All thoughts my own, from my unique but limited perspective. Take anything with you that feels true and leave anything that doesn't resonate.
A lot of boys in the US and abroad are finding a community of likeminded white men who like to remember their role in history as mostly or wholly positive. I understand it’s difficult to face the wrongdoings of past ancestors, because it often feels like rejecting a part of oneself, and this is painful, uncomfortable work. But it’s astounding and scary to me to watch so many men tense up at the mention of past injustices of white men. Like this fire in their eyes, and a cunning decision in their cheekbones to restrain the tongue. As I’ve said my piece to a couple such men, I’ve gotten this strange feeling like they had switched off listening to me, and gone blank so as not to hear this poison I’ve decided to direct at them for the purposes of shaming them and to put myself on a pedestal. “He’s on their side now,” they think at me. “I will not be talked out of my superiority. For if history shows us anything, it’s that the world is a better place when white men are in charge.”
And I have been to the imaginary mountaintop from which they think that. I was raised in America and taught history from Floridian textbooks. I mean, worldwide power and control over most other people who they felt were inferior for one reason or another? Which pretty much includes women, refugees, black and brown people, and anyone from another faith or religion outside of their own? Sounds like a good situation for them. I am a white man myself, so humbly, I’d add that I don’t say “them” to separate myself from white men. I say “them” to make a distinction between the white man that sees his place as higher than others (whether acted upon or not, because much of the population appears to resonate silently with this axiom), and the white man who is constantly doing the work required to comprehensively void such mental structures.
I see myself in the second camp. I am not ashamed of my personal family history, and am proud of many of the accomplishments and stories I’ve heard from the bloodlines that flow through me, white or otherwise. I do not see the achievements of my ancestors as unearned. But I know in my heart they were often, inherently, earned on rotten grounds. And how earned is a victory if the game was rigged in your favor? Isn’t a life that can only be won or lost inherently unfair to those who don’t want to play the game at all? We white men have created a gratuitous reality involving the whole of society, in which no one else can succeed. I can’t remember if it was painful to admit this to myself, but I can say after several years of accepting that reality, I feel so much better and so much less defensive. I can be much more honest with others now that I’m honest with myself. And the beautiful thing is that the truth is always messy, so exchanging personal truths with someone different to you in skin tone or ethnic identity is life-affirming, as you start to realize how much you have in common, and how to trust one another in the present, despite the very complicated and prismatic truths of history.
I am the son of two Americans, one of which is from a long line of white Floridians that reaches back to Kentucky and New England over some 10 generations. The other is the product of Swedish and Mexican immigrants back 1 or 2 generations.
This isn’t important for the collective, but it’s important to me. My perspective is unique because of the nuances, just like everyone else. And there’s contradiction in my blood, which I feel daily. I know living in the spaces between truth is not an easy or relaxing life to live, but I welcome the contradiction at my core for its creative potential. One half of me is always at odds with the other half, in this beautiful dance around the singularity. Truth. Or God. This is a process which produces ever-better language for me to use. And visuals when I can muster them, if only I work hard to see clearly and trust myself to be truthful.