01-Aug-2006
White Males
[Commencement address given to the graduating class of St. Bleufard’s High School, Quillifarkeag, Maine, on June 11, 2006]
This is probably going to piss some of you off.
I suppose some of you might be wondering what it’s like being a white male these days, especially if you’re not one. It has been said you think us endowed with privilege and access to all the world’s choice goodies.
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Some of you, of course, don’t wonder at all because you’ve long since demonized us or created other images. But I thought I would talk about us today since it is, to me, an important group, and the world these days seems obsessed with its groups.
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What is often conjured up initially are boys – NASCAR boys, good ol’ boys, beer drinking boys, plumbers, electricians, and all those joes with a dusty cellphone hanging from a belt. Next, however, come the men, the suits, as I like to say, nearly all of whom look like Dick Cheney. Some wear judge’s robes or carry sticks used to beat women who want to play football or have abortions. Others make long preachments on family values such as women’s God-given ability to iron clothes.
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Within the arts we’ve even become a category, often preceded by the word ‘dead.’
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As you can tell, I’m setting up this peer group to look a little squirrelly. Actually, having been part of it all my life, it is a little squirrelly.
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It has been said that we run things, that we’ve always run things. It has been said that we set the rules, hold on to the money, parse out the political power, and determine what is and is not to be valued.
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We’ve been in charge too long goes the complaint. Our values have perverted the world scene and caused wars, economic upheavals, regime changes, oppression, and probably disease.
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I’m not sure what I’ve been in charge of, but, whatever it is, it hasn’t been all that long. I also don’t look like Dick Cheney, nor do I have a cellphone.
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Truthfully, our clout is more negative than positive. True enough, no one tells us that our skin is the wrong color, that our clothes are too revealing, that we should be home with the kids, that we should go back where we came from, that we can’t hold a particular office or run a particular company.
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Being told such things would piss us off, no question there. But what does happen to us doesn’t follow from what doesn’t happen to us. We’re not given anything. There is no road map to success that reads “For White Males Only,” no membership card, no key to the White Male Restroom. Generally, we think we’ve worked pretty hard to get whatever we have. We tend to think we sacrifice a lot and that, for the most part, life seems to be harder than it ought to be.
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Naturally, I wouldn’t expect you to believe that.
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Honestly, being a white male feels a lot like being white milk. We dominate the cooler but there are still lots of choices.
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Still, we have the ability and more than a willingness to look you in the eye and say, If you want it, you got it.
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I wonder if it wouldn’t be good to have some laws that forbid white males from doing much of anything. They could be temporary laws so that we don’t institutionalize the sort of thing that gave us slavery, high heels, and Indian reservations. They would, however, be laws that gave us all the menial jobs but kept us out of the middle-management suites, the executive suites, public office, music, teaching, the arts, medicine, airplane-piloting, religion, pornography, and communications.
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In other words, someone else can do the PowerPoint presentations from now on, but we’ll be glad to set up the equipment.
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Hotel rooms? We can clean those. Time to toss those foreign maids out of there and into the university system (already we’re a minority there but our absence will still free up a lot of spaces and the new administrators will be desperate to fill those spaces).
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Landscaping? Field work? Chicken gutting? Bring it on, though please don’t say anything like, “See what it feels like to be frustrated, deadended, bullied, overworked, trapped, desperate, cowed, threatened, demeaned, humiliated, maligned, debased, shamed, discouraged, dispirited, or hamstrung?”
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We know all about those things. We’ve lived them.
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Naturally, I wouldn’t expect you to believe that.
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There probably wouldn’t be a Masters golf tournament anymore. I don’t think renaming it to the Mistress tournament would be good. Most major sports would remain pretty much the way they are, with Tiger Woods beginning to feel quite lonely and men’s tennis all but disappearing. NASCAR would be gone along with Friday night wrestling.
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Catholicism would take a big hit, although I think it would be fun to get jiggy with a bunch of priests finally freed of the burden of offering salvation to anyone with the proper grovel. Native American, black, Asian, Hispanic, and female priests, however, might be able to offer a whole new take on what salvation means. I do think, though, that the Pope and the college of cardinals would be pretty pissed.
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Someday they’ll talk about us sitting in our La-Z-Boys and looking up at the cinder ceiling. I don’t know what that means yet, but it sounds loaded with potential.
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By the way, some of you are bothered by these comments not because you think me outrageously right or wrong, but simply because I make them, that as a white male I’m not content simply to step aside and yield the floor.
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Maybe you’re annoyed because you think of me as a flawed group. But I’ve never been a group so now what?
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One of the things we do know – that you think we don’t know – is that it will all go on without us. We know that.
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G.K. Wuori © 2006
Photoillustration by the author
