Maybe I wasn’t the only one who heard a woman say of the bandit bankers who nearly wrecked the financial system, “Of course, a bunch of white men.” Maybe you have also heard fatcats, criminal or otherwise, described similarly.
To explore the nature of prejudice, imagine you hire someone named Terry to do chores around your house. At first, Terry is punctual and industrious, but soon you notice that the work does not get done and small items that are easily pawned go missing. Quite reasonably, you fire Terry, change the code on your lockbox, and look for a replacement. You want to make sure you don’t hire another Terry.
Your approach to hiring a replacement will depend on your ways of thinking about who Terry is. The categories you select from to conceptualize Terry reflect the categories you were taught to put people in. These probably include sex, race, ethnicity, age, and religion. The categories you choose also depend on aspects of Terry that stand out from your normal experience. Thus, if you’ve never met an albino or a person with spiked purple hair, these are bound to become the basis for categorizing the first ones you meet. The categories you use to characterize Terry will also depend on which categories you have come to associate with theft and undependability. These, in turn, will depend to some extent on your personal experience, to some extent on media representations of different categories, and to some extent on reality. Only very energetic critical thinking and the use of probability theory can help you figure out which categories in which situations are genuinely related to theft and undependability, and I sincerely doubt that anyone goes to that much trouble unless they are getting paid to. Finally, the categories you use to describe Terry so as to avoid hiring another Terry depend a great deal on how you categorize yourself.
We disparage people by using categories that don’t apply to us so we don’t have to disparage ourselves, whether the disparagement is born of disdain or envy. If Terry is a Venezuelan woman who wears revealing outfits, her white boss will think of her as—and tend to avoid hiring anyone who seems—Latina, but if the boss is Latina—Puerto Rican, say—then she will think of Terry as Venezuelan. It will not occur to the Puerto Rican boss to characterize Terry as a woman, because she is herself a woman, but if Terry were a man, then his Latina boss might avoid hiring another man. If Terry and her boss are both Venezuelan women, then the boss will think of her as cheaply dressed, and avoid hiring anyone who wears revealing outfits.
The main reason some women and minorities describe the powerful or the criminal as white men is that women and minorities are not white men. This is the same reason some white men label criminals according to their skin color or ethnicity. There are a lot of different ways the powerless or the disapproving could describe those who are envied or disgraced, but too often they focus on sex and skin color. We white guys have a rich vocabulary for describing self-satisfied dismissive assholes. For example, we call them self-satisfied dismissive assholes. Some women and minorities just describe them as white guys. Focusing on this label promotes their own agenda; white guys are bad, or white guys are privileged, so hire someone like me, and nobody’s more like me than I am. Classifying people they don’t like as white guys also justifies their attempts to shut up other white guys. I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has referred to some white guys who did something wrong without bothering to distinguish them from me, whether it was, “White men have had power long enough” (said to me when I was in high school!), or “White men committed genocide,” or “White men enslaved Africans.” What they were really saying to me was, “Shut up,” or, worse, because it annihilates my personhood, “I can only see your sex and skin color.”
What’s that? People of color and women have also been dismissed because of sex and skin color? That’s terrible. Let’s try to stop that.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
I’ve noticed your blog thus far has been about race/culture/ethnicity/gender and how each group interacts with one another. Might this be a topic for a new Karson book?
If you are offering to publish it, I accept.
I publish nothing other than Libertarian smut.
A book discussing these issues in this way would seem to be an effective way to teach multiculturalism, especially to white guys of privilege (like myself).