A few thoughts about unloved and unloveable white supremacist males. The movements that were once derisively called “identity politics”—the civil rights movement extended to include female humans and queer humans—have changed the global conversation about social justice, economic equality, and inclusion in civil rights. The French Revolution produced a global paradigm shift with regard to the middle class. The civil rights movement produced a paradigm shift with regard to people of color. This shift is still contested. The women’s movement and the gay rights movement produced a paradigm shift in rethinking what a human being is. This shift is so far-reaching in its implications about social justice and self-governance, it destabilizes all economic, social, religious, and cultural systems that are now termed “patriarchal,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” and “misogynist.” The majority of Americans voted for a black male president and for a white female candidate for president. They were voting for the paradigm shift. The majority of Americans are being held hostage in an illegal election. No matter how violently white, male, self-defined heterosexual humans fight back to regain supremacy in the cultural and moral conversation, they will fail to change minds. We believe in these values in our bodies and through our experience, and this knowledge can’t be bombed out of us. We can be frightened, jailed, and killed, but none of this will alter the paradigm shift. Female humans are not more peace-loving kinds of humans, but all our lives we have felt and studied how unfair power works. One thing feminists added to the cultural conversation is thinking about the psychodynamics of global politics: that there are unconscious drives as well as economic strategies in policy decisions. The push back of white supremacy and masculinist (militarist) values underlies everything that is happening on the cultural landscape now. The supremacy of capitalism as well, of course, but I think the venom and crazy we are witnessing, the frenzied enjoyment of 45 and his policy makers, the pure enraged tantrum of it all to destroy regulatory programs and abortion rights, attack the arts, education, and everything we think makes life worth living, is driven by a poisonous rage that whiteness and maleness are not safe, not ordained by nature and god, not respected, and not loved.
Laurie – this is great. Thank you for writing and posting these insights. I will share!
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