Two recent disparate events have left me thinking.
The first was a face-to-face conversation with a Reformed Journal reader whom I regard highly. She taught Advanced Placement English to high school students in New York for many years and embodies how I imagine our readers: intelligent, well-read, and possessing a mature faith. As we talked, she singled out many of our regular RJ writers as personal favorites. Everyone she named is a woman, which I initially didn’t notice. That came to me as she listed the regulars she does not read. They are all men and in regard to each she said, “He’s just another white guy.”
I protested. These men were different, from different parts of the country, with different interests, writing about different things.
“Just another white guy,” she kept saying.
I tried my best not to get defensive but it was hard. After all, some of my best friends are white guys. Actually, most all of my best friends (including her husband) are white guys.
She said she reads my articles. Was our friendship the only thing keeping me from being just another white guy? She also mentioned a couple of other male writers whom she appreciates—men she felt rose above being “just another white guy.”
I stuck that encounter away until the other night when I saw something surprising on television. I was watching a Detroit Tigers game and, as is my habit, was channel surfing during the commercials. I don’t like to brag but I’m really good at this, always returning to the game at exactly the right moment and never irritating anyone else who might be watching. I digress, but my use of a television remote is best called “delightful.”
A cable movie channel was showing a beloved comedy from the 1980s that I hadn’t seen in a while so I kept coming back to that between innings. I was surprised when one of the main characters dropped an “F bomb.” Then it happened again. And again. Over and over. I did not remember the movie like this. My guess is that when I’ve seen it over the years, it’s been cleaned up for television. But the other night the cable channel was showing the original. Then, for no apparent reason, a woman took her shirt off. This wasn’t a sex scene, it was just, you know, that thing women do when they’ve obviously had their clothes on for too long. If there ever was gratuitous nudity, this was it.
Up until that moment, I would have said this comedy was rated PG or PG-13. But it was clearly rated R. Nobody under the age of 17 was supposed to see it unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. Yet who was this movie made for? Whose gaze was it meant to please? Young men and adolescent boys. That got me thinking and I poked around the internet and found a slew of R-rated 1980s comedies: The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, Coming to America, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Vacation, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, Stripes and more(there are dozens of lesser-known low-brow R-rated comedies on the list). Besides starring a disproportionate number of Saturday Night Live alumni, these movies followed the same formula. Each was quite successful, earning staggering amounts of money. It’s no coincidence they were R-rated—it was the marketing strategy, built on both the belief that the tastes of young men and adolescent boys were normative and the confidence movie theatres wouldn’t enforce the ratings.
I saw each of these movies when they were released. Couldn’t wait to see them. I’ve seen each enough times that I remember iconic lines and scenes. They are a part of the greater catechism of my life. The amount of time I have spent absorbing this greater catechism dwarfs any religious instruction I have had. (Although I’m not sure how much that matters since my religious instruction was also sexist.)
It occurred to me (not for the first time, but this was a fresh reminder) that I grew up in a world made for me. When I was younger, I noticed this as much as a fish notices water or you and I notice air. Since I never noticed, I never questioned why the world should be made for me. That’s just the way it was. I can try all I want (and I do try) to be sensitive to the experiences of women, people of color, people with different sexual orientations, people with disabilities, or any other marginalized group, but it’s hard. The world has always been designed for me.
Which makes me just another white guy.
Or, more specifically, just another white, straight, cisgendered, middle class, Christian, able-bodied guy.
What also occurred to me was how much the MAGA movement is built on the deep desire to preserve the world I grew up in, a world of white male superiority and domination. I thought of the video shared by Secretary of Defense Pete Hesgeth recently of evangelical pastors proclaiming the benefits of oppressive patriarchy and “explaining” that women should not be in positions of authority nor allowed to vote.
And then I stopped myself.
That’s too easy.
It’s too easy to play “me vs. them.” Too easy to make myself feel better because I am not as idiotic as the toxic nut jobs on that video. Too easy to say, “Look how great I am because I don’t want to Make Patriarchy Great Again.”
What’s needed, instead, is ruthless self-examination. Instead of posting a vacuous sermon about how egalitarian I am, what’s needed is for me to look deeply at how comfortable I am in my privilege and to confront it. I was raised to be sexist. How will I work to undo that greater catechism? (Maybe start with my attachment to the television remote.) Looking inside this way isn’t easy and there is little reward for doing so. But if I don’t?
I’m a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.
Or, better yet, just another white guy.
15 Responses
Thank you for this, Jeff. It mirrors a conversation I often have with myself about being “just another progressive White woman.” The strength of your piece is its combination of conversation and self-examination. I had thought that my having experienced sexism (both external and internalized) gave me an upper hand in self-examination regarding White privilege. But I have found that no amount of “looking inside” can replace what I’ve learned from my Black and Hispanic and Asian friends. One friend took me on a field trip to three stores and salons specializing in Black hair, while explaining to me that the first Black woman millionaire created a business aimed at helping Black women achieve “good hair” (defined as hair with the texture of White women’s hair). The sociological and spiritual layers of that seem inexhaustible. I had reached retirement without knowing that there are Black hair superstores within a few miles of where I live (and what it is like to be Black when there isn’t anywhere that caters to your hair within hundreds of miles). No amount of looking inward could have brought me that awareness.
I’m a woman and I grew up believing the world was made for me. Don’t beat yourself up because you now realise the universe doesn’t orbit around you.
Vintage Jeff Munroe – thoughtful, witty, honest. Many thanks!
Just watch the news, weather, sports, game shows; anything, and see that the appeal factor (usually clothing, but sometimes or also roles) is quite different for each gender and belittles the respect for the female participant’s rightful representation there. Thank you, Jeff, for this piece.
Thank you.
“I’m a racist deep down, but I know better. I try to treat people according to what I know rather than according to what my viscera may suggest.”
Yeah.
I get the message here that being “just another white guy” is a very bad thing to be, but it’s not really spelled out what it is that makes it so bad.
None of us get to chose who we are. But we still have the job of knowing who we are. I’m not Jeff Munroe, so I can’t speak for him, but I think he’s saying that not realizing he’s a white guy designed for white guys is the problem here, not simply being one. And that, as I tell my middle school students, is a “solvable problem.”
I don’t think it’s bad, per se. The description “is” —white, straight, cisgendered, middle class, Christian, able-bodied guy. What’s “bad,” if you will is that we tend not to be taught the inequities that are part of this. Thus, we have a difficult time seeing it, and that translates into perpetuating the hierarchy all while living as if there isn’t one. Instead, I think, we should be taught to see and pursue justice in love.
Thanks Jeff….. I can relate to the “just another progressive white woman thing too….privilege, privilege, privilege.
Thanks for being honest about being specifically, “just another white, straight, cisgendered, middle class, Christian, able-bodied guy.” I wonder which one of those qualifiers is the most important or does it depend on the situation and the other people you are engaging with? Personally I think RCA & CRC churches are just too middle class (& usually really upper middle class) for very many people.
While I think self-reflection always a good thing, I am also confused how your acquaintance gets a pass on her own conduct. This is someone with a “mature faith” who largely refuses even to read what certain people write because they are “white guys”–an immutable characteristic? Oh, my. There’s a word for that. You are a bit hard on yourself. I suspect you have misidentified the clanging gong in this story.
I commend your critical self-reflection, which is surely part of any mature spirituality, especially in the Reformed tradition. However, there is a difference between critical self-reflection and the self-loathing that seems to have become a theme in white progressive circles. Your reflection, while thoughtful, leans toward the ladder in my view. I do not think that self-loathing on the part of white men is either healthy for us personally or helpful to our body politic as a whole. We now have a generation of young white men who grew up with the message, “you’re the problem,” and this is not working out very well for the progressive cause. Many of these young men are turning to a new conservative movement eager to accept and embrace them.
Honest and thought-provoking. Self-examination of these complex issues is what we are admonished to do as believers (Matthew chapter 7). It is easier to criticize (which I do too often) our current leaders in our Nation’s capital, than to see my own hypocrisies.
Tom – Well put. Expanding on that, progressive Christianity increasingly seems to be adopting much of the mindset and tenets (and occasional harshness) of progressive political liberalism, including an awful lot of unwarranted guilt. Guilt for Reformed people is an easy thing, but often that Reformed original-sin guilt which affects us all equally seems to be getting confused with politically progressive “guilt” which often pours on a lot of what might be considered to be ancestral guilt, or “the sins of our forefathers.” It’s pretty poor Scriptural exegesis that would pour the guilt of some largely dead patriarchal age onto each individual male today, and force them to apologize for it on bended knee. Both conservative and liberal Christianity have a lot of “worst elements” of their corresponding political movements to beware of. Neither is doing a particularly good job of it, it many instances.
Let’s take that further. That “idiotic toxic nutjob” is one Doug Wilson, a fairly serious Reformed personality. To be clear, “serious” does not mean correct. But, it’s also fair to say that the headline trumpeting that he says “women shouldn’t vote” is not true–or at the very least, is misleading. I finally watched the video. What Wilson actually advocates is some odd system of “family voting” in which men as the “head” of the family ultimately casts the family’s vote, after the family discusses the vote. Part and parcel of that is his wife, who Wilson calls “Chief Executive Officer” of the family. The problem is the headline. You watch expecting a diatribe against women, and you get this CEO and family voting scheme instead, and some stuff about evangelizing the whole world successfully so the nation is a Christian nation and the world a Christian world. I don’t know who wins the hearts and minds of young men in this battle, but I wager it isn’t Ms. “You don’t matter because you’re just another white male voice” and Mr. “I’m sorry. I’ll go self-reflect a bit.”
Self-reflection is a wonderful thing, but when these attitudes permeate into our churches, we’re cooked. Old men might might buy into it, largely out of a desire to retain approbation of their peers, but young men? They’re out. Honestly, even I’m not going to “ruthlessly examine” my sexism and privilege. My “privilege” involved being flat broke, and a lot of long hours and endless, tireless work and labor to get anything. Perhaps my refusal to further examine my “sexist upbringing” (which I don’t recall existing) and “privilege” (which I earned) makes me “just another white guy.” Oh well, time to go watch more Doug Wilson videos to get a “new” theological perspective. At least he isn’t trying to make me feel like garbage about myself. I say that facetiously, but I think the point is made.
(I don’t mean to seem overly critical, but I’ve never been one for “Wow, important things to consider…” commentary. At least I managed to avoid “the world was made for me” and belabored stories of the many places I’ve lived where that was… not exactly true. Oh, fine. Profanity laden movies with nudity and gratuitous violence which I was strictly prohibited from watching were made for me as a Reformed Christian young man those many years ago? I could argue that point.)
Cal, I honestly do not understand why you took any of Jeff’s comments to be that he was “pouring guilt” on you or anyone else. Self-reflection does not have to be a process with the intent to make people feel guilty. I would suggest your reaction says more about you than anything else. I also recoiled to your comments “‘privilege’ (which I earned)”. Yes, I am sure you worked hard and my not have started with much. I am sure you contributed a major part to your own success. But to think that your hierarchy in culture as a cisgender white male did not give you any advantages means you are deceiving yourself. And why are you not sharing your full name like everyone else on this blog? If you really don’t feel guilty about what you posted, then be transparent.