I have the bad propensity to look back at things I’ve written in the past. This is a Facebook Note from 10 years ago, to the day, that apparently, was a long typed out email or GChat between me and someone I had at the time, with the note below. The length says I probably was corresponding via email, or I was ranting while bored with my then job during a conversation and pulled the blocks of conversation out of that container. I then found the correspondence of value to share more widely. It’s a bit bittersweet to see that, pretty much:
1) It’s 2026 and all of this can still apply today.
2) It’s 2026. Since so much of this can still apply today is very frightening.
I think I was referencing white men I knew that had toddlers or perhaps kindergarteners at the time. It’s a decade later, and those new generation of white kids are in high school or college now that I’m in my mid-40s. The cycle is probably going to continue, despite my fears.I have a perverse ability to ‘read tea leaves’ from my interpersonal life and apply them to the general society at large I find myself in. I’m haunted by looking back and seeing some well weathered truth a little bit too much to the point of wondering if I’m sane at all. I wonder if the whole point of this existence is to comply to the dominant, if unhealthy, narratives of it. I’m still sticking out being an outlier ‘cause honestly it feels fucking great.
So a bit of a break from the D.J. Shows playlist, as I think this is a timely crossroads to consider today. Unedited, because I guess this was raw enough at the time to justify quite a bit. If you see yourself in the text, never mind an image, don’t take it too personally.
July 21, 2016
So the topic of “white dude empathy” (and the general lack thereof, in particular in Queer CIS Male spaces, but in regards to white dudes in general) came up in a conversation I had this week. As conversations tend to come due this week of the Republican National Convention, but also, in this season of the Bernie Bro. In this universe of “All Lives Matters….”
The conversation lifted out of talk of sex life, but landed with me making this observation about how many an empathetic/trying to be “woke” white dude ends up replaying, re-hashing and re-creating the same shitty scenarios that they’re trying to dismantle. Although their hearts may be in the right place, there’s a lot of breaking away from institutionally learned behaviors they must overcome:
“Well, let’s remember although we may have went to semi-integrated schools (in the Bay Area at least), by high school they were pretty segregated based on academic tracks. So a lot of it (lack of white male empathy) are problems with education funding and policy because that natural empathy (that brings a more nuanced level of understanding of racial dynamics) just didn’t organically happen. White Boys with 1600 SAT Scores and above 4.0 grade averages due to the extra bonus that AP classes carried over “normal” high school courses, to the point that they’ve lived in these super isolated, socially gated communities where it takes *A LOT* of interaction with others to understand how really nuanced and diverse the world is.
Hell, in my graduating high school class, the dudes that called themselves The (Sausage) Fest are now all dads raising the next generation of obtuse white dudes and restrictive roles in society that cater to Becky’s in distress….With the same single minded track towards “success.” That breeds a very solitary understanding of what includes ‘happiness.’ It informs what’s most important for them to learn about, and emotions, affection, sensuality are all left out of the equation. Let’s not speak of how often some straight acquaintance has asked me about butt sex if we dare start talking extendedly about our lives since high school while chatting online. For the record its not gross if you’re aware of your body and don’t consider it a “dirty” part of yourself, dude(s). There’s too much good/bad/Binary, this or that informing their lives. Because they’ve always been in the ‘good,’ did ‘the thing,’ followed the Mission to a position and have been rewarded by our society with all the spoils.
So in a sense, the lack of white male empathy on a lot of levels is just so institutional. Like why the correlations with issues around race are also reflected in the issues around gender inequities in tech and finance. There’s the inherent bias that afflicts women of all races in those fields that stems back to tracking women out of Advance Placement Mathematics and Sciences in but not so much in humanities (that often lead to lower paying career fields, sadly). The world has been an oyster for generations of white dudes.
Ours, under 40, unfortunately have been brainwashed quite often, quite regularly that everything was solved back in 1968 or something. Ironically that’s possibly the last big peak in Civil Rights Volatility, and in the wake of it a lot of us were institutionally fed that it was fixed with a hands across the nation Coca-Cola commercial version of Post-War American History. The reality for a number of “the rest of us” prevent us from taking in the corn syrup, but…..
It’s perhaps easiest, at this stage to remind them they possibly are lost in understanding because systematic culture has isolated them from diverse experience. It’s just not what they know, and if we can convince them to be quiet in increments, not respond, and just actively listen to the world around them, maybe we’ll get somewhere, but I don’t have much hope. Even for the “Woke” ones. I feel a lot of them are still just trying to get a 1600 on the SATs of Social Justice because they’re forever chasing the achievement high that they’re been systematically taught to crave.
I hope in some way that doesn’t make statements loaded and that eases and opens ears that 1) It is institutional and out of their hands but 2) are they willing to be open and recognize and change it now? That takes the burden off of me, and those like me, and leaves the ball in their court. I hate sports so, welp. It takes time and investment in people you care about (yeah there’s a select few possibly empathetic white dudes I give a shit about). It’s just older I get the fewer people I want to invest in.
