In Pat Buchanan’s editorial, “The Great White Hope,” the ultra-conservative columnist and former communications director of President Reagan laments the demise of the white man, and specifically the middle-aged and working-class white man, whom he portrays as the victim of our changing times whose plight includes raising rates of suicide, death, and addiction, and stagnant wages.
Buchanan pines for those (very pre-Obama) halcyon days when:
“In the popular culture of the ’40s and ’50s, white men were role models. They were the detectives and cops who ran down gangsters and the heroes who won World War II on the battlefields of Europe and in the islands of the Pacific. They were doctors, journalists, lawyers, architects and clergy…our skilled workers and craftsmen….They were the Founding Fathers…and the statesmen….Lincoln and every president had been a white male. Middle-class white males were the great inventors…[and] the great capitalists….All the great captains of America’s wars were white males.”
I can imagine Buchanan seeing through his nostalgic mind’s eye the television shows from his youth: “Father Knows Best,” “The Donna Reed show,” and “Leave it to Beaver,” all reflecting the mainstream popular image of the American family as white, middle class, with a nice home in the suburbs, and all the family members accepting their assigned raced and gendered scripts.
Take “Father Knows Best,” of which the program’s title is very telling. The Anderson family lived in the generic hometown of Springfield, though we never learn the state. The family profile ran something like this: Betty Anderson – affectionately called “Princess” by her doting parents – was the eldest child who was smart, pretty, fairly emotional, rarely if ever getting into trouble, always looking out for her younger brother and sister.
Bud (James Jr.) Anderson, possessed the “boy-next-door” good looks, was wisecracking, irresponsible, rarely emotional, independent, and frequently worked on his car while wearing a greasy t-shirt.
Cathy the youngest, whom her parents affectionately called “Kitten,” exhibited many emotions, and was a bit of a “tomboy” in an endearing sort of way. She was very dependent on her parents and older siblings for support.
Jim Anderson, the visible head of the family, was very wise, forthright, and moral. He was seen often reading the newspaper over his morning orange juice and eggs cooked by his wife before heading out to his professional career work.
Margaret Anderson, emotional but steady and nurturing, portrayed a housewife who was most often seen tidying up the living room and in the kitchen fixing meals for the family. In the late afternoons, she waited expectantly by the door to share her family’s joys and deflect their trials and sorrows as they returned home from work and school.
Television commercials at the time showed white women ruthlessly attacking scuff marks and disheartening wax buildup on kitchen floors, and ugly smelly toilet-bowl grime. And who can forget that terrifying “ring around the collar.”
White (and only white) men, on the other hand, were pictured in total control, viewed, for example, seated behind the wheel of their “luxurious Oldsmobiles,” with their adoring “better halves” by their side. Or they were “looking smart” and “being smart” after shaving with Gillette, with the obligatory sexy young white woman feeling their smooth strong faces. Or they were tackling one another and working up a real sweat in the (all white) manly sport of football, after which they cooled down with a cold refreshing Budweiser.
Coming back to the present, Pat Buchanan asked and answered his own question: “But what explains the social disaster of white Middle America?”
He first addressed the issue of white people’s stagnant wages even as they (white people) are “at or near full employment.” For this, he laid full blame on the “scores of millions of third-world immigrants [I didn’t realize anyone still uses the term “third world”], here legally and illegally, who depress U.S. wages…” and on former U.S. jobs shipped overseas “under the label of ‘globalization’.”
Well, I can understand how Buchanan and anyone continuing to plunge their heads in the cultural well of ‘40s and ‘50s whitewashed U.S. culture would place blame on immigrants (by implication, of color) and the “third world” for the problems of white people. In the world of “Father Knows Best,” we saw virtually no people of color. By extension, I ask, how many people of color did Buchanan see throughout his youth and continuing today other than the cooks and maids serving white people, the road construction workers and gardeners in white neighborhoods, and the laundry and dry cleaners?
Buchanan also blames the white man’s decline on plunging marriage rates and the increase of white babies born “out of wedlock”:
“Where a wife and children give meaning to a man’s life, and to his labors, single white men are not only being left behind by the new economy, they are becoming alienated from society.”
Well, how dare those pesky women enter the workplace at greater numbers and become financially independent from men? How dare women demand equal pay for equal work, quality health care and child care, paid family leave, and other benefits to support them as workers, with or without children? And how dare those radical homosexuals and bisexuals demanding marriage equality, and those transgender people demanding to use the bathrooms most closely aligned to their gender identities rather than simply what was assigned to them on their birth certificates?
To Mr. Buchanan, this liberal-inspired push for “multiculturalism” has thoroughly skewed traditional racial, cultural, and gender dynamics for the worse by marginalizing white people and white culture (whatever that means).
“The world has been turned upside-down for white children. In our schools the history books have been rewritten and old heroes blotted out, as their statues are taken down and their flags are put away.”
In Buchanan’s estimation, books have even bashed our great heroic icon, Christopher Columbus:
“Children are being taught that America was ‘discovered’ by genocidal white racists, who murdered the native peoples of color, enslaved Africans to do the labor they refused to do, then went out and brutalized and colonized indigenous peoples all over the world.”
Well duh, Mr. Buchanan. What do you find historically inaccurate about this?
Rather than address this question, he attacked measures enacted to improve the chances for success of traditionally minoritized communities:
“Since affirmative action for black Americans began in the 1960s, it has been broadened to encompass women, Hispanics, Native Americans, the handicapped, indeed, almost 70 percent of the nation.”
And because of affirmative action and the increasing emphasis on “diversity,” Buchanan asked whether white working class people “have become the expendables of our multicultural regime? He answered:
“White males, now down to 31 percent of the population, have become the only Americans against whom it is not only permissible, but commendable, to discriminate.”
Due to the current plight of white workers and the anger they feel for all the reason he enumerated, Buchanan explained why Donald Trump has captured the imagination of so many white people. He also used a similar explanation to justify why “militant anti-government groups (read, neo-nationalist fascist groups) attract white males?”
Buchanan, the perennial flame thrower, has always displayed a lack of subtlety in his argumentation. Again, I find it quite apparent that he has stereotyped minoritized peoples for the purpose of scapegoating them for the problems that plague our nation, though, in fact, minoritized people suffer from these problems rather than serving as the cause.
Buchanan and others blame poverty within our communities and low achievement in our schools on the “cultures” of those suffering from the inequities. This “cultural deficit model” detracts from our interrogating and truly addressing the enormous structural inequities within the country. So-called “social issues” become wedges to attract people to a particular candidate or political party. In the final analysis, though, when middle and working class people vote for these candidates, they essentially vote against their own economic self-interests.
This country, even during colonial times, functioned as an affirmative-action-for-white-people nation, though labeled in different terms. Take one example, following WWII, according to historian Karen Brodkin:
“The G. I. Bill of Rights, as The 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act was known, is arguably the most massive affirmative action program in American history….I call it affirmative action because it was aimed at and disproportionately helped male, Euro-origin GIs….[Benefits] were decidedly not extended to African Americans or to women of any race. Theoretically they were available to all veterans; in practice women and black veterans did not get anywhere near their share.”
The resistance from Buchanan and many others, while venomous and blaming in tone, is nonetheless predictable in that these tactics have been deployed time after time against individuals, groups, and communities that have challenged oppression and dominant hegemonic discourses.
I truly hope that Buchanan merely represents the last vestiges of a dying world order that has consistently resisted the equitable distribution of opportunities and resources for all the world’s peoples, for I see minoritized people and our allies joining together in greater numbers than ever before to push the boundaries and unwilling to accept the repressive status quo. Most exciting of all is the fact that people of the younger generations are leading the way.
The Great White Hype: Lamenting the demise of the white man