One of the right-wing rules they’ve made up in recent years is that anything that makes white people uncomfortable — teaching about racism, for instance — is bad. Students shouldn’t have to feel ashamed of whiteness if they didn’t personally do anything wrong.
While it’s partly true — being white and/or male still confer a lot of privilege — it ignores that shame is a natural reaction, even if we’re not responsible ourselves. Discovering our family wealth was built on sex trafficking, slavery or property stolen from Jews in Nazi Germany would make most people feel ashamed even if we personally hadn’t done anything. I think it’s equally understandable to feel shame when learning how much lynch law reinforced white privilege and how horrendous it was.
Matt Walsh, whiny misogynist, recently took the opposite tack: not only should white people not feel ashamed, we should be proud to be white! “If anyone’s writing an article singling out white men, it should be to thank us. After all, as I said recently, this country could not exist without white men. Nearly every good thing you have in your life — everything that makes your life safer, more comfortable, more enjoyable — was given to you by a white man.”
What’s interesting about this is that it encapsulates how conservatives want it both ways. If Walsh (or anyone) is going to take pride in what other white people have done — stuff he didn’t contribute to or participate in — then shouldn’t he also accept shame for what other people have done? If his white maleness is enhanced because of good stuff other white men did, then the evil white men did must detract for it. If you can’t accept the shame, you don’t get the pride either.
There’s nothing unusual in this. People like feeling their country is awesome; for some people it’s much more important than being awesome. Walsh is nothing but a loudmouthed, misogynist pundit but he’d clearly like to think that being a white man like George Washington, Albert Einstein and General Patton makes his white penis something special. Guess what, it doesn’t?
Plus of course, his thesis is wrong. The lives of women and people or color are safer and more enjoyable because of the civil rights movement and feminism. While there where whites and men involved in both, the grunt work was done by respectively black Americans and women.
This country wouldn’t exist without white men, true. Nor would it exist without black slaves, who helped build wealth throughout the south as slaves (as well as being a massive economic asset themselves, in the days when people could be property). Nor without women, whose unpaid labor has propped up men’s ability to build, create and work money for as long as this country has been around. Not to mention many brilliant people who were not white men: Lise Meitner (figured out nuclear fission), Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin (co-discoverer of DNA), black surgeon Charles R. Drew (creator of the modern blood bank), Martin Luther King, John Lewis.
And that’s not even getting into how hard white men made it for anyone else to accomplish anything or get credit for it.
So it’s not enough for Walsh to believe white men are awesome — he has to believe nobody else is.
Depressingly he’s not unique.
