Tag: white males

America’s White Male Problem

Frank Schaeffer

The American political process is being hijacked by a reckless, whining dangerous gang of psychologically damaged white men who are far-right ideologues. I used to be one of them. It’s time to tell the truth about our white male problem.

Not everyone who disagrees with the president is a racist. Not even most people who do are. But the continuous attempt by the white far-right in Congress to shut down the government rather than work with our black president has a lot to do with racism. And lurching from manufactured crisis to crisis isn’t about politics; it’s about pathology. It doesn’t make sense politically to take the blame for risking America’s future — and the Republicans know they will take the blame — so how can we conclude other than something else is going on here?

I’m not talking about the white young male mass murderers we’re afflicted with carrying assault rifles courtesy of the NRA. I’m talking about the white far-right males who hijacked the 112th Congress and are set to destroy the 113th. They have metaphorically done to our country what the killer in Newtown literally did to 20 children, and for the same apparent reason: alienation from the mainstream and retreat to a paranoid delusional fantasy land of — literal — mental impairment.

This has less to do with politics and more to do with the fear and mental illness that grips a willfully ignorant minority of white males. But the mainstream media is talking about everything but the underlying racial, cultural and mental health issues afflicting the white male minority of far-right congressmen holding us all hostage. And the extreme insanity of the right-wing rhetoric over the last four years, from “birther” to Obama-is-a-Muslim etc., conclusively points to something other than politics.

The manufactured crisis we face are not about economics. These self-inflicted wounds are about a few people’s fear of being marginalized.

It’s not considered polite to mention race anymore. But I’m going to mention it anyway. We have a white problem.

I’m a 60-year-old white male father and grandfather. My son served in the Marines. I own a gun. I have handwritten notes from George Bush Sr, Jr, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford both to me and to my late father expressing gratitude for our contributions to the “fight” for traditional values and the Republican “cause.” Been there, done that!

I spent my youth not only as part of the Republican Party but helping to organize the culture wars that have come near to destroying our country. I have worked with the very kind of people who are now the hard-core Republican right. But I have changed my views. I may not be one of them any longer, but I bring an insider’s knowledge to the table.

Overlay a map of the states with the safe gerrymandered congressional districts that sent us the Tea Party Republicans hijacking our country and you’ll find it’s the same map by and large of the former slave states.

The anxiety of losing white long-held power at the expense of minority and marginalized constituencies like women and gays has metastasized into outright hatred of everything and anything President Obama would suggest. Racism has combined with fear.

The fear is of a world in which white (mostly) evangelical Republicans lose power… forever. The country has moved on, but the safe Republican gerrymandered districts have not. These folks are literally living in a fool’s paradise whose time has come and gone.

The white Republican hijackers of our Congress talk about smaller federal government and out-of-control federal spending, states’ rights and the Defense of Marriage Act. These are the defenders of 30-round magazines and personal arsenals, Kevlar-piercing cop-killing bullets, access to unlimited numbers of semiautomatic weapons and lethal handguns carried in public — all in the name of the Second Amendment.

The mainstream media doesn’t have the courage to say it, but the Second Amendment “defense” is nothing to do with today’s loud defense of “gun rights.” The truth of the matter is that there is a subculture of frightened white Republicans who see their own government as a threat. They’ve embraced ignorance and a fact-free life that denies evolution, gay-rights, the demographic changes in America, and above all, the fact that their fellow countrymen have rescinded our entire history of racist bigotry and voted for a black man for president. They just can’t accept this.

The common thread that runs through the Republicans’ “issues” of the day has little to do with those issues per se. What it’s really about is the fear of a future in which traditional white male power structures dissolve.

The true crux of the friction with the White House and the Democrats and indeed with most Americans — including most women living in the South and many Southern men as well — lies in the racial history of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and slavery.

The lies about our federal government — that somehow they are in league with the United Nations, to the point where we can’t even sign an international declaration on the rights of the handicapped! – have nothing to do with the stated objectives. This is like a family argument where an uncle shows up at the dinner table and argues with everyone not because he actually disagrees but because he’s feeling alienated from the family.

Simple palpable hatred drives these people to willful ignorance. The white males insisting on carrying guns (in a country where violent crime is way down!) are scared, not of muggers, but of the fact that their imaginary reality is coming unstuck.

They’re too smart to believe that Fox News spin on reality is reality. Most of these folks are too smart to believe in their evangelical theology either. I’ll bet at heart many are atheists or at least doubters, well aware of the hypocrisies and inanities of evangelical Christianity. But they put on an act of upholding what they believe are the traditional standards we need to live by, which really boils down to little more than white resentment.

These Republicans are from safely gerrymandered districts so they have little to lose and something to gain by “holding the line” against public opinion and the president, even if it continually pushes the country to the brink.

The fact is that many flag-waving American Republican males these days are horribly unpatriotic. Not since the 1960s and the far-left of the Weather Underground have we seen people who hate America so deeply. Some of the Republican “patriots” hate this country so much they joinsecessionist movements and interpret their “right to bear arms” as a right to build personal arsenals against that day when the federal government comes to “take away our freedoms.”

House Republicans like to say that Americans voted for a divided government. They say that “gridlock” is what becomes it. But that’s not true. The Democrats won 50.6% of the votes for president, to 47.8% for the Republicans; 53.6% of the votes for the Senate, to 42.9% for the Republicans.

A state of panic exists because Republican members of Congress demand a state of paralysis. They want to freeze the world as it is because the new world doesn’t have room for white male bigots who base their lives on Bronze Age mythology and white, privileged, Jeffersonian-style institutional racism. Their real ideology has nothing to do with gun rights, fighting against abortion or reducing the size of the federal deficit, but has everything to do with their own personal psychological turmoil.

These people are literally ill with fear. And their world is turning lopsided. There is a black man in the White House and he’s winning, and worst of all he’s self-evidently smarter than they are. He’s not even angry!

It is time for the mainstream media to stop playing the Republican extremists’ game. Let’s talk about racism and white Southern males who can’t get with the program. Let’s talk about what’s really going on with gun rights, which has nothing to do with hunting or home protection or even the Second Amendment, but has everything to do with the delusional paranoia of people who really believe the world is out to get them because it’s changing.

Let’s talk about the fact that there never was a fiscal cliff, just a dysfunctional Congress hijacked by the white males who turned the Tea Party into their cry of anguish.

The real problem we face is racism, bigotry and willful ignorance in the face of our changing demographics, spiritual beliefs and the challenge that postmodern thought poses to people stuck in Bronze Age thinking. These haters are a minority in the South, but they have  — through gerrymandering — given the whole South a black eye. The millions of tolerant Southern white men, women and all the rest of us wherever we’re from need to rise up and condemn this charade.

The real problem we face is not economics or gun ownership or what happens to Planned Parenthood, but how we can reintegrate a few hurting marginalized white males in Congress and their most ardent delusional supporters into a better future while stopping them from using self-created political stalemate to burn down the house we all share.

Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

You can’t have your banana and eat it

“In his ‘Wrath of dethroned white males’ (see underneath), Professor Malegapuru Makgoba has dared to offer a biological explanation for the power structure that prevails in the new South Africa. Makgoba is perhaps the leading theoretical Africanist in our country today. I am sorry, therefore, to bother him with Eurocentric logic, but his argument represents a tautology,” writes Dan Roodt.

In his “Wrath of dethroned white males” Professor Malegapuru Makgoba has dared to offer a biological explanation for the power structure that prevails in the new South Africa. According to him, the white male has been “dethroned” and should now learn to adapt to a subservient, even submissive, role within our society.

Until now, Social Darwinism or the model of society as a competition for resources where the fittest will survive and prosper, has often been associated with notions of European superiority. After all, Europeans from a minute area in north-western Europe managed to get on to little sailing boats to colonise and rule the greater part of the Earth for a few hundred years. Britain is said to have conquered 100-million people in the Indian sub-continent with 800 soldiers and 2 000 Indian auxiliaries.

Makgoba’s view of African male dominance therefore represents a novel departure from a previously Eurocentric idea. However, he is not the first South African to take an interest in biological explanations for human behaviour or politics. Two of his predecessors would be Eugene Marais and Jan Smuts.

Marais was keen on the study of primates, especially baboons, and wrote two books about them, The Soul of the Ape and Burgers van die Berge. The great Afrikaner physician, journalist, poet and intellectual stressed the similarity between human and baboon behaviour, including an occurrence where he observed human boys and young baboons playing together, making clay figures and imitating one another.

This extraordinary incident is recounted in Burgers van die Berge. It fits in with Makgoba’s view that imitation and “aping” are normal features of both human and baboon societies. Nowhere would Marais, however, advance the notion that imitation was solely linked to hierarchy and dominance.

Makgoba is perhaps the leading theoretical Africanist in our country today. I am sorry, therefore, to bother him with Eurocentric logic, but his argument represents a tautology. Because black males are in power, he deduces that they are both dominant and “fitter” than white males. However, it could be that they are dominant for reasons other than their fitness.

Not so long ago, Mathatha Tsedu, the then editor of the Sunday Times, caused quite a ripple when he wrote in his column on July 13 2003 that black men sometimes display a lack of prowess. He quoted an anonymous Cabinet member who had told him: “When you come from where we come from and you then have to realise that if you want something done quickly you have to rely on whites, it is really debilitating. You bleed internally, but our very own comrades do not work. There is generally no work ethic.”

Of course, there could be a debate about what attributes an alpha male should have in human society. Should he be intelligent, physically strong or both? Should he be a good manager, highly numerate and literate, disciplined and with a good work ethic? Or are these but the traits of a tame white baboon and are universal criteria for primate success such as aggression, reproductive prowess and dominant behaviour more important?

Makgoba’s assessment leans toward the latter interpretation. However, I do not think that the same conditions of Darwinian survival pertain in the human world as opposed to the animal world. Human beings display altruistic behaviour uncommon in many species so that they would not necessarily subjugate the weaker members of their society as happens in a primate hierarchy.

Take the nuclear project at Pelindaba that existed under the previous government, for example. A handful of white Afrikaner males produced six nuclear bombs, deadly enough to kill millions of people in one fell swoop. In a straight Darwinian contest, they should have used that power to eliminate their black male rivals forever, thereby ensuring their own dominance within Makgoba’s scheme of rivalry between white and black males. Yet not only did they refrain from using the bombs, but they handed over power to the black males and peacefully dismantled their own lethal weapons.

Biologically speaking, such behaviour is absurd. No male baboon would be caught dead playing into the hands of his rival. Yet this is precisely what we have seen in South Africa.

At another level, however, one could argue that a form of social Darwinism is still operative at every level in a capitalist society where individuals and companies are selected for fitness through economic competition. This leads to a further contradiction in Makgoba’s argument, for while exalting black male fitness over white male weakness, he insists on affirmative action and black economic empowerment.

Because of racial-preference measures in our society, Darwinian competition, even at the more civilised economic level — as opposed to brute contests with bared teeth and flailing limbs — is flawed.

Either black males such as Makgoba will have to discard racial preference so that the real Darwinian contest may begin, or they will have to continue invoking sympathy for the poor, downtrodden black male having been disadvantaged by centuries of colonial oppression and racism. In other words, they will have to choose between Darwinism and altruism.

As they would say in the baboon world: you can’t have your banana and eat it.

Originally published in the Mail & Guardian on 1 April 2005

Wrath of dethroned white males

by Malegapuru Makgoba
In the primate family, to which humankind belongs, there are certain heritage features which display “clear dominance relationships among members, and the proclivity to imitate”, hence such terms as “aping and monkey business”. Alienated. Quarrelsome. Spoilers. Certain white males exhibit all the symptoms of the dethroned male baboon.

A critical factor of human development and leadership is “our primate heritage” as defined in the book Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, by Howard Gardner, Harvard University’s distinguished psychologist and professor of education.

In the primate family, to which humankind belongs, there are certain heritage features which display “clear dominance relationships among members, and the proclivity to imitate”, hence such terms as “aping and monkey business”.

These heritage features are most pronounced in males who compete for control of the social cluster, for protection of offspring and possession of the most desirable females.

Baboons or bonobos, for example, are often headed by a dominant male with pretenders to the throne hanging around. The dominant male ensures that progeny are not only his through reproduction, but also that all members of the colony imitate him. He becomes the “gold standard”. Ultimately the dominant male is dethroned by a younger and fitter male, only to repeat another variation cycle of hierarchy, dominance and imitation.

The dethroned male becomes depressed, quarrelsome and a spoiler of the new order until he gets ostracised from the colony to lead a frustrated, lonely and unhappy life. This is our “primate heritage”.

I use this example because baboons are familiar to most South Africans; they are among our closest primate relatives genetically and a totem for some Africans. African people have been referred to as bobbejaan and at times shot and killed by certain white males who apparently “confuse or mistake” us for baboons.

More importantly, I use this example because humankind is reflective and should do better than our primate relatives; also because the dethroned white male in South Africa is playing the same role as dethroned baboon troop leaders do.

The primate practice teaches us that information is not sufficient to bring about change; that change often only occurs when it is enforced on even such a highly sophisticated species as humankind.

A group of dethroned white males called “Die Boeremag” are recently alleged to have been plotting a coup and even entertaining the exciting thought of assembling all Africans on the N1 and then chasing or marching them to Zimbabwe. In their naïve logic, Zimbabwe belongs to Africans and South Africa belongs to whites.

Another group of white males are languishing in a Zimbabwean jail for masterminding a coup in Equatorial Guinea; a group of white male farmers have emigrated to Nigeria; and some white males are alleged to be causing “instability in the Free State”.

Recently, Justice John Hlophe to his credit raised the issue of racism within the Cape Division of the judiciary as largely ascribed to and associated with white males. Many prominent Africans have complained repeatedly and with increasing frequency over the decade about “alienation and institutionalised racism” within the academic, church, corporate, media, sports and public/government sectors of our country.

As the transformation of our society deepens, like the peeling of an onion, more racist white males are being caught, fingered out and revealed. Surely we must by now recognise and respect that Africans who have been victims of racism over centuries and generations understand better than the perpetrators about what racism is, means and feels.

We must equally accept that 350 years of racist experiences and socialisation cannot be overcome in 10 years of freedom. The request for “reconciliation” and “forgiveness” masquerades as a quest for memory loss. Regrettably, whenever an African raises this issue, the white male response has been “to play the man rather than the ball”.

Racism, a socially constructed phenomenon with no biological basis, is a complex system of symbols and meanings that continues to modify over time as a consequence of both societal structural changes and political struggles. A segment of white males continues to deny the collective body of African experiences and instead wants to monopolise and to dictate the definition and appropriate meaning to racism. If and when they do accept the existence of racism, it is often detached and projected. Lately, many African students at campuses of higher learning are complaining about “racism, alienation and social exclusion”. The main culprits are the younger generation of white males imitating their elders.

Similar symptoms of the dethroned are evident in the caustic, negative terms in which the debate about black economic empowerment is framed; in the ways in which black executives are vilified; and in the way in which employment equity is always viewed through the prism of its impact on the longevity and well-being of the (dethroned) white male.

The dawn of the new dispensation has retired a segment of previously dominant and ambitious white males prematurely. This segment has lost its power, authority and a sense of purpose in society. Whether intended or unintended, conscious or unconscious, a sector of white males have an adaptation problem.

They have become bitter; but this also has become a serious problem for our society and a major obstacle to our democratic transformation. Some members of this group, which is out of kilter with the mindset of liberated African society, have become spoilers — across a wide range of activities. It has become not only ungrateful but also oblivious to Ubuntu. This group does not seem to understand the word “reconciliation”.

All these take place in the midst of a society making every effort to reconcile its horrible past and to transform itself into a just, equitable and non-racial society. The creation of a non-racist society will emerge to a large extent through the conscious confrontation of the current pervasive racism by all.

It is crucial here to indicate that not all white males display this obnoxious, arrogant, racist behaviour we continue to experience 10 years after liberation. In fact, to the contrary, many white males have made great strides, great sacrifices and significant contributions to this evolving equitable, non-racist and non-sexist South Africa we are creating through our Constitution and our African renaissance vision.

But the group of spoiler white males, just like the male baboon or bonobo, was once a dominant force through colonial and apartheid conquests. Over centuries this group defined that which was civilisation as opposed to that which was barbarism. He defined that which was liberal as opposed to that which was autocratic. Even when he excluded women, blacks and the uneducated classes in society, he still called this liberal philosophy.

He defined culture, morality, ethics and the shape and form of wealth distribution according to the way it suited and advantaged him. He created and bequeathed the world an illiberal, unjust, unequal, racist and sexist society. Over centuries and through dominant enforcement he ensured that his mindset or world view was imitated without question by those he presided over. This dominant white male has had an unparalleled and unrivalled opportunity in which to shape the history and future of the world and humankind according to his image.

But as history and nature would have it, unfortunately the white male in his prime was never able to conquer everyone. The great Arab and Chinese histories and cultures continued to challenge the monolithic culture of the white male. The indestructible and experiential cultures of the Africans remained impervious and alive despite centuries of imperial invasion and concerted efforts to obliterate these.

With the demise of the empires and of Western values, even the stiff upper lips of these white males begun to quiver. This white male feels ostracised from society and is leading “a frustrated, lonely and an unhappy life away from the herd”.

We now have a predominantly African government presiding over an African country and a predominantly African society with dominant African values. This African force will follow our primate heritage of cultural social clusters, dominance and imitation, with modifications made by our Constitution, which respects human dignity, diversity and non-sexism. It will also be influenced by the context of the 21st century, globalisation and the greater mosaic of interdependent cultures.

Africans will transform and reconcile this society by ensuring that the fingerprints of their African culture, value and knowledge systems and notions of social order are embedded in and are the blueprints of a future South African society.

Africans will not transform this country through previously dominant foreign rules, values or cultures. No dominant group ever transforms society through subservience and alien values. This would simply be against our primate heritage. When the English were dominant we were anglicised, when the Afrikaners were dominant we were Europeanised, now that Africans are dominant we must Africanise and not apologise for our Africanness.

The white male should instead be excited by the new prospects of imitating Africans. When we say “Mayibuye iAfrika” we mean it and mean business. Democratic governments are representative of the will, values and aspirations of the majority and not the will and aspirations of a whingeing white male minority.

While Ubuntu will continue to influence our drive for reconciliation, let there be no doubt that sooner or later African dominance and the imitation of most that is African shall permeate all spheres of South African society

This message should be loud and clear just as the writing is on the wall for all to whom South Africa belongs. All modern democratic societies celebrate diversity around a common vision, in our case an African vision. It should therefore become common sense that the white male soon learns to speak, write and spell in an African language; that he, like Johnny Clegg, learns to dance and sing like Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He should learn kwaito, dance like Lebo, dress like Madiba, enjoy eating “smiley and walkies” and attend ‘“lekgotla” and socialise at our taverns.

He must soon accept, value and imitate the things that matter dearly to Africans. The sooner this white male gets out of his denial mode, the sooner he will receive treatment and proper African rehabilitation. Surely, our white male group can and should do better than the baboon or the bonobo.

Malegapuru Makgoba is the vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and writes in his personal capacity

Originally published in the Mail & Guardian on 25 March 2005

FW de Klerk attacked for ‘defending the white man’

A black South African columnist has just published the following article in the London Guardian, blaming whites for blacks’ continuing poverty under a black government.

FW de Klerk: defender of the white man

South Africa is trying to move on from apartheid. It’s a shame its former president is not

by Justice Malala

The last undemocratically elected president of South Africa, the Nobel Peace laureate FW de Klerk, has in recent months been holding forth on the state of the nation. It’s a familiar view: that South Africa is becoming yet another post-colonial country destined to fall into maladministration, corruption, famine and finally war because the white man has lost political power.

In his utterances, it seems, the only thing that can save the nation from this preordained state of affairs is continued protection of white minority privileges and rights. All attempts to discuss a South Africa that is not riven by the terrible inequalities wrought by apartheid are seen, by him, as a threat to these privileges.

We heard elements of this narrative again this week. “The Mandela and Mbeki era of reconciliation is over,” de Klerk warned darkly. “White males are quite unjustly blamed for the continuing triple crisis of unemployment, inequality and poverty.”

He did not ask South Africans to come together and find solutions to these problems. Instead, he asked them to “get [on to the] playing field and become politically active”. The message is clear: they must fight and stop the ruling ANC’s talk of speeding up measures to stem unemployment and poverty.

These utterances come in the wake of De Klerk’s interview on CNN in May when he claimed that black people under apartheid “were not disenfranchised, they voted”. In this he was defending the heinous homeland system, under which Africans were “cleaned out” from “white South Africa” and confined to impoverished “black reserves”.

It increasingly seems that De Klerk cannot change from the person an angry Nelson Mandela identified during the democracy negotiations in 1991: “His weakness is to look at matters from the point of view of the National party and the white minority in this country, not from the point of view of the population of South Africa.”

Though De Klerk chooses to appoint himself defender of the country’s white males, they need very little defending. Almost all of the 20 best-paid directors in Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed companies are white men. This is not to vilify them, but it is a reminder that all of us South Africans need to do something, urgently, about inequality and poverty. After all, just this week the World Bank said South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with the top 10% of the population accounting for 58% of its income and the bottom half less than 8%. “Circumstances at birth are important drivers of inequality in South Africa,” said the bank’s report.

South Africa faces massive problems of unemployment and poverty. The ruling ANC has spectacularly failed the poor after 18 years in power. Under President Zuma things are getting worse: the challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality need a new vision and new leaders. But the De Klerk soundtrack, that South Africa is on the verge of collapse because the white man is allegedly under threat, is tiring and depressing. It does nothing to solve these urgent and collective problems.

De Klerk still believes he is the leader of a threatened white minority. He should learn to think of not just the white males whose survival he so energetically claims to defend, but also of the poor and marginalised who every day stand on our street corners and beg for alms.

That is the complex narrative of a country that has defied stereotypes and had three democratically elected presidents in 18 years; which has avoided racial conflagration; which has given more electricity to more people in the shortest space of time than any other in the world. It is not the narrative of a country whose sole obsession is the survival of a white minority’s privileges.

Original article.

Second revolution against whites must come, says Zuma

Johannesburg – The ANC’s second transition is necessary to overcome the compromises it made in the fight for democracy, President Jacob Zuma said on Tuesday.

“One of the causes of the slow pace to economic freedom is that ahead of [the first democratic election in] 1994… we went through a negotiations process,” Zuma said in Midrand.

“We had to make certain compromises in the national interest, and these were absolutely necessary to make. We had to be cautious about restructuring the economy in order to maintain economic stability and confidence at the time.”

Zuma was opening the policy conference of the ruling African National Congress.

He said the apartheid era’s economic power had remained intact.

“The ownership of the economy is still primarily in the hands of white males, in which it has always been.”

A document on the second transition was one of the ANC’s 13 policy documents which would be discussed during the four-day conference.

Zuma said the second transition would make the country a “true democratic developmental state… which has a number of instruments it can use to facilitate change”.

The first transition was still important because it had ushered in an era of democracy in South Africa.

“The time has come to do something more drastic to accelerate change towards economic transformation and freedom.”

Zuma asked delegates to discuss the notion of a second transition when dealing with the strategy and tactics document.

“It is time to ask questions about the present and future… the last 18 years was the first transition. We are calling for a dramatic shift… to deal with the triple challenge[s] of poverty, unemployment and inequality.”

– SAPA