On the Suckage of Being the Baddie

(CW: suicide)

I don’t mean this as a claim to victimhood or a plea for pity. It’s just information: I feel awful a lot of the time about being white and cis-male.

It sucks to accept that you’re the baddie.*

That is, the social group/identity that I’m assigned to from birth is, historically and systemically, the oppressor of (most) other social groups. The world is unfair, and in multiple ways, I benefit from this unfairness personally while other people suffer because of it. Sure, folk like me (white cis-males) go through a standard share of trials that humans generally experience. But I’m exempted from the extra bits of dehumanization, inequality, and marginalization that go along with being a woman, trans*, a non-US citizen, disabled, or poor. I’m used to being the default, to having the benefit of the doubt, to seeing myself well represented in narratives fictional and factual. That reality (scaled up to historical-social levels) translates to misery and injustice for billions. No picture of a more just and equitable world is possible without people like me losing the unfair share of privilege we’ve hoarded for centuries.

That sucks. To be sure, it’s not anywhere near sucky as being marginalized; I reject any kind of comparison along those lines. But—within the inner realm that is me—being part of social oppressor groups fuels a constant drone of depression. Occasionally this drone rises in intensity to a roar so loud that it’s hard for me to think of anything else except for how awful I am or how my very existence immiserates others. (At that point the voice becomes indistinguishable from bog-standard low-grade clinical depression.)

This is not something I care to admit to. I especially try not to let on about this to or around people who don’t share my unearned privileges. (I mean, what would I expect such people to do with that information? What good does it do to inform them that X member of their oppressor class feels bad? That’d be like texting “rly wish you were here” to someone dying of starvation while you dine at a four-star restaurant.) Neither do I want to vent about my feelings to other white cis-males. Whatever gains there are to be had from sharing stresses get swamped by the flood of wounded self-regard currently saturating reactionary movements on the right. Aggrieved white male entitlement is at an all-time high, and I want to do nothing that intensifies that trend. I regard claims that white males qualify as any kind of oppressed class in 2019 USA to be not just laughable but malevolent. White men (at least) have long since exhausted their right to complain to others about their lot in life qua white men. The world would need to be very different—and different for a very long time—before I could seriously entertain the notion that white males have grounds to claim oppression as such.

I can’t just wave a magic wand and annul privilege. I had no choice in being privileged any more than oppressed groups choose to be oppressed. (It’s the accountability without agency factor that makes systemic privilege such a frustrating, counterintuitive concept. It violates commonsense instincts about fairness. But them’s the breaks. And again—it’s orders of magnitude more difficult for people who by no agency of their own find themselves subject to marginalization.)

I do have choice and responsibility in what I do about or in reaction to privilege. I could choose, for instance, to fold inward into a state of paralyzed self-loathing. But that’d only be me diving further into privileged self-centeredness. I try, instead, to undo the systems of privilege that set my social classes above others at personal and systemic levels. Loads of options exist here: checking myself constantly, listening to and giving the benefit of the doubt to marginalized voices, receiving call-outs and corrections with humility, thinking through and trying out reparative actions, educating others, stepping back, sitting down and S-ingTFU, signal-boosting non-white-males, pushing for changes to social-political-cultural-economic infrastructures. These latter things, I know rationally, contribute good to the world in a way that my own private mortification at white maleness never would.

But sometimes, when the drone of self-loathing gets loud enough, I find myself orbiting playwright/poet Amiri Baraka’s quip to a white woman in the sixties who asked him what she could do to help the race problem (as if that was his or any other black person’s job to answer): “You can help by dying,” he told her, “You are a cancer. You can help the world’s people with your death.” (Baraka later distanced himself from such views.)

To be clear: my fascination with this mode of thinking isn’t rational. No one “makes me feel bad”—not Baraka, not a marginalized group or person, not even other white men. It’s all me, or rather the chemicals in my brain. Baraka’s quip appeals to the narcissism in my self-centered depression: I can help the world’s people, single-handedly, just by dying! Here I thought that realizing justice took long-term, collective coalitions of people changing systems and institutions, but no! Just me dying would do it! As is typically the case with my depressions, “helping racism” isn’t really the point. It’s “escaping this intolerably bad feeling,” with racism as a convenient cover-story. (If it weren't white supremacy/patriarchy, that inner "kill yourself!" voice would find some other excuse.)

That isn’t to say, though, that if I had access to an Infinity Gauntlet, I wouldn’t be sorely tempted to snap all white men including me out of existence. I wouldn’t, mind you. I'm not a fan of causing others' deaths, and I reject (with Kelsey Piper) the idea that justice requires inflicting suffering on others. But, if it were a different kind of snap--like "all otherwise white male children would be born brown or black," I’d be tempted. Such temptations are . . . probably also my self-centered depression talking. Probably.

What really pulls me out of the depression zone on this topic, though, isn’t calm reflection on the dysfunctional thought patterns I get trapped in. It’s teaching.

More tomorrow,

JF

* Of course I'm not equating "being a Nazi" with "being white and male." I just like the skit.