Maybe It’s Time We Stop Putting “Good” White Guys On A Pedestal
I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. Being a man who uses the language o f feminism, a white person who speaks out against racism, a cisgender person who decries transphobia, a straight person who stands up for queer people’s rights, an able-bodied person who draws attention to ableism in your communities, and on and on doesn’t make you a hero. It doesn’t necessarily even make you less complicit in these systems of oppressions.
It’s just basic fucking decency.
I’ve approached the career of Louis C.K. with a healthy dose of skepticism based on this truth. I wondered why the people in my community tripped over themselves to put him on a pedestal while failing to draw attention to the marginalized people who had been saying the same damn things forever. I wondered why we were piling heaps of praise on someone who lives life on the lowest difficulty setting as a white, straight, able-bodied cisgender man.
After all, paying lip service is easy when you’re not entangled in the realities of oppression, when you don’t have to bear the very quotidian exhaustion of living life as a marginalized person.
But, it wasn’t just Louis C.K. It was Bill Maher and his politically incorrect brand of liberalism. Recently, it’s the likes of Jeffrey Tambor and a host of others we’re sure to hear allegations against in the near future. The list could go on for a while. My eyes have grown exhausted with all the rolling they’ve had to do.
And, they’ve all let us down at some point. Take Maher for example. He has repeatedly come under fire for things like making an insensitive joke that involved the n-word, for giving the fascist Milo Yiannopolous a platform and finding common ground with him during their segment, and making repeated transphobic jokes about Caitlyn Jenner.
We’ve entered a time where performing progressiveness is finally “cool.” A white cisgender man can gain social capital for saying women deserve the right to have an abortion and equal pay, where before he might have lost “dude” points for saying the same. He can argue that there are issues with racism in this country (but maybe not go so far as to endorse Black Lives Matter) without his white audience dropping out.
However, we require very little follow-through with these guys. And, it seems many people are quick to defend them when they make egregious jokes or comments that do real harm to marginalized people.
“What about all the good things they’ve done?” we ask. “What about all of the other white, straight, able-bodied cisgender men who have learned things from them?”
Sure, using your public platform to speak out against injustices is important, but what does it mean to truly invest in those issues? And, what does it say about us if we’re only prepared to listen to someone speaking the language of social justice if we see ourselves and our privilege reflected in them?
Comedian and creator of Amazon’s One Mississippi Tig Notaro’s comment on the Louis C.K. scandal seems to lay his and I’d venture many other of these “good” white guy’s intentions bare. She wonders whether he produced her work to glaze over his own shitty behavior. She wonders if she was merely a pawn in the ultimate narcissism of C.K.’s brand of social justice.
And, we wonder with her: was his trademark progressivism just another way of jerking off in front of us?
Because, as many marginalized people have repeated ad nauseum, the best way to invest in the communities that you’re allied with is to step aside and give them the chance to speak for themselves. C.K.’s capital was built on his willingness to honestly reflect on himself and his experiences, indeed to humiliate himself. But, it’s also been bolstered by these times where he’s said the “right” thing. Maybe he should’ve just stuck to the former.
We’ve had decades, centuries, millennia even to listen to straight white cis men. It’s time we have more shows and movies like Insecure, Her Story, Moonlight, and Tangerine. It’s time we pay more attention to the political wisdom of the Janet Mocks of the world instead of losing our shit every time a white guy says the same things as though he came up with it himself.
Which is not to say that these men shouldn’t be saying things in support of marginalized people; of course that would be far worse. I just mean to point out the fact that true allyship means stepping off of your platform and handing it to somebody more qualified to speak on a given issue. It means referencing and foregrounding the work of people whose ideas have formed your own thoughts on a particular problem instead of acting like no one has ever thought the same things as you before.
But, who makes it to the mainstream? Whose work gets broadcast on HBO and FX? Who gets to host their own TV show?
Can these thing change? Yes, a million times yes.
And, as viewers, as consumers of media, we have the power to encourage that shift. We have the power to stop watching these assholes and invest our viewership capital into those people who are working to make things different. We have the power to stop clicking “share” every time a good white dude says something halfway decent and start circulating the abundant words of the folks most impacted by racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, fatphobia, and on and on.
It’s time we turn our attention to the people who are subject to different systems of oppression and take our political cues from them. It’s time we stop mourning the art of the “good” white guys who let us down, and start reflecting on the heaps and heaps of truly beautiful art that we’ve missed out on because we live in a society that only values white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied voices (and a handful of token marginalized people if they’re willing to play into the respectability politics game).
It’s time to hand the pedestal over to someone else.
