What's In it for White Men?

I have been thinking a lot about how the emotional shackles of white masculinity relate to the low numbers of white men showing up for interpersonal anti-oppression work. In a previous post, I reflected on the gender dynamics that play out when men show up in groups that are working on unlearning whiteness. I observed that while women usually do most of the social and emotional labor in these groups, they are also able to get their needs met in terms of working on their conditioning. I speculated about why these spaces might not feel welcoming to white men, but I only touched on what it would mean to do anti-oppression work in a way that truly meets our needs.

“Hey,” you may be thinking (or yelling at the screen), “anti-oppression work isn’t about white men’s needs! It’s about dismantling white male supremacy.” I get that. And, I feel strongly that dismissing white men’s needs is ultimately counterproductive. I believe that no one does this work, over the long haul, unless they’re getting something out of it. I like to tell myself I’m motivated solely by my selfless commitment to social justice. But I know that’s not entirely true, and believing it is dangerous. If I’m not able to connect to how anti-oppression work contributes to my own liberation, I could end up operating out of guilt, and a sense of obligation to help the oppressed. White savior complex, however, is not liberating for anyone.

Last night, I went to a gathering of my white UNtraining friends to bid farewell to a white cishet man who has to leave the Bay Area. He and I shared a tender moment of sadness about his impending departure and mutual appreciation for the ways we’ve been able to support each other as men. I was intensely aware of how rarely I experience that kind of trust and vulnerability with other men (besides my spouse). It was a poignant reminder of the spiritual and psychological price we pay as white men for our involvement with these systems.

I want to be as clear as I can that I am not rehearsing the “oppressed white male” narrative. It is beyond dispute that white men still control all the major social institutions and, as a group, wield disproportionate political power. Not only that, we receive compassion denied to others and get treated with sympathy when we rape or commit mass murder or ruin the country. But none of this alters the reality that many of us experience loneliness because our social conditioning makes it difficult to sustain same-gender friendships. The harried pace of modern life is a factor, but as Mark Greene argues, the source of our loneliness goes to the core of modern masculinity.

As young boys, we’re trained to avoid showing physical or emotional affection with other boys and never, ever to express vulnerable emotions. We’re conditioned to experience relationships as contests for dominance or as means to an end, but rarely as ends in themselves. Authentic connections, however, require emotional safety. I don’t feel particularly safe with most straight white men, and several men have told me they feel similarly. No wonder we experience loneliness!

Male training not only sets us up for emotional isolation, it also instills in us a disconnected, instrumental mindset that prepares us well for colluding with systems of oppression. Paul Kivel has given a name to the narrow and rigid set of attitudes and behaviors that define manhood in opposition to ostensibly feminine traits such as empathy and emotional connection: the act like a man box. This construct not only discourages men from living full emotional lives, it encourages racism, misogyny, and other forms of dominance and violence. This is one of the reasons I believe that healing ourselves and dismantling oppressive systems are not separate projects.

The good news is we have already begun a deep conversation about the culture of hegemonic masculinity and its harmfulness to men. Contrary to what some conservatives argue, this conversation is not a blanket smear of masculinity and men. Their reaction does have a parallel, though, in the way white folks often react to having our whiteness named. In both instances, the group in question has long enjoyed the privilege of being seen as just normal, generic individuals, unmarked by “difference.” This is a hard privilege to give up. I admit that I feel myself flinch every time I’m reminded that my white male identity shapes how I view the world.

The unmarked individualism of white masculinity also allows us to blame harmful attitudes and actions on isolated bad apples. This absolves us from responsibility for, or even awareness of, the ways that whiteness and masculinity create the social conditions and worldviews that reinforce the racial and gender hierarchies we benefit from.

If white men are to heal ourselves and participate in transforming society, we must begin to take responsibility for ourselves, personally and collectively. For me, personal responsibility begins with taking responsibility for my own feelings. Being stoic is great when changing a flat tire in a blizzard, but if I’m unable or unwilling to express vulnerable feelings, I’ll probably end up feeling isolated. Personal responsibility also means being aware of how I cause harm, even unintentionally: by talking down to women or people of color, or talking over them, or expecting them to take care of my ego, for example. It’s difficult to be aware of my impact on others if I’m disconnected from my own feelings.

Collective responsibility might be harder to wrap one’s mind. For one thing, masculine identity entails a basic ambivalence. Though we expect to be seen as unmarked individuals, we also want to be seen as men. For the latter identity to be positive, however, we have to take responsibility collectively for what manhood means. This doesn’t mean we have to be accountable for every bad act of every individual man. It does mean recognizing how we are complicit (actively or passively) in celebrating male violence and domination or punishing those who venture outside the “act like a man box.”

Collectively, we need to replace the act like a man box with an act like a human box. In the latter, we will give one another the space and support to be our full selves. We will call each other on our sexism and racism and “locker room talk.” We will celebrate the strength of character that it takes to tell the truth about ourselves, even when we’re afraid or confused or just sad. And, of course, we will reject any impulse, external or internal, to construe our human feelings, or the sharing of them, as somehow weak or unmanly.

I ended my previous article by arguing that, as white men, we need our own spaces to work on our social conditioning. I want to reiterate that conclusion here. To liberate ourselves from the emotional shackles of our conditioning, we need to cultivate trusting, emotionally vulnerable connections as men. If this sounds as scary and unthinkable to you as it does to me, that’s because our distrust and fear of each other is at the very foundation of white masculinity. And it is why we must begin our work with each other. Our liberation and other unthinkable possibilities await.

Whiteness and Corporate Social Responsibility in China

There's been a good deal of discussion in the corporate media lately about the harsh and often unsafe working conditions in Chinese factories. It turns out that the folks who assemble those shiny gadgets that dominate the American consumer landscape - the smart phones, tablets, laptops, and such - lead less than shiny lives. They routinely work six day weeks, ten to twelve hour days, and spend much of that time standing or sitting on backless stools. They are sometimes forced to work double shifts or given corporal punishment for minor infractions. And they live in overcrowded dorm rooms, with as many as twenty people sharing three rooms.

A recent episode of PRI's This American Life featured monologist Mike Daisy describing some extremely disturbing things he learned from talking directly to Chinese factories workers about their treatment. A few of weeks later, as part of their iEconomy series, the New York Times published an exposé detailing similar safety problems and labor abuses. Although the fact that most electronics products are manufactured in China by exploited workers could not have been a big surprise to anyone who's been paying attention, this story received a flood of attention. The reason for this, I'm guessing, has a great deal to do with what these factories were making, for these were not just any factories. These were the factories where the Apple Ipad is assembled.

Apple's most brilliantly realized product may in fact be its brand image. It is seen as different from other companies, as holding itself to a higher standard, as somehow embodying antiestablishment, countercultural values. These stories, however, threaten to cast the company as just another corporate miscreant, willing to think differently about product innovation maybe, but sticking with tradition when it comes to labor exploitation. This contradiction creates a sort of cognitive dissonance for many Apple fans, engendering the sort of moral shock that animates Mike Daisy's This American Life story.

The ensuing conversation has, predictably, taken shape as a debate about corporate social responsibility and whether Apple is ultimately good or bad for Chinese workers. Critics of Apple, like Mike Daisy, point to the harsh working conditions in the factories and the meagerness of Apple's efforts to improve them, especially compared to the resources they put into ensuring product quality and brand image. According to these critics, Apple has a responsibility to ensure that working conditions among it suppliers meet internationally accepted standards. Their position is not really that Apple is bad for workers, just that they are not nearly as good as they ought to be.

Meanwhile, some supporters of the status quo argue that Apple is good for Chinese workers because, they claim, what China is going through is a necessary and inevitable phase of industrial development. These commentators suggest that the sweatshop phase of development is itself beneficial because it lifts people out of poverty, gives them an alternative to village life, and improves the status of women. They even suggest that working conditions are bound to improve, as employers are forced to compete for workers. The critics reject, meanwhile, the notion that brutal exploitation is necessary or inevitable and insist that everyone, everywhere, is entitled to the basic protections that workers in developed countries take for granted. 

While these debates tend to be focused on how workers are treated and the degree to which corporations should be held responsible for working conditions in their supply chains, one obvious issue rarely comes up in the corporate media. That is the question of workers' ability to determine their own working conditions through collective bargaining. Although it occasionally merits a passing mention, as just one right among others, collective bargaining is rarely acknowledged as the fundamental right that made all the others possible.

Organized labor has always been the only effective counterbalance to the power of corporations. Perhaps this is one of the reasons labor history is unfailingly marginalized by the corporate media. At the same time, of course, our collective memory is being steadily degraded by corporate funded think tanks constantly working to turn the labor movement into a historical footnote. The fact remains, however, that the labor protections taken for granted in developed countries did not originate from corporate good will or from a competition for workers. And they certainly did not develop out of some deterministic progression to the next stage of social evolution (an ironically Marxist notion for a capitalist to hold). They were hard won through a difficult and often bloody struggle by workers to organize and make demands.

There is another subtle but insidious factor helping out in the effort to downplay the significance of organized labor for the Chinese workers' struggle. That factor is racism, which should come as no surprise, since labor control is the original reason for racism. Consider the way in which the issue is typically framed. As I said, rather than discussing the reasons why workers' are denied the right genuinely to affect their own circumstances, most critics focus on the responsibility of corporations and U.S. consumers to insist on better treatment. When we cast the labor rights debate as a debate about corporate and consumer social responsibility, Chinese workers end up in the role of helpless victims.

This tendency to see the predicament of Chinese workers as something that companies like Apple or their customers can solve by insisting on improved working conditions is simply another instance of white savior complex. This attitude, like its colonial antecedent white man's burden, is a form of paternalism rooted in a tendency to view colonial others as somehow less than fully human. The sine-qua-non of the white supremacist imagination is that only white people are seen as individuals who exist for their own sake, and possess their own intentions, aspirations, and dignity. The rights of workers to organize may be getting short shrift in this debate, in part, because of a difficulty among white liberals to imagine Chinese workers' capacity to determine for themselves their own best interests.  

Well meaning white liberals cannot advance the cause of human liberation as long as we imagine that we have a special responsibility to intervene in the suffering of poor victims in far off places. The problem is not only that this strategy is ineffective; more often than not, it reinforces the very structures of oppression that are the true source of the suffering. The emphasis on corporate social responsibility, for example, accepts and even endorses the unchecked power of the corporation. These white savior strategies thus distract attention from the deeper structural issue. By concentrating on ostensibly bad actors, we are able to avoid looking at our own complicity in the neocolonial, neoliberal institutions of global capitalism, the very existence of which depends on an unending supply of exploitable labor.   

 Barry Deutsch / CC BY 3.0