Author: Michael Karson, Ph.D.

White guys don’t have to be taught to empathize with the marginalized; they have to be taught not to. You’ll hear that a white guy who empathizes with the marginalized does so because he has some marginalized identity himself. He must be gay, or he married an Asian woman, or he was mistaken for black, or whatever. Alternatively, he must have gone through multicultural training, that growth experience of realizing what a privileged, racist, sexist, homophobe he is. (Not all multicultural training is like this, but people who think that white guys have to have their noses rubbed in their privilege are thinking of this sort of thing.)

Everyone starts off empathizing with the marginalized because everyone starts off powerless, disqualified, and functioning differently from other people’s expectations. Your parents rightly did not treat you as an equal, but sometimes they pulled rank on you purely for convenience, and you experienced the frustration of powerlessness. You experimented with different social roles (this is called “play”) and it was all they could do not to laugh out loud when you sang, at age 11, the McCartney lyric, “I’m not half the man I used to be.” Your parents developed a sense of who you were based on their experience of you, but within six months their expectations were outdated. This is similar to the way people develop expectations of others based on external traits and then box the others into behaving according to those expectations. Just growing up means you weren’t normal, to the extent that normal means “as expected.”

So white guys grow up marginalized, just like everyone else. Look at the horror and rage that accompanies many white guys’ loss of privilege—it turns out that white people dislike being put in their skin and stereotyped as much as people of color do. But that horror and rage, as Erving Goffman points out, occurs not because the loss of privilege and face makes white guys fearful of what will happen to them; it’s because they know exactly what is happening to them. They’re being made into boys again.

Many men are taught that it is humiliating to be like a child—short, emotional, and powerless (but not Wordsworth, that white guy extraordinaire, who wanted as a man to have his heart leap up at rainbows as it did when he was a boy). We are taught to disown all that is weak, vulnerable, emotional, and joyous. Then we dedicate ourselves to pretending to be, for want of a better term, cowboys. And while it’s true that a socially marginalized identity element or an experience of self-disgust can undo that ridiculous posture, an easier path to self-acceptance is, well, self-acceptance. I don’t have to know what it’s like to be black to identify with the diversity agenda; I just have to know what it’s like to be me.

Down the road, I’ll question the meanings of manly and womanly. For now, having specified what being a man means to me, I thought I’d take a crack at a womanly ideal. I wanted to post the exact same description, not because I really believe a good woman is just the same as a good man, but because I want to believe it. Instead, I drafted a guest blogger of the female persuasion.

This from Janna Goodwin:

When I was a kid, growing up in Wyoming, I liked to ride my bike, hard, up and down the hilly, dusty “jumps” that cut through the vast fields around our neighborhood. I played basketball, not well, but with joy. I read books on the front porch, listening to lawn sprinklers. I dreamed of travel to distant cities and adventures in foreign lands. I imagined saving peoples’ lives; I wanted to a hero. I liked dressing in blue jeans and shirts with the sleeves rolled up. I bossed my little brother around. I played cowboy with Scott, Dave, and Dolores in the beekeeper’s field across the street. I drew pictures constantly. I took up conversational issues with heated excitement and confidence in my own ability to reason (even when I could have used some tempering of my certainty with evidence). I did not like the way it felt—vulnerable, exposed—to wear skirts, patent leather shoes, frilly blouses. I couldn’t bear the high-pitched squeal of giggles or the gossipy insipidness of girly-girls. I wanted to be the Artful Dodger. I wanted to be Little Joe. Ilya Kuryakin. My notion of being a Good Woman involved wearing padded brassieres, bearing children, taking dictation, making sandwiches, wiping noses and butts, and sacrificing one’s vitality and independence for others and frankly, I wanted no part of it. I didn’t want to be a Bad Woman, either, which apparently entailed sexuality (gross!) if not narcissism and gold-digging. I wanted, instead, to be a Brave Soldier, a Fine Lad, and a Brilliant Artist. That’s about as close as I can come to expressing what I intended to grow up to be. I didn’t envy the penis, but I wanted the options.

Experience, maturity, college, and feminism changed my perspective. I was treated well, treated badly, hurt, dismissed, fondled, mauled and otherwise objectified, given some opportunities and denied others—which, as, it turns out, happens to most people, some more wrenchingly, systematically, and detrimentally than others (we all make up reasons for our bad experiences and rejections, explanations that have little to do with our personalities or luck and much to do with unfairness. Sometimes, we’re spot-on in our assessments and other times, we’re way off: sometimes, it’s sexism or racism or classism and sometimes, it’s just bad breaks or they didn’t like you as much as they liked the next one).

By age 30, for me, Good Womanliness involved blooming self-righteousness and the constant arrival, via literature and critical thinking, of insights that inflamed my sense of personal, historic, and global injustice and enlarged my capacity to dislike others, particularly men and seriously—damn them—Straight White Men, who were obviously all full of themselves, wealthy, tall, controlling, and oblivious to their own undeserved privileges. I spent too long feeling mainly pissed off, especially (yeah, go ahead, hate me for saying it, but it’s true) every month when I had my period. I began to wonder if I actually liked being an Angry Woman (not so much, it turned out) and whether Angry Woman equated to Good Woman.

In settling on an identity, I definitely didn’t want to be a Womyn, a Witch, a Crone, or one of the Sisterhood, all of which smacked of cultiness. I wasn’t even, in the end, completely at ease with the Feminist label, having grown tired of the sense that one could never be outraged enough or prove oneself sufficiently intellectual or dedicated to just finally say “Whew!” and to get on to enjoying a life largely free of indignant wrath.

By 38 or so, I was fully cognizant, in a permanent and behavioral way, of both my middle-class and skin color advantages—such as they may or may not have been, depending on the situation—even while coming to grips with the disadvantages, both actual and perceived, that I faced as a Woman—and particularly as a Straight White Woman approaching middle age, the kind of Woman most easily dismissed by all other groups (including ourselves).

Anyway, the more I became me, and the more I liked that me, the less important it felt to correct the rest of the world. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that concentrating on the shortcomings—and perceived shortcomings—of other people isn’t fun! It is what plenty of women (not, in my book, the Good ones) enjoy most. Side observation: for the Righteous Woman, correcting others as a way of gaining status and control really beats the hard work of figuring out what kind of person she wants to be, what kind of relationships she wants to have and what kind of life she wants to live. I’d guess that right now, someone reading this wants badly to reach out and correct me, to explain why and how I’m wrong to have my perspective and to speak my sense of the world aloud. Because I obviously don’t know how fortunate I am (and the Righteous Woman or Man obviously knows more about me, my life, and my circumstances than I do)… and I need to be educated, trained, enlightened. You know who you are.

So, today, I’m a full-fledged Woman. I’m possibly a Fairly Good one, though certainly not, you know, clearly and sincerely Good. I focus, as much as possible, on what makes me feel happy, healthy, competent, reliable, responsible, and strong. The values, characteristics, and practices I try to cultivate in myself and my life as I age—and become, I daresay, Better at being a Woman, a Man, and a Person—include curiosity, critical thinking, compassion, humor and playfulness, creativity, connectedness, physical wellbeing, relational wellbeing, reflectiveness, robustness, responsiveness, agency, liveliness, inner peace. I keep myself as aware as I can of the variety of contexts that inform not only my own experiences but the experiences of others, and that awareness keeps me on my toes in a good way. I don’t like, but nonetheless invite, social, psychical, and physical discomfort, and it visits me often, sometimes savagely. I maintain the right to succeed, fail, make mistakes, declare my perspective, argue, reject or accept claims, botch things, improve things, fall on my face and pick myself up. I reserve the right to laugh. I suppose that, since these are all foundational to me, and function as guiding principles, they’d constitute what I think of as Good. Or at least Pretty Darned Good.

Well, no, unlike Elephant Man’s John Merrick, I haven’t been egregiously targeted or pervasively marginalized, but still, Merrick’s protest is my own. “I am a human being!” he shouts, cornered in a urinal by the gawking, frightened, threatening crowd. We have much more in common than otherwise, in my opinion, and not just I and Merrick, but also I and you.

Every society, whether transient and small like the riders of an elevator, whether grand and lasting like China, extends its privileges to those it recognizes as full members of the tribe. The way to inclusion is to define the tribe as “all human beings.” Period. If you specify your identity beyond that, you are setting the stage to leave someone out. “I am a human being” should be an entry visa to any society, and only misconduct or incompetence should be stigmatized and marginalized. (Even misconduct and incompetence should not cost full membership in every social situation, only in the roles that the person is incompetent or unwilling to play.)

When Merrick croaks out a final, “I am a man,” I (rather idiosyncratically, I admit) don’t hear it as him refining his definition of himself. I hear it as a comment on what he has just done, which was to face down his demons and to speak the truth that he is a human being. Every person would be well-served by trying to be a better man (and by trying to be a better woman, but that’s another post).

True story. I taught in a psychology graduate school (not in Colorado) and I left after not getting a full-time position there. On my last day, a group of students asked me why I had never seemed to fit in. I said, “This place goes on and on about multiculturalism, but there has never been room here for my culture.”

“What’s your culture?” one woman asked.

“I’m a man,” I said. “I think it’s more important to test ideas with argument and evidence than to be nice about everything that’s said.”

Frankly, I also meant that I like providing for my family. I like being right, and I like sex. Anger doesn’t alarm me. I think that honor is a useful concept and a good guide to living. I think it’s usually better to cowboy up than to whine. I think it’s more important to be funny than to be tender. I don’t think “you hurt my feelings” is a valid argument. I take no satisfaction in being offended by words. I’m proud of success and I am not ashamed of being smarter or better at something than someone else. I don’t feel guilty about other people’s suffering unless I caused it. Allow me to repeat that part: I don’t feel guilty about other people’s suffering unless I caused it.

Perhaps you are also part man? Probably on your father’s side. You and I both come from a long line of men.

I want to participate in the multicultural discussion without being dismissed, stereotyped, or derogated as a white man. I want all of us to feel that it is never okay to judge someone by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character (in Martin Luther King’s famous phrasing). King said of white allies, “They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.” He probably meant that white people’s own freedom depends on demanding the freedom of black people. But “inextricably bound” is a two-way street, and I can also enhance the freedom of black people by demanding my own. I believe we can make the world a better place by not accepting marginalization based on race, sex, color, or sexual orientation for any purpose.

Some say there is no problem: there is hardly any racism left. Some say there is no problem: just submit to the multicultural agenda and take your lumps. I say there is a problem: multiculturalism becomes the thing it despises (because it is performed by humans), and the only solution is to welcome excluded voices, even when those voices come from straight white men.

Why would a white guy want a seat at the multicultural table? Why not slink away and rejoin other tables, where I am already a full-fledged member? I’ve certainly seen white colleagues respond to rebuff with retreat—and I’ve seen many multiculturalists wonder why those colleagues don’t support the diversity events (where by “support” they mean silent and chastised attendance or declarations of being racist and deserving payback for the sins of others).

The short answer is outrage. I quivered with rage when I first saw children mistreated. After consulting on 10,000 child welfare cases over 28 years, I don’t react quite so intensely. Homophobia pisses me off today like overt racism did in the Sixties. Outrage underlay even my psychotherapy practice, and believe me when I tell you that it is hard to be warm and empathic when you’re outraged. I get angry at the tyrannies imposed on clients by their families, their communities, and themselves. I get extra angry when I hear how therapists frequently treat clients, which gets pretty close to the way aristocrats treat commoners (“in my experience, they like it when I [insert some form of self-indulgence here]”). My view of therapy has sensitized me to subtle ways we exploit others. Thus sensitized, I refuse to relinquish my political, personal, and professional interest in social justice and power dynamics just because I am not the right sex, color, or sexual orientation to express that interest. I belong at the multicultural table as much as anyone. If you think white men are already welcome there without debasing themselves, you are very lucky in your choice of multicultural conversations or you are not paying attention.

I also want a seat because it is becoming the most important table in the social sciences. Why this has happened is not clear to me and really doesn’t matter. Even a book on report writing must, if the proposal has any chance of acceptance, include a chapter on culturally competent practice. If I want to be a full-fledged member of my academic environment, I need to be fluent in power theory and multiculturalism.

Finally, frankly, I want a seat at the multicultural table because I am not welcome there. That’s not my oppositionality talking—that’s my privilege talking. I have sought out situations where I am full-fledged, and now I’ve come to expect it. Because I believe that no one should be excluded from any conversation on account of race or sex or sexual orientation (baby showers annoy me one way or another—I’m either excluded because I’m a man or I have to go to them), I feel entitled to elbow my way, politely but firmly, into the multicultural group. Everyone should feel this way. A minority therapist (minority!—he identified as Chinese, putting him in the largest ethnic group of all) told me once that he wanted white men to feel as self-conscious and vulnerable as he feels when walking down American streets. I told him that my goal was for him to feel as happy-go-lucky, carefree, and oblivious as I do. We should all be privileged, not all unprivileged.

Stronger people than I’ll ever be elbowed their ways—politely but firmly—into bus seats, lunch counters, and segregated neighborhoods when I was an impressionable youth. To do any less at the multicultural table, especially when the stakes are so low regarding my physical safety, would be to drop the torch that, at least in my imagination, I am expected to carry.

A privilege (in a multicultural discussion) is an unearned advantage, rather like a legal right (on which the word is based), but unenforceable. Many multiculturalists will tell you that privilege, or lack thereof, sticks with you wherever you go, but that’s wrong. It’s money, inherited or earned, that sticks with you; so we have to distinguish a lack of social privilege from being “underprivileged.” Privilege is the opposite of stigma, not poverty. There’s white privilege in situations where it’s advantageous to be white and black privilege in situations where it’s advantageous to be black. There is also a privilege associated with every category society puts people in, so that sometimes people are privileged for hearing, sometimes for being deaf, for being tall, for being short, and so on. It all depends on the local and immediate norms of whatever group you find yourself in. If you have a privilege, it means you are authorized to play the role you’re in.

You can’t understand what all the complaining is about unless you understand that people naturally avoid situations where they are not privileged, and it’s much easier and much less financially costly for white people than for black people (in most of America) to avoid situations where they are not privileged.

Heterosexual privilege operates when you talk about your spouse and other people assume you’re straight. (Straight people in this situation are fully authorized to play the role of spouse.) Heterosexual privilege operates in most states if you want to marry the person you love. Gay privilege operates in a multicultural discussion of heterosexual privilege, where gay people are perceived as being fully authorized to comment, but straight people have to prove that they’re all right before commenting. You can see that the political and economic costs weigh more heavily on the gay person avoiding marriage than on the straight person avoiding certain conversations.

A professional multiculturalist I know told straight students that they were wrong to get married as long as gay people can’t. Other professional multiculturalists have made it clear to white people that they should always be aware of when they are enjoying white privilege, and they should either forego the fruits of their advantage or they should adopt an apologetic and guilty attitude toward the situation. This is nonsense. The deepest privilege of all accorded those who are fully authorized to play their roles is to be unaware of the privilege. Where you are welcome, you need not be situation-conscious. In a restaurant where you stand out like a sore thumb, it’s hard to get engrossed in your dinner or in your conversation. In a restaurant where you are fully accepted as a patron, you can enjoy your meal and your conversation. I’m for recognizing and acknowledging privilege, but I’m also for enjoying it. When you are privileged, you should feel lucky, not guilty.

A black couple—a physician and a judge—bought a new house in a predominantly white, upper-class neighborhood. On moving day, a neighbor asked them when the new owners were arriving. The couple laughed. When the physician reported the incident in a multicultural workshop, the trainer told her she was denying her anger, and that she should have confronted the neighbor with his implicit racism. There’s definitely a place for anger when you are being marginalized; it should spur you on to do the most constructive and redemptive thing you can do about broadening definitions of which people can play which roles. But more often than not, when you are marginalized, the most constructive and redemptive thing you can do is laugh.

The path to a middle ground between apathy and guilt has to deal with multiculturalism’s tendency to categorize people and treat them according to the category they’re in.

Categorization sucks. Biologists now speculate that the reason it took so long for humans to come up with the theory of evolution is that we are either hardwired or programmed by our use of language to categorize objects. The insight that led to the theory of evolution (and then to systems theory and behaviorism) depended on looking at a flock of birds and, instead of seeing them as all the same or all nearly the same, seeing them as all different. Natural selection operates on these differences. Even people who have no intellectual resistance to the idea of evolution can have trouble with this concept—they imagine nature selecting one species and not another. Putting animals and plants in categories and treating them as if they are all the same inside the category hindered the development of biology by untold centuries. Let’s not allow the categorization of humans to have the same effect on psychology and political science.

Because it is useful to learn about other cultures as a way to evaluate our own, and because all cultures have done so much harm by trumpeting their own virtues and their own definitions of normalcy, multiculturalism is reluctant to condemn any cultural attitude—except those of white guys. Cultural relativism is useful for evaluating the culpability of an individual—criminal behavior in a criminal neighborhood often tells us little about the person and a lot about the neighborhood—but it is stupid to honor a practice just because a lot of people do it. Think of culture as “some other people.” This liberates you from qualms about criticizing another culture. I met a Chinese woman who hated herself for having big feet (big feet, you could say, ran in her family). She said that in Chinese culture, big feet are ugly. Instead of saying her feet offended her culture, she needed to say only that her feet offended some other people. This quickly opens the way to finding yet another group of Chinese people who were not offended by her feet. If over a third of Utahans voted for Obama—if even a staunchly stereotyped group like Utahans can show that much diversity—I’m pretty sure you can find a lot of Chinese people who are not obsessed with small feet. Making girls feel bad about themselves because they have big feet is wrong. It’s easier to say that some other people are wrong than to say that a culture is wrong. But if you don’t know that clitorectomies and honor killings are wrong, then you are too lost even to use the words right and wrong. I realize that there are people all over the world who would say the same thing about me for not thinking that female sexuality is dangerous and vile. But you and I both know which of those perspectives is wrong. You don’t have to say, clitorectomy is wrong because; you don’t have to appeal to a rule; you can just say that it’s wrong.

What multiculturalism also gets wrong is its general, but not complete, failure to appreciate American culture. In some academic classes, for example, students are instructed to write essays about their ethnic heritage, but they’re not allowed to choose American. American students can choose Italian, or Irish, or even English, but American is not counted as an ethnicity. I assume Canadian is also forbidden. I have two coffee cups in my office, one with a picture of Fenway Park, and one with the Bill of Rights. I like being an American—racism, warmongering, scientific stupidity, and strutting patriotism notwithstanding.

Enlightenment values have made America and its progeny the best places in the world to live by any reasonable standard of measurement (except weather). And it was white guys who championed Enlightenment values of scientific inquiry, critical thinking, free trade, civil liberty, separation of church and state, and above all the free exchange of ideas. (It was, of course, white guys who stood in their way, but so what?) It was white guys who founded a country on suspicion of power, the consent of the governed, intolerance of corruption, separation of church and state, the right to self-expression, and the right to complain about the status quo. This last is under-appreciated, in my opinion. The First Amendment guarantees the right to complain—to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Complaining about the party line by the marginalized is the essence of what multiculturalism should be about; complaints lead to change and inclusion, not just if they’re acted on, but even if they’re only voiced. Only those who had not been allowed to complain could have thought to include this as a basic right, but the health of every group, every individual, every society, depends on a feedback loop between the dissatisfied and the powerful.

Though undoubtedly racist and sexist and homophobic at first and in many ways still, the structure of divided government and the Bill of Rights was easily applied to women and blacks (and is in the process of being applied to gays) once they were recognized by the normals as fully human, a recognition sped up by the free marketplace of ideas—and by communication technology, itself a child of the free-thinking that produced science. Women are better off in the democracies than anywhere else in the world or in history. There’s a strain of feminism that asks whether women should secede from the multicultural agenda, since all other cultures besides Western or Westernized democracies are so awful. Black people, though living in a country built on slavery and steeped in racism, are better off by any reasonable measure in America than in black Africa. This is because of their own industry, talent, and intelligence, but these traits needed a society built on Enlightenment values—a society built by white guys—to flourish.

Multiculturalism often confuses the rules of social conduct, which are socially constructed, with the laws of nature, which are not. It wants to transfer its discovery that there’s no one right cuisine or musical tradition or wedding custom to questions about reality, treating all points of view equally not just in the obvious cases of cosmology and evolution (yes the Hindu and creationist myths are lovely—but wrong), but also in the cases of astrology, ghosts, and UFOs. These are all empirical questions (answerable according to evidence)—but multiculturalism sometimes thinks it’s more important not to hurt marginalized people’s feelings than to think critically. It’s not always easy to ascertain the nature of reality, but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s only one reality. Multiculturalism often confuses the fact that people relate to reality subjectively with a new-age notion that there is more than one reality. To say there is more than one reality is to try to protect people from the experience of being incorrect by positing some other plane on which their ideas would, if that plane existed, have merit. But there is no other plane. Instead of protecting people from finding out that they are wrong about some things, we ought to be trying to remove the sting of being wrong. After all, being wrong, getting feedback, and self-correcting is the only way to become better at anything

In this particular respect, multiculturalism is unscientific. Science is a human subculture that privileges evidence over feelings, posits a single reality, and draws its unparalleled strength for generating useful ideas about how the world works from its self-corrective functions. I have often said that the entire scientific attitude can be summarized in a single word: oops. This word conveys the desirable attitude towards one’s own mistakes—they are recognized; they are not devastating. Multiculturalism often treats people like fragile crystal when it coos at and accepts whatever drivel they spout, and some people rather shockingly seem to prefer being told they already know everything to getting useful feedback and learning how to get better at whatever they’re doing. So, yes, perhaps it’s because I’m a white guy that I think people need to stop being so intellectually dainty, but that doesn’t make me wrong. When people face a daunting learning curve, as they do in graduate school or starting a skilled career, they can either start trudging up the mountain or look for a shortcut. Multiculturalism all too often is that shortcut. It tells the person that the world is unfair when in fact it’s often just difficult.

Instead of examining and questioning power in groups, multiculturalism—because it is a human, all-too-human enterprise—tends to become a power structure of its own. All animals are equal, wrote Orwell, but some animals are more equal than others. He was mocking the way revolutionaries tend to become tyrants and bureaucrats once in power by twisting the catchphrases of the revolution to a new purpose. Professional multiculturalists are always going on about categories—even the American Psychological Association tells you that you have to put your clients in various categories, from disability to race, from ethnicity to nationality, so you can decide if you’re competent to treat them. Supposedly, you get competence by attending workshops that lump all the people in a category together, which, if only slightly reframed, would be blatant exercises in racism, homophobia, sexism, and xenophobia. Professional multiculturalists use their categorizations of people to justify their own positions of power, just as others with power justify their power with their own categorizations.

Some writers are weighing in on the fact that the murderer in Aurora is a white guy, arguing that if he weren’t, we’d be hearing all about how his culture made him do it, and arguing that indeed his culture did make him do it because white guys are so privileged that they think that other people’s spaces and even lives belong to them.

Whether most mass murderers are white men is up for debate. Certainly in the United States, you can think of a lot of random murderers who were white, but that may reflect news coverage and police work. (How many senseless killings by black and Latino men have been reported as robberies, drug deals, and gang violence?) More importantly, two thirds of the men in this country are white guys (even more if you count white Hispanics), so one would expect twice as many white mass murderers as non-white. As for paranoid and psychopathic killings outside the U.S., one has only to look to Africa to get a sense that a lot of non-white men are also killing people to restore face or for fun.

Where race most comes into play in this story is in the color of the victims. I have no doubt that shooting up a theater in a black neighborhood would have made big headlines, but I also wonder about the extent of the coverage and the sense of tragedy associated with white victims. When a black or Hispanic child is killed in a drive-by shooting in a major American city, her parents feel as devastated, helplessly angry, spiritually confused, and bitter as the families of victims of mass killings feel. But they don’t get a visit from the President.

If the killer’s race has anything to do with it, in my opinion, it’s that middle-class men of color have learned to deal with humiliation much more proficiently than white guys. Oh, don’t get me wrong: being a white guy is also an exercise in humiliation—with all the messages we get from our culture to stand up for what’s right and to defend ourselves and those dear to us, our lives are one failure after another to embody the Dirty Harry ideal. The men in that theater need a special kind of attention right now, because many of them are plagued by the thought that they didn’t see it coming and attack the shooter themselves. It’s a “special” kind of attention because if you try to help them with that, you are contributing to the undermining of the masculine ideal by defining them as needing help. But even though all men are plagued by the risk of humiliation, men of color in America get a lot more used to dealing with it non-violently because they get a lot more of it out on most streets and in many of our institutions.