Angry White Frail

Comment Magazine Christine Rosen

After Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded more than 500 in Las Vegas in October, many of the headlines made note of his race. “White American men are a bigger domestic terrorism threat than Muslim foreigners,” one Vox headline read. “America has silently accepted the rage of white men,” CNN posted. “Stephen Paddock was an angry white man with a gun,”

magazine noted, denouncing “toxic white male violence.” The Intercept’s headline described “The White Privilege of the ‘Lone Wolf’ Shooter,” and the progressive website Think Progress featured a story with the headline “When we talk about mass shootings, we are talking about white men.” Salon promised to tackle “America’s White Man Problem.”

Even actress and perennial attention-seeker Lena Dunham inserted herself into the news cycle, posting a link to a

article, “White Men Have Committed More Mass Shootings than Any Other Group,” and tweeting: “No way not to politicize this tragedy. It’s about gender & race as well as access to guns. Considering it random is comforting & dangerous.”

This is in stark contrast to the headlines that appeared after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando last year, when American-born Muslim and ISIS sympathizer, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people. “Don’t throw the blame on Muslims for the Pulse Shooting in Orlando,” one HuffPost headline read. “Orlando Gunman Attacks Gay Nightclub,” the

reported, making no mention of the fact that the gunman was Muslim. Even one year later, long after Mateen’s radical Islamic views were common knowledge, the

recalled the attacks in Orlando as an incident of “gun violence.”

It’s not a surprise that the culture pivots quickly to embrace murderous depictions of white men. For years, the Angry White Male has been the left’s favorite culture-war villain. He’s expected to perform a particular role, prompted to denounce his white privilege and “toxic masculinity” early and often, and treated punitively if he dares go off-script. (Remember footage of the crowd of angry students in 2016 who surrounded Yale University professor Nicholas Christakis and screamed expletives at him when he tried to engage them in a conversation about race?)

Male students on college campuses are frequently denounced as potential rapists and told to “check their privilege”; “white supremacist” is now the epithet of choice, deployed by members of the progressive left to manufacture outrage about policies such as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s support of charter schools (even while real and reprehensible acts of white supremacy, such as the white-nationalist march on Charlottesville, Virginia, occur). Today, the unfair dominance of the white male is used to justify everything from toppling statues to replacing the literary canon with “herstory.”

And yet, for such a monolithic and terrifying oppressor, the white male looks surprisingly weak. In many arenas—educational, economic, emotional—he is flailing. For example, women now outnumber men on most college campuses, which, as economist Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, has been true for some time: “The huge gender inequity in higher education for the Class of 2017 is nothing new,” Perry wrote. “Women have earned a majority of U.S. college degrees in every year since 1982 and since then have earned an increasingly larger share of college degrees compared to men in almost every year, so that men have now become the ‘second sex’ in higher education.” Mortality rates for whites—and especially for white males—are rising sharply. A 2015 study by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton outlined how “diseases of despair” such as drinking, suicide, and drug addiction have led to a dramatic increase in mortality rates for middle-aged, white Americans. Writing in the

about the study, Alana Semuels noted that by 2015, non-college-educated white people ages 50 to 54 had a mortality rate “30 percent higher than that of all blacks in that age group.”

As for Angry White Males as perpetrators of violence, even here the facts belie the popular narrative. Although men, on average, are far more violent than women, Daniel Engber at Slate

recently pointed out that “Asians and black Americans are overrepresented among mass shooters by about the same proportion (a bit more than one-fourth) that whites are underrepresented.” Another inconvenient fact often left out of the hot takes about “angry white men” and violence after a mass shooting: the stark reality of race and murder rates. As Engber notes, “Overall murder rates among black Americans are 6.3 times higher than they are for whites, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.…In other words, white Americans may be somewhat underrepresented among mass shooters, but they’re even more underrepresented among all killers.”

The notion of the Angry White Male conveniently overlooks some inconvenient facts about hate crimes as well. The overwhelming victims of race-based hate crimes aren’t black people: They’re Jews. In fact, hate crimes against black people have been declining for the past decade. According to economist Robert Cherry of Brooklyn College, FBI statistics reveal a 60 percent decrease in hate crimes against black people in the past 10 years. (And it is worth asking: If the Las Vegas shooter was motivated by white-male rage, why did he attack a concert featuring country music, a genre heavily favored by white people, during a performance by a white male country singer?)

If our narratives about white men don’t work anymore, why do they persist?

Identity politics must have its villains, which is likely why we have we seen an escalation of the demonization of whiteness just as white men’s power has started to wane. Among the leaders of this race-mongering is James Baldwin wannabe Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose essays and books argue that white racism is an inescapable and pernicious force in American culture. As Thomas Chatterton Williams recently argued in the

, Coates’s efforts have mainstreamed a dangerous notion: “No matter what we might hope, that original sin—white supremacy—explains everything, an all-American

.” The result? “Whiteness and wrongness have become interchangeable—the high ground is now accessible only by way of ‘allyship,’ which is to say silence and total repentance.”

This is why someone like Coates can describe neighborhood gentrification in cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., as “a more pleasing name for white supremacy,” liken it to Jim Crow, and accuse gentrifiers of “exulting in a crime” and yet receive nothing but praise from the white liberal elites who live in those very same gentrified neighborhoods.

The Angry White Male narrative is attractive to the left because it fits a worldview that sees vague “structural forces” and “inequalities” as the source of all of the world’s ills. As Engber argued, after an otherwise thoughtful assessment of violence and race statistics, “structural inequalities related to education, employment, housing, and healthcare, along with de facto segregation and a history of discrimination and bias, create conditions under which black Americans, in particular, are more likely to be both the perpetrators and the victims of this violence…white privilege kills, at least in part, through the reciprocal cost it imposes on to other groups.”

White privilege doesn’t kill. People do. Reducing people to categories (white, male) to explain their actions might be intellectually convenient, but it rarely increases understanding. Demanding that people atone for a “privilege” they might not have experienced—while telling them that they will always bear the taint of a racism they neither feel nor practice—isn’t a path toward reconciliation or racial harmony. And the glorification of black racial identity favored by Coates and his ilk brings us no closer to what multiracial America should be. Both traffic in essentialist notions of identity-based on race.

It is here where a conservative sensibility offers a better approach, one that recognizes the realities of human nature. Such a worldview recognizes the existence of evil, of bad intentions and of bad behavior at the individual level as well as the ways in which bad intentions can multiply via bad choices, bad policies, and bad governments. It argues that acts of violence, such as what occurred in Las Vegas (or Charlottesville, or in other cities throughout our nation’s history) cannot be explained away merely by pointing to vague structural forces or to the color of a person’s skin. That is too convenient. These crimes must be confronted and punished each time as evil acts of individual human beings—people should never be used as pawns in a larger race or gender war. If you want to be “woke,” then wake up to the fact that the Angry White Male is more fiction than reality.