Navigating the Racism of White Males
A long US history of white men practicing and perfecting the message of diversity-as-threat and identity politics
Let’s get straight to the point: NO ONE plucks the strings of identity politics more than white men — both now and from the earliest days of forming the US nation.
Today, I respond to one white man in particular: Mike Jankanish, a high school teacher and occasional op-ed contributor for The News Tribune, who authored the article “Diversity education is a divisive education.”
First, we should all be very cautious when a white male claims that diversity threatens our national unity. As a white male myself, I can attest — both personally and historically — to this claim of diversity-as-threat being easily and often translated (whether the speaker is conscious of it or not) to: Diversity threatens the privilege and supremacy that the white male has worked so carefully and fastidiously to develop and protect for himself.
The term identity politics is commonly associated with marginalized groups of people, and far too commonly used as a pejorative term when referenced by someone outside the marginalized group. (Read: white people — especially white men.)
It must be said, very early on, that this specific white male, Jankanish, represents little more than the tritest (and archaic) of white male tropes. Nearly every point of his opinion is entirely unsubstantiated, plenty of which are just blatant manipulations of truth — Abraham Lincoln himself would have yanked the misuse of Jankanish’s quotes out of his mouth — or intentionally vague to the point of being entirely innocuous.
Yet, this is precisely the point: This white dude’s words are as antiquated and repetitive as the racism of our US constitution’s authors — but he is still offered a platform for it.
Racism can be a relative term, but the constitution objectively — and very carefully — permitted slavery. More subjectively but easily substantiated, this was done for the sake of economic gains for white people: Rhode Island, the very last state to ratify the constitution, initially protested the protection of slavery under the constitution but buckled under austere pressures…
