In season 5’s second episode of Girls, Ray — who you’ll remember as the sardonic, socially awkward coffee shop owner — walks up to a rival café across the road to complain about their their lid policy.
The encounter doesn’t go down well, to say the least, not helped by the fact that Ray mistakenly addresses a gender-fluid barista as “sir”, before catching himself and launching a tentative: “Female?”
The offended barista then starts calling Ray “white man”, yelling the word in his face repeatedly until he decides to leave.
“White man. I think you need to go white man.” “White man, white man, WHITE MAN.”
It’s a bizarre scene that borders on the grotesque — yet it strikes a nerve. The purported irony, perhaps, is that while we’re meant to see it as Ray being insensitive towards a gender-fluid person, the barista’s reaction is totally disproportionate to the event: she’s the real crybully here.
This phenomenon — white male bashing — seems to be on the rise. Forty years since the end of the civil rights movement, concepts of race and ethnicity have evolved, our attitudes have shifted: it’s no longer acceptable to make jokes about women, mental ability or fatness. No gay jokes, no black jokes. The only demographic that has escaped this trend — being the only “non-minority” group, and therefore de facto oppressor in Western society — and for whom it’s okay to spit on if you’d like is the straight, able white man.
Nowadays, we see countless examples of white folks (mostly male) being degraded on television and in commercials, or being told to “shut up” in online conversations simply because they’re white. The Daily Show host Trevor Noah has made it its credo: take a social issue, throw in a couple of knowing jabs at racial clichés, finish on a joke about white people. The whole thing often comes across as deliberate race-baiting. Recently, he even managed to take a story about Google’s robotics division and shoehorn the words “fuck white people, imma right?”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of humor.
What’s problematic, however, is when these types of comments turn into gratuitous and resentful gibes. No one wants to be turned into an evil boogeyman, or told to deal with the burden of a “white privilege” they didn’t earn — especially when that notion is unknowingly superimposed on you. To use social justice terms, the only thing that this does is essentialize and alienate an entire demographic to the point of harming the very cause of progress.
Indeed, the liberal penchant for fostering resentment and guilt — a byproduct of post colonial thinking — is exactly what propels movements like the alt right to the fore. People who are unfairly pigeonholed easily turn into reactionaries.
I hate my class everyone's so racist in here #fuckwhitepeople trend it guys !#fuckwhitepeople
— ivan (@IvanFelix96) April 7, 2016
I do love when people talk about me like I'm the help as I walk through an office. #fuckwhitepeople
— kyle¯_(ツ)_/¯ (@kyletothejones) March 23, 2016
Black people CANT be racist we are already suppressed so we can't benefit from it #fuckwhitepeople https://t.co/aV0RLPUKvi
— babyface (@babyface_mike) February 8, 2016
Similarly, all too often, well-intentioned white men who support progressive causes are unjustly excluded from conversations about racism. But telling these folks they can’t weigh in this issue (because they have no way of understanding what it feels like to be black, brown, female, bot, *insert category* ) or on the excesses of PC culture feels counterproductive at best and divisive at worst.
This unproductive defensiveness eliminates the possibility for democratic debate and precludes all the party involved from having an honest conversation about where privilege resides in their our own lives, or from engaging with the experiences of others.
Social injustice is an emotional issue, which often calls for anger, rage even. There are plenty of ignorant and close-minded douchebags to be enraged at out there.
But spreading “white man guilt” with impunity is not an answer. If the bashing keeps getting worse and if politics of “difference” remain the norms, marginalized groups and the social activists supporting them might never be able to transcend their public standing as victims and do away with the very identities at the origin of their marginalization.