UNI

The chief motivating factor of the discourse here is the recent discussion of the issues that lead to te shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. I take no interest in engaging in the polarizing thus fruitless debate of who is to blame, whether it be shooter, mother, guns, etc. Here, in this space, the goal is to inquire upon the essence of our perceptions of masculinity and whiteness. The following is a musing set forth by New York Times opinion blogger and Princeton Assistant Professor, Christy Wampole:

“Young, African-American men are often imagined to be violent on the street, killing one another in gang-related violence or murdering convenience store clerks while trying to empty the cash register. The stereotypical image, even in its wrongheaded reduction of the black man to an inherently violent being, does not leave room for that other kind of murderer, the one who plans and executes a calculated, non-spontaneous large-scale death spree.

The angry white man has usurped the angry black man.

I would argue that maleness and whiteness are commodities in decline. And while those of us who are not male or white have enjoyed some benefits from their decline, the sort of violence and murder that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary will continue to occur if we do not find a way to carry them along with us in our successes rather than leaving them behind.”

To the highlighted notion, I wouldn’t suggest such so surely. The stereotypical image of which Wampole is alluding, though merely a perception, has very real and dangerous manifestations. One need not look too far to the incidents of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Darius Simmons, who were only a few of a great number young men with a similar fate for example. To the notion of color, we sung of freedom and emancipation from Great Britain, yet we never sought – or, more accurately – fought against the very ideas of universal freedom we so adamantly purported. In the 1940′s, we – those who engage and invest in the continuance of the American project – shunned Hitler for his actions of mass genocide with shortsighted dissonance, seldom, if ever,  recognizing that his sentiments and practices where a continuance of a Western idealism very much akin to that from which we derive. Let us look to Ernest Renan’s La Refonne intellectuelle et morale, the influence in this regard from the academic mill:

The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity. With us, the common man is nearly always a declasse nobleman, his heavy hand is better suited to handling the sword than the menial tool. Rather than work, he chooses to fight, that is, he returns to, his first estate. Regere imperio populos, that is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the adventurers who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like those of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and every man will be in his right role. Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race. Reduce this noble race to working in the ergastulum like Negroes and Chinese, and they rebel. In Europe, every rebel is, more or less, a soldier who has missed his calling, a creature made for the heroic life, before whom you are setting a task that is contrary to his race – a poor worker, too good a soldier. But the life at which our workers rebel would make a Chinese or a fellah happy, as they are not military creatures in the least. Let each one do what he is made for, and all will be well.

Further, one could, and should, look to the manifestations of oppression via the avenues of gender compounded with race that often goes either unnoticed or discredited as a valid topic of discussion in the canon of the oppressed (Kimberle Crenshaw brings forth the idea of Intersectionality of race and gender in her landmark study “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race & Gender“, 1989).

Where Wampole and I depart is in the understanding of what should be restored. Wampole, suggests that we must repatriate the White Male into society, keeping in mind the feeling of need as well as the pains of having been excommunicated from the dominant place in society.  We must practice empathy, as they step down from hegemony.

But, let us refocus our lens of empathy. Women, and particularly colored women, have served as a receptacle for the pain that one must seek to avoid in order to actualize and achieve, if possible, the idealized versions of ‘Male’ and ‘Whiteness’. For the black male, there is an escape route due to gender privilege. As for the White woman, there is an escape route due to Racial privilege. It is a dangerous practice to continue deductive reasoning where one is afforded the comfort of denial where “Anywhere but here violence, turbulence, and oppression is acceptable” is the concluding point. The fact of the matter is that violence, at any capacity, whether “here” or “there” affects the human condition in it’s totality. This is true whether the halfhearted engagement – in which the male, and white world tends to practice – says so or not.

The advertisement of the weapon used in the Newtown shooting.

What is important here, and I think Wampole – partially – misses, is that we are trying to forge a new identity, an identity no longer defined solely by white and masculine normative behavior. Whiteness, in the scope of western epistemology, is an identity based in moral erosion having relinquished all forms of responsibility for the humanity of the “others” within a “Self v. Other” dichotomy. Having divested from the responsibility of upholding the humanity of other’s, one has in effect robbed oneself from his or her own humanity. Here is where our problem lies, the moral degeneration fueled by development at the expense of the “other”.

In deconstructing our perceptions, and the perceptions of those who perceive themselves as both white and male, we must also actively seek to build an understanding of and with those who suscribe what it means to be white and male in a non-hegemonic, yet still important and inclusive manner. Yes, maleness and whiteness is on the decline, but we cannot afford to restore it in it’s traditional sense, it has proved costly and degenerative to a holistic human equation.

(Christy Wampole’s Article can be found here: “Guns and the Decline of The Young Man“)

- KL