What are we talking about when we talk about white men?

White men are more likely to engage in violent extremism because of how both whiteness and masculinity are expressed in twenty-first century America. You can find white men elsewhere too, but the vast majority of the research concerns the North American context. Both whiteness and masculinity are the results of historical processes that have imbued biological traits with cultural, social, and psychological meanings. Racism, the belief that races exist and that the colour of your skin reflects deeply-seated characteristics that make you similar to other people with the same pigmentation, developed in its modern form during the seventeenth century as slave traders and slave owners tried to justify their abuse of other human beings.

As Barbara Jeanne Fields argues, racism quickly became an ideology that structured basic human interactions and social structures. It is so deeply engrained in our everyday lives, Thomas C. Holt points out, that we ‘know’ instantly how to interpret certain racial markers just as Nazis knew what it meant when someone had a large nose and curly hair.

Whiteness, just like blackness, is encoded into the symbolic and interpretive systems we use to interpret our lives. And it too has a history. At various times in American history, the Irish, Poles, Italians, and other pale-skinned people were not seen as white, and were excluded from legal and social privileges only available to whites. They won the right to be considered white in the courts, drawing on the sorts of scientific and legal languages that white people found persuasive. Whiteness has given people the right to settle in certain neighbourhoods, to attend certain schools, to eat at particular restaurants, and to carry firearms in public without fear of arrest.

In the past, these privileges were written into law. Today they are reproduced through economic inequalities, segregated neighbourhoods, and personal prejudices. White privilege is so entrenched that even alerting people to the privileges their whiteness brings often evokes hostile reactions, shutting down discussion and preventing reconciliation. As proprietors of such a valuable commodity, whites sometimes feel threatened when their privilege is exposed or if they feel that their communities, which had been premised on the idea that all members benefited from whiteness, might be losing status because too many non-whites were moving into the neighbourhood.

Some – a tiny minority – respond with violence. The beliefs of the violent few, however, rely on a widespread and pervasive ideology of race that has saturated western ways of seeing the world for the past three hundred years.

Print Share Comment Cite Upload Translate Updates

Leave a Reply Cancel reply