A Tale of Two White Men
I.
Last night, as I was trying to sober up before falling asleep, word of a stolen Alaska Airlines plane began filling my Twitter feed. An airplane nerd with a constant longing for the flying career I never pursued, I found it impossible not to follow despite my exhaustion. By now, the outline of the story is widely known: a young ramp worker at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport managed to fire up a Dash 8 Q400, taxi to an active runway, and take off (with the parking brakes still on, apparently) on a joy ride that included some (admittedly impressive) aerobatics before crashing into an island in what appears to have been an act of suicide.
We also have, thanks to Jimmy Thomson (Twitter: @jwsthomson), recordings of the communication between the rogue pilot and air traffic control. These recordings paint a tragic narrative featuring a relatable anti-hero who has reached the limits of his ability to cope with his world and has decided to depart it by way of an improbable, daring, and above all romantic escapade. Amateur videos taken from multiple vantage points set the backdrop for this final act of anti-heroism: a serene, cloudless sunset over rolling hills, islands, forests, and calm waters.
As the story unfolded, tweet by tweet, we learned that our tragic protagonist recently came to terms with his mental instability and that economic pressure, in the form of minimum wage for demanding physical labor, played some role in his decision to go rogue. “Ah, minimum wage. We’ll chalk it up to that. Maybe that’ll grease the gears a little bit with the higher-ups.” I suspect that once the initial shock wears off, that line is going to get a significant bit of air time. In an election year (and not just any election year), I think that line may even make it beyond the usual platitudes about the importance of mental health care, and force a reckoning with the role that our economic system plays in creating and perpetuating misery and mental illness. Indeed, a number of tweets at least acknowledge the “sticking-it-to-the-man” aspect of wrecking a multi-million-dollar airplane belonging to the company that pays you minimum wage. Whether people will begin to publicly investigate the connection between wage slavery and mental illness is another issue.
There is, however, another snippet of the communications that I don’t think is making the rounds as much as the other details, but that has (or should have) equally wide implications for our society. At one point, the pilot asks the controller, “Hey, do you think if I land this successfully, Alaska will give me a job as a pilot?” This is a set-up: our pilot has already stated that he doesn’t know how to land the plane and isn’t particularly interested in landing it. Nonetheless, the controller replies by trying to get the pilot to envision some positive outcome to the situation that can only occur if he gets the plane down safely: “You know, I think they would give you a job doing anything if you could pull this off,” says the controller. Our pilot/anti-hero/protagonist does not agree. He responds, “Yeah right!… Nah, I’m a white guy, they…” before trailing off, soon to shake off his mortal coil.
***
Meanwhile, a few months ago I met a friend of a friend, a successful white male completing a top-ranked MBA program in a major US city. This person’s father is prominent in his field, the same field the MBA student worked in prior to this exclusive business school. Over beers, we commiserated over the feeling that graduate school in the US is mostly a two-year job fair meant to open up the upper rungs of the governmental and corporate ladders to people who were ready to pony up cash for the access. Further, we bemoaned the fact that the most valuable skill one seems to develop in graduate school is “networking” and resume-shopping, all in the hopes of getting that coveted summer internship-cum-job offer at a respectable consultancy or investment bank, and all the while competing against ever-greater numbers of equally qualified people from equally recognized institutions. Not even coming from a top MBA program was a guarantee of a job offer, let alone a lucrative one.
I didn’t expect (but in retrospect should have expected) the next thing to come out of this friend-of-a-friend’s mouth: not even being a straight white male is a guarantee; in fact it’s an obstacle. In the subsequent sentences, I learned that being a black male (or even better, a black female) was a near guarantee of stellar employment opportunities, despite inferior skills or capabilities. And let me tell you, they are almost always — especially the women — underqualified, but they get the interviews and the jobs because they bring “diversity”. I guess it’s hard out there for a straight, white, debt-free male.
II.
I can’t claim to know Richard Russell, the rogue pilot, at all, of course, or the friend-of-a-friend in any real depth. But a cursory glance seems to reveal two men who essentially had two things in common while the former was alive: they were white men, specifically white men who believed that white men are being oppressed by virtue of their race and gender. It may be that these are the only traits they shared — one was working a physical-labor job for minimum wage while the other was fast climbing the corporate ladder at an exclusive graduate school. In our society, people like these two rarely meet and even more rarely socialize. I suppose it is possible that Russell once handled the other man’s bags, but who knows? What we do know is that despite being at near polar opposite ends of the opportunity spectrum in the US, they both declared themselves to be oppressed on the basis of their being white men.
Russell blamed at least some of his failure to achieve more, to want to live more, on a lack of opportunities, opportunities denied to him but reserved for non-white non-males. We can speculate from his casual-but-not-really-casual remark that Russell felt his opportunity to thrive was thwarted by preference given to people unlike him. Did it ever occur to him that plenty of barriers exist to thwart people unlike him from reaching even his relatively low position within his employing company? Who knows. In the end, we are fortunate that Russell was content with taking his own life. It is worth noting that he did endanger many others, as his good intentions (he stated he didn’t want to hurt anyone) could easily have come into conflict with his lack of training. But it could have been much worse. A less emotionally relatable anti-hero could easily have picked a much bloodier blaze of glory to go out in, maybe involving firearms, maybe involving his airport access, maybe involving a plane full of innocent people. Thankfully, Russell spared everyone but himself. Will the first copycat be as merciful? Is he one of the “very fine people” marching around DC right now, on the anniversary of Charlottesville?
Meanwhile, my friend’s friend may be taking a coffee break from preparing job applications, reading the articles and scrolling through the tweets about what is, admittedly, a sensational story. He may click through to the collected recordings of the radio communications. He may click a particular link and hear a fellow white man, far down on his luck and well past his wits’ end, give a naive air traffic controller a reality check about what the future holds for white men: peril. And he may sympathize with the other man, whose employers may one day pay his own emphatically-non-minimum-wage salary to recommend laying off guys like Russell in order to defend profit margins and create shareholder value.
And way down the line, this friend’s friend may find himself involved in hiring decisions, firing decisions, promotion considerations, wage negotiations, undergraduate and graduate admissions, home lending standards, public budgets, school zoning plans, or any number of situations where his supplicants will broadly come from two camps: those who had mountains to climb based on their circumstances of birth, and those who had the mountains mostly leveled without their knowledge but to their benefit. Will he identify more with the former or with the latter? Will he even know who actually belongs in each camp?
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression, says the internet. I want to hold out hope that people like Russell and my friend’s friend hold certain beliefs out of ignorance rather than malice, and that they can be persuaded to see the world through a different frame. But to find out, we have to address and challenge the myth(s) that linked both men without their knowledge, that led to one highly visible death yesterday but grinds down millions of lives silently, in the background, behind the cameras’ prying lenses.
