Outside The Downpour Of White Male Tears

Watching The Tangle Of A Psychic Car Wreck

musehick
musehick
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Sometimes being a white male is more than a little painful. It is weird to be part of a group whose viewpoints are seen as increasingly irrelevant — primarily due to the historical prevalence of said viewpoint, and the way it seems to express itself now, when exposed to societal pressures which render it unacceptable, and strip away the safeguards it has always enjoyed.

Saying you don’t identify with said viewpoint is no guarantee your opinions won’t be fed through the same filter and likewise discarded, because you are, after all, a white male. An orchestra of tiny violins is playing, and yet another white male protest dies on the lips of its originator, and some of them have to be worth listening to, right? People just don’t want to hear it — the douche, and the benefactor of white male privilege, which outstrips even white privilege by a distance that I’m sure makes some women wonder about their own privileged status, has rendered all talk from even the staunchest white male advocate of feminism or other worthy cause pointless.

If you do have something worth saying though, it is still worth persisting, and trying to navigate past the crash barrier. You will hit that barrier. Well, if you are trying to explore outside your bubble’s echo chamber you will. And we need people who aren’t hand-wringing with guilt or acting as apologists … people who are willing to bump up against the discomfort and actually try to contribute.

I think the challenge is good, and will hopefully provoke some kind of sea change, one that sees the white male re-engage and acknowledge his status while not resting on his laurels, and seeking to redress the balance. If the group that is the source of so many problems in society isn’t allowed and encouraged to find a way to communicate that adds to the motion of changing things then any effort is going to be slowed down. It’s not as if you can cast aside a whole sector of the community and hope to succeed anyway — they need to be re-educated. Trump feels like the revenge of angry disenfranchised white guys, and that description seems to travel beyond the boundaries of class, and you have to wonder if they can get angry enough to put The Donald in power, what might they do if they turn that force to do good?

When you write anything like this, you write it on the shifting sand of assumption(an assumption you aren’t the same kind of a-hole as you are writing about), and the hope you’ll be recognised as different. As with anything that seems like a distancing mechanism, it may serve some purpose that helps the whole, but there is an element of the self-serving about it too. What are you supposed to do? Never write another damned thing? Doesn’t work for me. I have an aim to help people with my writing, so I try to forge ahead with honesty, and I am only ever going to be able to write from my own viewpoint.

I don’t remember talking about race so much in England; it wasn’t such an ever-present issue as it is in America. If you aren’t conscious of the issue over here then I am not sure where you are hiding out — deep inside the womb of your own echo chamber? Since the current administration got into power it got even more necessary to talk about this … something has to change. Talking is a start. It’s different here. It’s survival for us all to handle this.

No more crying over the plight of the white man though. Time to start drying those tears, stop acting like society is screwing you over every time a non white male gets a helping hand up out of the shit. It is possible to be a decent guy and stow the douchebaggery. If you want to be a sympathetic character try being an empathetic character first. Ditch useless white guilt and hand wringing and get into action changing things for the better — and if your efforts get rebuffed, double them. No one is asking you to be a white saviour, but you’re working to save yourself by saving others.

musehick

Written by

musehick

I ate a sandwich once. Now I can’t eat sandwiches.

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