About white men
I’m frustrated by the bellyaching I hear from some white men regarding their “plight” in today’s America. There is this pernicious idea that white men are being marginalized, or somehow being denied a voice in society and politics. This is rubbish, of course—white men still have political and economic power far in excess of their demographic levels.
Take a gander the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans; it is overwhelmingly male, and you’ll have to look closely to spot the few people of color. And of the 27+ million U.S. businesses from the 2012 Survey of Business Owners (the most recent data available, alas), fewer than 10 million firms are owned by women and fewer than 8 million are owned by racial minorities.
The numbers pertaining to political representation are also particularly telling. Depending on your source, the 2018 U.S. population of non-Hispanic whites is roughly three-fifths (60%) of all Americans, but probably closer to 61% or 62%. And given that at least half the population is female, we are looking at (generously) 31% of the U.S. population being white males.
Yet in the current (116th) U.S. Congress, you have only 25 female senators (25% of that chamber, obvs) and 102 female representatives (23% of the lower house). Meanwhile, in state legislatures, women make up about 29% of representatives overall. Only this year (2019) did a state legislature achieve a majority-female representation: Nevada with 52%. Think about that for a moment—America has existed for nearly 250 years and we have just had our first female-dominated legislature, despite women consistently comprising half the country’s population.
For people of color, the percentages are 25% in the U.S. House and only 9% in the U.S. Senate. As the Pew Research Center points out, “Despite [a] growing racial and ethnic diversity, Congress still lags the nation as a whole: the share of nonwhites in the United States is nearly double that of the country’s legislative body (39% vs. 22%).”
Considering both houses of Congress, white men make up about 63%, which is a bit more than double their actual demographic representation—and this even after an election that saw substantial gains in representation for women and people of color.
And lest we forget, there have been 45 U.S. presidents and not a single one of them has been female, while only one has been a person of color.
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Obviously, white men still exercise economic and political power in excess. But are they right in saying their clout is waning? Yes, of course. As the decades go by, America is becoming more ethnically and racially diverse, and those racial minorities, along with the women who have been shut out of the halls of power for so long, are increasingly demanding proportionate seats at the table. So the degree of control wielded by white men is indeed diminishing. But given that white men still possess influence far beyond what their demographics would suggest, why is there such a sense of panic and apocalyptic rhetoric?
One explanation for the hand-wringing is the psychological concept of loss aversion. It’s been demonstrated convincingly that people respond far more viscerally to the idea of losing something than they do to gaining something. (According to research by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, losses are about twice as psychologically powerful as gains!) So it makes sense that white men, having enjoyed dominance for so long, are disturbed by the accelerating diminution of their leverage. Even though white men still exercise power that is nearly twice as potent as their demographic status would merit, the decline in their influence over the last few decades creates a perception of comparative loss.
Perhaps another fear is the idea of minority status. Whites have never known such a status throughout American history, but many projections claim that by 2045, whites will represent less than 50% of the U.S. population, with the trend likely continuing downward. Given that white men have historically not done a very good job of protecting the rights and representation of minorities in our country, maybe they now fear getting the short end of the stick they so often forced on women and people of color. A quote I once saw suggested: “Always devise your rules as if you didn’t know whether you were going to be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.” Many of the rules (written and unwritten) imposed by white men over the decades have been quite beneficial to them but less so to the rest of the population. And now that the wheel is turning, and white men are slowly inching down the pecking order, perhaps they worry that they have no reason to expect better treatment as minorities than what they themselves offered in the past.
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But for now at least, white men continue to exercise a level of power and representation that is frankly undeserved. Have white men really proven themselves the wisest, most intelligent, most insightful members of our citizenry? No, I don’t think any such argument is persuasive. Would anyone really argue that having women and people of color at the Continental Congress in 1776, or the Constitutional Convention in 1787, would have resulted in a less vibrant, less successful United States? Would providing women and minorities easier access to education and greater economic opportunity in the 1800s have hindered the greatness of the American experiment? Rubbish.
To be very clear, this is not to say that white men don’t have anything to offer—they surely do. But there is no reason to assume that what they offer is any more valuable than what women or non-whites bring to the table. While I don’t have much use for people who broadly paint white men as villainous or inept, I do take issue with people who argue that white men are somehow smarter or better suited to lead any society. Yes, a group of white men wrote the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and those are glorious documents that enshrine some excellent ideas, but those same men also permitted slavery in their new nation and gave little thought to the rights of fifty percent of their population, and America has paid for those oversights in the centuries since, and continues to do so.
Recently, I was reading a book by John Maxwell in which he discusses the topic of abundance mindset. He pointed out something interesting, explaining that “Generosity is a word that comes out of the Latin word generosus, meaning of noble birth. It was associated with members of the aristocracy who, by virtue of their privileges and inherited wealth, were expected to give to others of lesser standing than themselves. All of us are in better places than someone else in life. To those people, we should be generous.”
I think white men could stand to be a little more generous. Like the nobles of antiquity, we enjoy positions of power that are usually unearned. Instead of clinging tenaciously (and often aggressively) to our excess power, I think it more appropriate to show a “nobility” of spirit by embracing the ideas of fairness and human equality, and eagerly supporting the realigning of American power along lines that are much more representative of our population. No one is asking white men to surrender their influence beyond its appropriate level; the rest of the country is simply demanding that they get the appropriate share that has so long been denied to them.
White men in America are going to continue to see their dominance fade. The default reaction of many at the moment seems to be a digging in of heels and a frantic attempt to maintain power through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and various other suspect means. But in the long run, I think a much wiser approach is to finally open our eyes to the deeply entrenched inequalities in our country and instead embrace the increase in fair representation and the allotting of proportionate seats at the table. It would behoove white men to consider more carefully the rights and fair treatment of minorities, because as the old saying warns, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”
