What the hell ever happened to the white American man?

In My Humble Opinion
101

I didn’t until I came here. The problem is many posters don’t grasp that there is a world outside their little microcosm. I feel the same way about women who complain about no good men. There are good people everywhere.

That said, I think astro is talking more about being disappointed with white male leadership more than the average joe - politicians, for example. I could be wrong. There is nothing wrong with this. I think white people do have certain obligations - chief among them being recognition of their privileged position in society and active willingness to tilt the balance toward equity. I can say I’m disappointed in my fellow whiteys who don’t get it. That’s not racist or white supremacist. We should be able to talk about what it’s like to be white. We need to have that discussion.

StuffWhitePeopleLike isn’t just a funny website, it’s also a nudge for us to wake up and realize all the little shit we take for granted as ‘‘normal’’ is culturally embedded. We live in a country dominated by white culture but that culture is so deeply ingrained that we don’t realize it is a culture. And all the little decisions we make are influenced by that culture, our understanding of what is right, without the consideration that there are other perspectives to keep in mind.

StarvingArtist, for example, feels that his people are losing power and perceives that as injustice. It doesn’t appear to occur to you, SA, that you started out way ahead in the game the moment you were born, because you were born into the dominant culture in your society. What you perceive as unfairness might actually be the balance tilting toward equity. You feel excluded because other people are finally getting a chance. It makes sense that you feel that way, but it’s your very perspective, grounded in whiteness, which makes it difficult to tell the difference between discrimination and true equality. That’s what I think, anyway. I know you disagree. But this is a conversation we need to have.

102

Ehh… A noble, stoic in public, tender and loving in private, hard-working, fair, ethically pure sort of white American man?

They’re still around. I married one. :wink:

103

On the contrary, I see white males acting in an almost stereotypically white male role in the present debate. They’re opposed to “progressive taxation to support the polity” because lately the polity has been spending money like Imelda Marcos in a shoe store. In public, Mr. Congressman votes to reduce tax rates. In private, he tells his flaky daughter she needs to pay her own Visa bill for once.

104

There are white men. There are white American men. There is no “white man” or “white American man” in the archetypal sense implied by that phrasing. There are no archetypes. People are people. The problems come in when you try to put yourself in a group and label it with generalized positive attributes with the idea that it distinguishes your group from other groups. “Men” are created by their circumstances, their environments, their opportunities, and their experiences, not by innate differences between them. Among the creatures of the earth, humans vary very little from each other, relatively speaking. Work to crate the kinds of circumstances that will help you, those around you, and everyone else in the world be the best they can be, and stop trying to think of a particular group (epecially one that includes yourself) as superior in any way.

105

In the late sixties the idea took hold on a widespread basis that in order to have a revolution you have to villanize your opponents. Women were no more sinned against prior to that time than men were. Each sex had roles it was expected to fulfill and and to those who had a hard time fulfilling them, life was not fun. But it came to be believed in feminist circles that to make changes it would be necessary to villainize men and portray them as oppressors who happily left for work each day to make lots of money doing little but telling jokes against women and enjoying three-martini lunches, only to come home expecting the little lady to have dinner on the table and the kids ready for bed. The portrayed men as having deliberately set about to make sure they had no money, no possessions, and no life but to serve their “masters”.

The reality is that most men worked at jobs they didn’t like, found them tedious and soul-destroying, and were primarily concerned about their wives spending habits because they were on the hook to pay the bills. They didn’t set this system up; they inherited it. Women were almost always given the kids in a divorce, plus child support based on the husband’s income and not on the child’s needs, plus alimony - essentially a pension awarded women by virtue of having gotten married in the first place and due for the rest of her life unless she married someone else, so men of that time felt every bit as trapped in an unhappy marriage as did women.

The tactic of villainization has now picked up by the liberal crowd in general and is used to portray life in pre-counterculture America as the domain of fat and happy white guys enjoying the good life on the backs of not only women, but black people and brown people and poor people and sick people and anyone else who they want to use to excuse the consequences of what has become of society since that time, and to justify increased tax rates and income redistribution.

All of which leads the Kool-Aid drinkers to think of white American males as “little white guys” deserving of scorn, when the reality is that it’s all bullshit and white guys today are pretty much the same as everybody else, which is exactly like they were before.

106

I live in the Midwest and am none of those things besides the one thing I have no control over.

Pretty narrow minded view.

107

I’d give it all up tomorrow for some rhythm. The ability to dance would be a nice bonus.

108

You just described the life and surroundings I’ve dreamed about. I love my “White American” life. We all better start loving our “White American” life. Don’t be afraid to pursue and defend that principal.

109

http://www.gaic.info/real_people.html My uncle was sent to North Dakota because he came home, changed out of dirty work clothes and went to the store, leaving his ID in the work pants. The neighbors had recently called the police on my family for singing ‘nazi songs’. (i.e. German drinking songs). It was not uncommon for the police to wait outside of known immigrants apartments and pick them up.

On this particular night, they picked him. He was not allowed to head back upstairs for his ID, and his family didn’t know what happened to him for a month.

It is only in the past year that we have been able to find information or references about the American camps taking Germans. So now is my turn to ask you: why?

As for people insisting that Japan was atom bombed because they aren’t white, I opine that they got bombed for a parallel reason that we are at war in the middle east: Pearl Harbor=9/11

110

A lot of people seem to want to attribute to racism what are in fact problems related to culture. We see it today in cries of racism when criticizes the dress and music coming out of the black communtiy. Rap music and sagging pants are not intrinsic to black people as a race obviously, since they are only a fairly recent development, and yet objection to them is almost always considered to be racist.

In the case of Japanese-Americans vs. German-Americans and the way they were treated during the war, it’s mostly a case of difference in culture and assimilation. Japanese culture at the time was and insular and separate from most of the rest of the population, and their customs and ways seemed mysterious. Thus, they came to be regarded as a mysterious and alien group whose loyalties very likely lay with their homeland rather than with the U.S.

German-Americans, on the other hand, were assimilating into the rest of society, learning and speaking the language and taking jobs and adopting lifestyles that were considered typically American.

So on the one hand you had what was considered to be a group of Japanese who were living in America, and on the other you had what were largely considered to be Americans who came from Germany.

This is a distinction with a considerable difference, and what it boils down to is that the Japanese were considered to be untrustworthy and a potential threat, and the Germans didn’t. This feeling of untrustworthiness toward the Japanese was exacerbated further by the nature of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor at the very time that Japanese emisaries were negotiating peace treaties in Washington. This alse created the feeling that the Japanese couldn’t be trusted.

Now, this is not to say the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII was a good thing but it does put lie to the notion that the Japanese were mistreated simply because of the color of their skin.

111

Do you mean all of us, or just the ones who listen to Howard Stern and/or AM talk radio?

112

I don’t get the tantrum reference

113

What he means is that it’s mostly white men who are voting against Democrat political goals, and since those Democrat political goals are so obviously the right thing to do, a tantrum or some other meritless reason is required to explain their opposition. At present “tantrum” is the easiest to go with.

This notion is ridiculous on the face of it however, when you consider the large number of conservative women in American households, the number of blacks and especially Hispanics who hold conservative political views, and the fact that the majority of the people in opposition to liberal politics oppose it because of deeply held philosophical differences in how the government should operate. There has always been a strong opposition to liberal politics in this country going back all the way to the turn of the twentieth century. This is why they have to fight tooth and nail to get anything done, and why whenever they do get anything done it’s the result of decades of strenuous effort.

The notion is also based upon the fact that in some areas - race, feminism, income redistribution, etc. - there may be a slight difference in percentage of support that gives liberalism the advantage, and they try to behave that this slight statistical advantage means that everyone supports them when it comes to those particular issues. In other words, if say 60% of women favor government health care, and 80% of men oppose it on the philosophical grounds that the government has no business managing our health care, liberals will claim that white men are having a tantrum or being sexist in order to deny health care to women.

This kind of behavior goes on in virtually every area of American political discourse. The default assumption in each area is that the liberal solution is so clearly the correct one that any opposition to it has to have something illegitimate at its core, and currently the left has chosen to pretend that everyone is in favor of its policies except white men, who are having a tantrum because things aren’t going their way.

Cynicism is at work in all this too. If, as a liberal, you can convince women, black people, Hispanics, and the sick and poor that conservative white men are actively seeking to block them from getting what is rightfully theirs, then you can successfully manipulate the way they vote and get them to vote in your favor.

So on the one hand we have some people on the left who are so absolutely convinced of the correctness of their thinking that there can be no legitimate way to oppose it, and on the other we have we have a cynical and manipulative attempt to influence the way people vote. And whichever hand we are on at any particular moment has nothing to do with the reality of why conservatives - men, women, blacks and Hispanics - favor certain policies and vote the way they do.

114

I don’t know any man who wears a 3 piece suit who isn’t a senior-senior citizen or a hopelessly vain eccentric. (Hint: Piece No. 3 is the vest. Can’t believe people still think it’s there.)

115

I don’t know many men who routinely go about in suits at all, but for those who do, I didn’t think a vest was that old fashioned. It’s a shame if that’s true, because suitably designed vest pockets would be great for small electronic gadgets. Using an inner jacket coat doesn’t always work out that great; it could fall out if you take the jacket off and carry it over your arm.