White men as victims: America's most dangerous fantasy

[marmar]

White men as victims: America's most dangerous fantasy
The notion that white men are a persecuted minority isn't just ludicrous — it paves the way for racist violence

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 22, 2022 6:30AM


(Salon) One of the most popular lies being circulated by the Republican Party and the larger white right is that white men are somehow oppressed in America. To say that such a claim is absurd would be an understatement. To be white is to have access to unearned advantages in almost every arena of American society and throughout the world. And to be male is also to have access to resources and life opportunities that in general are de facto still denied to women and girls.

By almost all indicators, men as a group dominate and control America's networks of power, influence, wealth and other resources.

Of course many individual men who happen to be white experience life hardships and other disadvantages. Moreover, the group advantages enjoyed by men overall do not trickle down equally to all men on either side of the color line. Likewise, there are individual Black and brown people, and individual women, who have tremendous power, resources and wealth. But in the aggregate, on a societal scale, white men are not being disadvantaged because of their race or gender.

But the absurdity of this claim should not be surprising. Race itself is perhaps the greatest absurdity in modern history; it is a social construct, not a genetic or biological fact. It was invented to legitimize global white supremacy and imperialism.

....(snip)....

There's a long history of white men seeing themselves as the chief victims of racial oppression. This includes the end of slavery. White men who were also enslavers saw themselves as the true victims of the abolition of their way of making a living, so they went to their government and asked, even demanded, compensation for their "loss" in freeing the people who worked for them for no money. In Britain, this was enacted through the Slave Compensation Act 1837 and continued compensating slave-owning white families through 2015. In the U.S., each slave-owning white man received $300 for each person they owned who was freed because of the Emancipation Proclamation, when at the same time formerly enslaved people were promised 40 acres and a mule, a promise that was mostly unfulfilled.

Fast forward to the era of "affirmative action" in the early 1970s, and even with this very limited federal government program, white men felt attacked. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/02/22/men-as-victims-americas-most-fantasy/

[ProudMNDemocrat]

1. That is BULLSHIT and we need to call it out!!!

Yeah right! We see more photos of Rambo wanna-bes who are white holding their big guns, looking tough.

We keep reading about white men complaining that "others" are taking their jobs.

It is all BULLSHIT!!

[Ray Bruns]

2. I am a white male and I have been terribly discriminated against

I can no longer be promoted over POC and women just because I am a white male.
I can no longer use racial slurs in public.
I can no longer be given loans just because I am a white male.

It has taken a terrible toll on my masculinity.

[Skittles]

10. you get it, Ray

real men are not threatened by progress!

[ck4829]

3. K&R. Individual white men certainly ARE victimized by society, but guess who the perp is?

Other white men, just richer and more politically connected than them.

When I was looking for a job way back when and and anything, ANYTHING, would have sufficed but all I got was form-reply rejection emails, it was dehumanzing and I had family members who were telling me I needed to blame immigrants or affirmative action - but I knew back then there was no non-English part to those rejections. There was no “press 1 for English”… just them.

[Orrex]

4. I've seen this sort of desperate butthurt even here on DU

Quite recently, in fact.


When oh when will the Oppressed White Male get a break?!?

[CrispyQ]

5. There are some excellent commentaries in this article.

White victimology politics were once the purview of neo-Nazis and the KKK, but they've become the engine of the Republican Party. Back in the '70s, David Duke was largely reviled and rejected by Americans for his white victimology politics. He claimed the "white man" was the real "second-class citizen" in America today.

But this delusion that white men are the real victims is now mainstream gospel among Republicans. That's thanks to decades of conservative politicians and talk show hosts cashing in on white racial anxieties about demographic change by injecting white supremacy or "white supremacy lite" into the GOP bloodstream.

~Jean Guerrero

I have some white, male family members who have this issue. I look at their lifestyles & wonder what they're pissed off about. They're college educated, live in nice houses in nice communities, drive nice cars/trucks. Their adult kids are doing well and also are college educated & live in nice houses in nice communities. I don't understand why they're so angry & what exactly has been taken from them.

Thanks for posting.

[ck4829]

7. I think rosy retrospection is a major contributor to this

Kinda like Roy Moore saying "the greatest America was ever been was right before the civil war... even though... we had slavery..."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/12/08/roy-moore-america-was-great-in-era-of-slavery-is-now-focus-of-evil-in-the-world/

The past is a paradise when you don't have to live in it anymore. They want their "women knew their place", "minorities weren't so difficult to deal with", and "didn't see all these immigrants before", but they certainly don't want to give up, you know; antibiotics, indoor plumbing, electricity, television with a thousand channels, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, the Internet, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, heating, air conditioning, their phones, the ability to buy and consume meat every day of the week, cheap clothes, that they can buy something online and it comes the next day, and so on and so forth.

[usonian]

6. The article is spot on. I am sharing it.

Racism is society's "original sin". Sickening.

Following links at Salon, I found these interviews with Joe Walsh.

My quotes are very short, and both articles are excellent reads.

https://www.salon.com/2022/02/11/joe-walsh-on-what-the-left-doesnt-get-trumpworld-would-happily-this-country-down/

For at least five decades the Republican Party and the larger conservative movement have moved farther and farther to the right, becoming increasingly anti-democratic and detached from reality. Today's Republican Party is a de facto fascist political organization, but that is only the logical end result of more than 50-years of policies and planning. ...

I hear from thousands of Republican voters every single day. If there's one message that I try to convey to the MSNBC viewers of the world, it is the following: These people, the Trump folks, the Republican voters of today, they would happily burn this country down to get the country they want. They would happily do it. And they tell me that. I don't think the folks who watch CNN and MSNBC every night really understand that fact.

https://www.salon.com/2022/02/15/joe-walsh-on-what-lies-ahead-is-sowing-a-race-war--and-his-followers-love-it/

What do you do about those Republicans and members of that cult movement who would rather destroy America, through violence if need be, than share power with Black and brown Americans?

I think at this point, it's too late. I think at this point, all we can do is outvote them.

To that end, I am collecting ways WE can do this.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216380145

Hello, DNC, do recent events, including Jan6, convince you that would-be tyrants will try to take with violence what they couldn't take within norms?

Hoping for an end to milquetoast messaging, but not counting on others, let's do whatever heavy lifting we can. Please post actionable items to the thread.

[Rebl2]

8. I seem

to remember hearing/going through this same nonsense back in the eighties. White men feeling so mistreated.

[OldBaldy1701E]

9. Small point of clarification.

White straight males. Just my two cents.