whiteness and white nationalism (although
white females are junior partners in the white nationalist
agenda). Bush presents himself as the president
who is preserving and enhancing the things that matter most
to white people: weakening affirmative action (although the real
reasons why white people have lost their
jobs include economic globalization, downsizing, corporate
mismanagement and, sometimes, outright lies in reporting corporate
profits and losses), and scapegoating black and brown people,
which prevents them from getting jobs and keeping their children
from going to the choice colleges. He protects the white middle
class and those with white middle class aspirations (the term “middle
class” is also a psychological construct – I mean, what white
person really wants to define themselves as poor?) and
provides them with more opportunities and a better climate
to achieve “The American Dream.”
What
is “whiteness?” It
represents what is “normal” – that white people work harder,
are smarter, more attractive, and have the right to define
anything and everything, including what is “good” and “bad.” In
short, it is “The God Complex.” Writing in the December 30
edition of Diversity
News, Stanford University associate professor Anthony
Lising Antonio highlights the complexities and pervasiveness
of whiteness:
"The
fact is we still don't understand what 'whiteness' is, it's
been such a norm that we haven't defined it, and I think white
students might feel like they're in a cultural vacuum, whereas
other folks – the Asians and the Latinos, for example – have
something tangible to call their culture."
So,
in the final analysis, we must explore Bush’s core constituencies. In short, Bush
appeals to all forms of white maleness: the “NASCAR Dads”;
those that drive Dodge trucks with HEMI engines, which, as
suggested by its television commercials, only white men can
handle (black or Latino males or women are not allowed to drive
those vehicles because to do so suggests equality – and we
can’t have that, can we!); those that watch Spike TV (the station
that defends and promotes white male dominion over women, heroism,
and beer); and young white males that watch The X Games because
they need to see sports where white males are dominant. (Note:
watch out black NBA players – white, European, fundamentally
sound players are being imported at greater and greater rates
so, stop worrying about dunking and making sports highlights – learn
how to pass the ball and play defense!)
How
do African-Americans address George Bush’s stranglehold on white males? We must
tell the world that “He’s a chicken!” We must let white males
know that the reason why they have lost their jobs is due to
his failed economic policies, globalization, corporate downsizing,
and corporate media disinformation on the strength of the economy. (What
is a “jobless recovery?”) We must show them that affirmative
action and diversity allows more people better chances at entering
the economic mainstream. (This will be extremely hard because
this strikes at the core of their hallucinations that they
are superior and that they got ahead because they work harder
and are smarter without accounting for nepotism, greater access
to information, and informal networks.) We must help white
males analyze the false link between the capture of Saddam
Hussein and our safety. (How safe do you feel if you don’t
have a job?) We must reiterate that our destinies are inextricably
linked; if nonwhites and white female incomes and images improve,
we all benefit. And, finally, we must pose to white
males this extremely important and profound question: “Can’t
we all just get along?”
Reynard
Blake, Jr. is a freelance writer, and President of Community
Development
Associates, an East Lansing, Michigan-based nonprofit and
faith-based organization consulting firm. He has written
and co-authored articles in the book, Revitalizing
Urban Neighborhoods, the Journal of Urban Youth Culture, and the Michigan Family Review. He
is presently writing a book on Hip-Hop, Black Leadership,
and the Black Church: Implications for Positive Youth Development. He
is also a researcher at the Disproportionate
Minority Confinement/Minority Over-Representation Project,
housed at Michigan State University.
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