“I’m Not Racist, I Have Black Friends”
It’s a bit like saying, I’m not sexist, I’m a heterosexual man
I recently read an interesting piece on the myth of the poor white racist. It was a well-written piece that raised some compelling talking points, but the whole article was based on one very problematic piece of logic: that you can’t possibly be racist if you marry someone of a different race.
If only this were true. If it were, there would be no such thing as a sexist heterosexual married man.
There is of course.
Plenty of men marry women, but that doesn’t mean they’re not sexist. Many of them consider themselves inherently superior to their wives, or they have very different expectations of their wives based on gender roles. Or they consider their career more important than their wives. Or think it’s fine (maybe even a good thing) that they earn more than their wives, even though they’re equally capable at their jobs.
There are a million ways for a man married to a woman to still be sexist. In fact, men who actually treat their wives as equals are still relatively rare. Even when men think they do a fair share of the household chores, their wives tend to disagree, presumably because the men underestimate how much their wives actually do.
