White Boy

I am the sister of six brothers, the daughter of a man, the mother of two sons, the granddaughter of two men and the wife of a man; they were all of them white boys once upon a time. They were variously living in a trailer with a single mom, playing Pop Warner football, immigrating from a country destroyed by hyper-inflation and war - or descendant from those fleeing a country starving from potato blight, smoking too much pot, tending goats, ceasing to drink alcohol, becoming a hockey team captain, excelling in school, dropping out of school, punching each other, mowing many lawns, fathering in exceptional and loving ways - more often than not, finding some spectacular women, finding some not so spectacular women, losing a mother at a young age, at last finding solace in other male friends, going mad, crying as though their hearts would break. None of them, insofar as I know and I don’t know everything about all of them, disrespected women, or harmed gay people, or were (“consciously”) racist. They did not seek empire, they were not colonialists, they did not appear to do so much better than women in similar jobs with respect to pay - many of them ran their own businesses: house painter, therapist, dentist, trash hauler, consultant. Coming up as I did, ceasing to shave my college shins and armpits, during waves of feminism, deconstruction of All Canonical Text by men who were once white boys - which is most of canonical text, civil rights, anti-colonialism and apartheid, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism - “Vive la Résistance!” - was always to be found the common theme, the reason for it all, the fulcrum of evil: the White Boy. I must ask this question now - does power stem from the white boy or did the white boy stem from power? How much of it does he still have? And how many of him really do have it?

Me?

In a state with a lesbian Governor, I can say that my observations about the promise of “women leadership offering peace and collaboration” is not necessarily borne out in practice. People have been marginalized by the white boy’s power, but there are yet innumerable examples of others exemplifying “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Power does not discriminate by gender, race, or sexuality. In 2019 I had a good chuckle when it was reported that the CEOs of four of the five largest U.S. defense contractors were women. Score one for feminism! This on the heels of the weeping about the loss of a woman president in 2016 - asserted by every woman I know to simply be about the fact that she was a woman, not that she was a liar, a war hawk. She primarily received her cash from corporate financiers like Goldman Sachs, those who contributed to the sub-prime financial collapse, itself in large part caused by the fantastically irresponsible financial deregulation perpetrated by the Clinton administration - “it’s the economy stupid.”

Meanwhile, what of the white boy in the United States today? Because, it seems in many ways he has been rendered back to a kind of boyhood. He seems to commit suicide rather a lot - as by gender, race and ethnicity white men committed suicide at the highest rate, and certainly by far the most in raw numbers, at nearly 70 percent of deaths by suicide (2022), yet 30% of the population. Increasingly our white sons don’t seem to be reaching for a college degree. In 1995 25% of men - not only white - were equally likely as women, also 25%, to hold college degrees. By 2020, that split skewed towards young women, with 60% of our daughters enrolled in colleges, while only 40% our sons. Back when I was still on the horror that is Facebook, I put that statistic out into that sad little universe and the replies were primarily from white women - “about time,” “and the problem is what?” It reminded me of an interaction I had several years ago, regarding a study of adolescent boys. In this case the reader was delighted to report the result that the author discovered these young men were actually “emotional.” The author was so pleased to realize that while she thought boys didn’t really feel emotions, upon sitting down and talking to them (listening to them) she discovered that they were emotional beings after all! When I criticized her assumptions, I was met with dismay and hurt, because the discussion became about the tender and injured emotions of the AWFL (American White Female Liberal) contradicted, rather than about the substance, the subject, itself - oh right, Boys.

When poor George Floyd died in the appalling manner he did, the sensationalist press that is a hack business and no longer a source of investigative journalism, beat the drum that unarmed black boys are twice, or three times, as likely as unarmed white boys to be shot by police. This statistic, amplified to zeitgeist, became the rallying cry for the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement. Many sought to assuage their grief and anger by posting a sign on their lawn, irrespective of what subsequent research has unearthed about the utter lack of efficacy of so many lawn signs. As it happened, the deaths of unarmed men (as it is primarily men) by police, including black men, had gone down significantly in the previous fifteen years. The total number of unarmed men killed by police in 2018 was 60, as in on average slightly more than one unfortunate man per state. Of course it goes without saying that 60, or even one, is too many. While black people account for about 13 percent of the population, the number of deaths (depending on reported data) exceeded that percentage by about two times - reported at between 25 and 30. It is also, sadly, true that while unarmed black victims were twice as likely to be shot, they were also twice as likely to commit a violent crime; in 2025 53% of violent offenders were white (at 60% of the population) and 25% black (at 13% of the population), and the rest by other races. The history of racism, trauma, epigenetics, family dynamics are large and much explored topics in black America, and I will acknowledge them here - they are critical to understand and must be our collective will to face. However, it does not necessarily follow that the propagandizing by apparatchiks of Critical Race Theory asserting the original sin of white five year olds is necessarily the cure. At last, a further sad little side note is that Tony Timpa, a young and mentally unstable man was suffocated by police neck restraint - 14 minutes in this case - in 2016, but he was white.

Women work and assert their equality to the extent they can - a battle to be sure - but there is still the biological fact that they have a womb and milk in their breasts. According to “The State of American Men 2025” 86% of men and 77% of women continue to define manhood as being a “provider.” The end of the Cold War seems to mean that we no longer discuss capitalism. We don’t talk about corporate malfeasance. We don’t talk about the Whore that is our government. We don’t talk about swallowing the pill of living in obscene economic disparity, bankrupted by health care bills, excluded from higher education, living cheap on toxic food, mental instability and addiction. When adjusted for inflation, the 2024 federal minimum wage in the U.S. was over 40 percent lower than the minimum wage in 1970. In 2023 median net household income was about $80,000 - of which one third on average went to housing, and upwards of $12,000 annual health care cost per resident, inclusive of Medicaid. Of course, we know that white boys earn more than white girls typically, and more than black and brown boys, but not always (Nigerians, and those originating from a certain number of Asian countries come to mind). Economic suffering discriminates by race and gender, but the majority of races and genders suffer economically. Is the white boy welfare recipient in Alabama, the heroin addict in New Hampshire, the suburban insurance adjuster hanging on by his fingernails to make the mortgage and car payments so his wife can work fewer hours but still get the health care and childcare benefits for their three kids - are these men really the problem? Are they so different from the black addict in East Oakland, or the suburban black dad in Atlanta running the Amazon distribution center while his wife, a nurse, faces union strikes for poor pay and unsafe conditions, as she battles every day in the emergency room the detritus of so many addicted and sometimes violent men, broken, those veterans of needless and criminal wars about oil and regime change (so amply supplied by those defense contractors)?

Seventy two percent of all men agree with this statement: “Men can have their reputation destroyed just for speaking their minds these days,” with highest levels of anxiety felt by white men. If I post this, I might receive “boo hoo, poor them” replies from my put upon white sisters. We live in polarization, Manichaeism, good and evil, black and white, the extraordinary reductionism that disables our capacity to communicate, learn, think, speak, where we confirm biases rather than challenge assumptions. This is very related to the collapse of the Anthropocene. Being of the majority doesn’t make you less worthy - as Nixon would remind us. Let’s fight the bad white men, and all of the bad people regardless of race, gender, and sexuality - but let’s not kick every freaking white boy under the bus while we sip our lattes and flick between Netflix channels.