Ideas in the Wild: How Andy Horning Aims To Help White Men Go From Fragile To Agile
What started as an internal whisper has become a steady rumble. It’s getting louder, feeling heavier the more we try to ignore it. White men in America now have a decision to make: become an agent of change or a victim of progress.
White men have found themselves entrenched in a privileged status quo for centuries. Old patterns and learned behavior have contributed to their success, but things are changing; our world is evolving. We’re tackling racism and sexism head-on. White masculinity, as we know it, is in the midst of a revolution.
In Grappling, Andrew Horning helps readers identify the best man they can be in a rapidly evolving world. By focusing on intrapersonal and interpersonal elements, Andrew provides white men with practical tools for navigating today’s complex issues and balancing masculinity with accountability. I recently caught up with Andy to learn more about what inspired him to write the book, the biggest lesson he learned, and how he’s applying that lesson in his life.
What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?
I’m in a DEI workshop and some in the class are struggling to understand the nature of white privilege. There are questions and looks. So the facilitator stops and says “Look, you know you have privilege when equity feels like discrimination.” I took a breath. There it was. The cross section of my worlds coming together. The undeniable role my privilege as a straight white cis male has played in my life meeting directly with my history as a therapist and person who has worked with people emotions for over 20 years of my professional life.
That “feels like discrimination” had to be a starting point for the way forward. What stands in the way becomes the way. I needed to help white men navigate the experience of discrimination in the rapidly changing world around them. Everyday I was witnessing the cost of them NOT navigating that, their weaponizing of the feelings they disowned and instead scapegoated those around them. And it had to come from someone inside the group so as to prevent the inevitable defensive moves of attributing it to their skin color or gender. In that moment I came to understand both the reality of being a white man, that this combination is both potent and problematic.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned going through the journey you share in the book?
While I may have had a sense of it before, I understand it even more clearly now: that what happens inside of us, between us, and around us are deeply intertwined. As white men, our inability to navigate our internal world with nuance or skill is causing problems with our capacity to relate to others and wreaking havoc on our ability to understand and navigate the complex problems facing our world today. Race and gender present a confusing and unique challenge to white men. Our failure to reckon with the world is calling us to move is tearing at the fabric of our country.
The more I wrote, the more I saw. The deeper I went into the material, the more I observed it everyday in the news. Our fear, our inability to deal with that fear, is causing us to react, defend, get rigid. Underneath that rigidity is a kind of fragility. An emotional fragility. Oh the irony that our messages to ourselves as white men, that we are strong. In reality, we are soft. And our softness is making us a bully in the changing world around us.
How will you apply this lesson in your life moving forward?
I understand how to process emotions. I understand how to help people deal with their internal experience. I also have had years working as a couples therapist helping men step up to the vulnerability that intimacy requires. I know firsthand the courage and compassion it takes. I can be the one to be a thought leader around this. To guide white men into first the construct that our socialization in this country set us up to be this way, it wasn’t our fault. But it is our responsibility. Once we understand that socialization, we need to do something about it. To really GRAPPLE with the changing world around us and inside of us. To help men understand the two critical aspects of grappling: engaging in a close struggle and without weapons.
Courage in the first part and compassion in the second. We have marginalized the power of self-compassion and that is going to be critical to us being learners and not knowers. I will continue to be a voice for this orientation, this path, this journey that white men, more than any other group of people, need to take. It will lead us away from fragility and towards a kind of agility that, with time, we will feel better equipped to respond to the rapid changes in our country. To not do it is to risk being irrelevant and exposed as we are seeing more and more today.
