What’s our plan for the straight cis white man?
In the worthy quest to platform marginalized people
Note: My imagined audience here are social justice activists who regularly promote deplatforming straight cis white men indefinitely as a representation correction model
Sometimes when I am about to quote someone with a poetic, insightful, articulate, experienced thing to say, I ask myself if they are white and if they are a man and if so, I hesitate. I feel pressured to somehow find a similar sentiment or idea expressed by someone from a less visibly represented identity. I hear in my head the horde of online activists(?), changing the world one condescending fault-finding comment at a time, saying something like,
“The last thing we need is more thoughts from colonizing white men.”
To which I might say something like,
“I agree that straight cis white men take up a lot of space and have been given more opportunities than the rest of us and I do love to see ideas and perspectives from other people, but I really like this thinker and writer for so many reasons. I believe his ideas add so much to the world. I’d love to share these ideas and insights from an Indigenous writer or queer female writer, etc, too but I haven’t found anyone saying this same thing yet.”
To which I hear them reply,
“It sounds like you need to broaden your exposure to more marginalized writers who don’t centre your own white perspective so much.”
To which I might say,
“I do make an effort to do that, certainly. I agree that adds so much value to one’s life and especially my thinking and writing as a white woman. Do you know of anyone I should be paying attention to who is speaking to these ideas in similar ways?”
To which I hear them say,
“I’m not here to do the work for you. It sounds like you have a nice little project for yourself!”
Me: *life changed*
(Quickie little interjection: “I’m not here to do the work for you,” is not activism. If someone is sincerely asking for help—and there are a lot of ways to identify sincerity—failing to put the effort in to help them is not doing more to further us along, and being snarky and superior on the internet is not “work.” So this sounds like someone who doesn’t have the answers but wants to criticize someone else for not having the answers. Probably because someone once criticized them for not having the answers, too, and we just play this game of hot-potato shaming each other.)
I hear this in my head because I’ve had these conversations before. Almost exactly like this.
I will admit that I don’t see broad calls to deplatform all white men. I can’t find examples of prominent people or publications calling for this. I see it in comments on Instagram or hear it in more private spaces. People with small followings where they will get little push-back, perhaps?
I’m hearing it as a rumbling amongst friends and people I’ve dated. Here’s a perfect example:
I once met a very lovely white trans man on Tinder. I loved some of the positions he took. But when I said that one of my favourite writers and thinkers is Peter Block, who wrote Community: The Structure of Belonging, a book that changed me deeply, he immediately rebuffed the reading suggestion because he didn’t read anything from white men anymore. I had insomnia for weeks because the moment an awareness of my consciousness stirred, I would snap awake more excited to think about Peter Block’s book than I was excited to sleep, but there was no curiosity or openness from my Tinder match. A dogmatic rule to uphold a social justice tool prevented him from exposure to a book I think offers wonderful social justice tools.
In trying to create social justice, there are three problems I see with the tool of indefinitely ceasing to platform white men, and the third problem is a doozy.
The first problem:
I believe that good ideas should not be hidden for us not liking the thinkers, their privilege, or the thinkers’ unrelated not-so-good ideas. When we don’t reject a person but we reject some of their ideas while embracing others, they are more likely to consider our feedback to be valid and well-considered and make some adjustments than if we just outright reject them altogether.
What do we care about more: progress or moral purity? A good idea will go farther, especially when picked up by good people, than will the quest for only platforming pure/innocent people because we end up spending so much time arguing about who is pure or innocent enough! And when we think we have consensus that straight cis white men are definitely not pure enough, we dismiss classism and trauma as intersectional axes to acknowledge and honour in those men.
Ideas are not people. They come from people and are therefore inherently biased because our own lived identities narrow our perspectives, but no idea needs to be pure, alighting upon us from some pristine ethereal source of truth and beauty, because even the purest ideas are subject to interpretation and recontextualization anyway and that’s good.
There’s no one true universal god to give us all the answers so we seek holy vessels—the purest, most innocent (marginalized) people—to platform and worship, as though that will facilitate progress and short-circuit conflict. But even if we find holy vessels, the ideas are still debatable and confusing because we don’t align in our access to language, knowledge and lived experiences. You could have the most noncontroversial idea — say, “Loving people is good” — and it could come from the mouth of an actual genius and marginalized 9-month-old innocent baby — and there would be people who would say, “Well, what do we mean by ‘loving’? We have to talk about that. Some people think it’s loving to ignore your own boundaries. Does this statement serve abusers who want to harm without consequence? Sometimes accountability is love. Sometimes love looks different than we think. And… what do we mean by ‘good’? Who morally arbitrates?”
The holiest people could never actually roll us back to structuralism but it seems like that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.
Can we, and do we, prioritize the quality of ideas first, identities second?
Moreover, if white men have had more access to power and place and had more access to other people who also have access to power and place, some of these men might be in a position of wisdom. If they are currently occupying so many positions of power, maybe they are the folks who can best address some of the solutions to fix our problems. Maybe a perspective from the inside of systems is one we don’t want to disregard and if these people are saying, “That solution won’t work because X,” there may not always be an ulterior motive to preserve harmful systems. It might be that there’s a legit problem we can’t understand from outside the system.
The second problem:
Requiring people to know about specific writers and leaders who are intersectional enough is a policing effort, a way to monitor who is righteous enough and a part of our in-group. But privilege of time, money, and social acceptance always figures into access to knowledge.
I think we build our mental libraries and our solutions best over time and through engagement that adds to each other’s awareness. If someone is okay with writing publicly about ideas where people can debate and criticize them and point out where they lack exposure to a writer or a concept, why is that not a valid way for that risk-taker to contribute? Why not simply share your knowledge with them, rather than point out what they’re not doing? Add to things. Not only is this a faster way for them and their followers to learn, the process of engagement—the manner in which we teach and regard each other—has so much value.
I don’t think we should wait to engage with solutions to improve the world until we have only perfect ideas from perfect, non-problematic people. Everyone just waits in a state of wanting until we’re so deprived that the perfect solution we were formulating now doesn’t address the new problems created by waiting? I’ve written elsewhere about how a community event for queer people was dismantled in my city because the organizers heard and accepted what a visiting Indigenous academic said to them: Until an event can cause no harm, it should not exist. But isn’t it better to be able to reduce harm immediately where we can, even if it doesn’t meet everyone’s needs? This sounds like a version of The Trolley Problem.
It’s like the difference between an agile software development versus waterfall. Waterfall project can drag on forever while everyone debates and perfects some feature. Agile project development requires people to tolerate working within constantly unfinished, imperfect work. But it gets shit done. Faster. And arguably better. And not just because of the end result but because of the skills people have to hone through the doing. That’s what we’re missing in our culture: People who can calmly manage confusion, uncertainty, complexity, cognitive dissonance, and conflict.
The third problem:
If there’s no path for achievement for straight white men, if they keep hearing the message that an affirmative action course correction means there are almost none of them at the table (and I know this usually is not what is proposed but it can sound that way), how will they not feel fear, hopelessness, and feelings of worthlessness? And how are they then not vulnerable to being radicalized?
Yes of course radicalization of white men is not the fault of social justice actions or culture. Of course. But check out this 2016 Vox article about how white men are lured into white supremacy. It only takes one valid complaint to frustrate someone during a vulnerable time in their life to desire to locate spaces where someone will validate their feelings.
If you keep hearing from the dominant culture*, “Sit down. Shut up. You take up too much space. You’re just like every other white man,” how do you not internalize that at all and then eventually get angry as a healthy self-protective reaction? Maybe we see so many more angry, aggressive white men in part because they were raised to have autonomy and boundaries, so they are not only overly entitled today (they so are!) but also simply faster at recognizing when they are being mistreated. Boys are raised to be hyper-aware of when someone gon’ done them wrong.
If worthy and wise white men could be rejected by people with growing cultural influence on who is and is not platformed, what does that say about the average bro? What does that say about men with reading disabilities, who are already more likely to wind up in prison?
When there’s no carrot anymore, when there’s no clear way forward, what’s to stop men from ceasing their progress and digging down, going underground? They need somewhere to go with something to do and people to love them, just as we all need.
It’s so easy to not be the one valid complaint they have by simply not being extremist ourselves and by focusing on ideas first, people second.
Even if some of them act like babies, throwing straight cis white men out with the bathwater is a cautionary idiom, not a plan.
* If you’re online, social justice activism and anti-white male rhetoric is the dominant culture in lots of spaces.
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