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| White dudes |
Dear fellow white dudes,
It’s pretty cool being a white dude, isn’t it?
We’re well represented. Here in the United States (my home country and focus here), the
majority of Senators and Representatives have always been white dudes, not to
mention 44 out of 45 US Presidents. The
majority of actors in leading roles in Hollywood movies are white dudes, as are
most Hollywood directors. Most corporate
CEO’s, military leaders, educational administrators, and so forth are white
dudes.
We white dudes have done some pretty cool stuff. Plato and Aristotle were white dudes,
although nobody realized this until the construction of modern racial
identities in the European Enlightenment, which was also the work of white
dudes (and a few white dudettes). Many
of my favorite science fiction and fantasy authors are white dudes: J. R. R.
Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Iain M. Banks, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc. Some of my best friends are white dudes.
White dudes are far less likely than others to be harassed
or to receive threats of violence in person or online. We are less likely to be murdered by our
romantic partners or by the police. White
dudes who engage in mass murder are framed as troubled loners, but rarely as
terrorists or thugs. We statistically
get paid more for the same work as other people.
We white dudes have a lot of privileges, which as science
fiction author and white dude
John Scalzi has pointed out, is like playing a
video game on the easy setting. We still have to put in the effort to play the
game, but it’s easier for us, especially if we're straight, cisgender, non-disabled, and come from middle to upper class socioeconomic backgrounds.
White
dudes’ greatest privilege is that we can choose to ignore all this and go about
our lives in the invisible safe space of a world made for us.
Man, it’s pretty awesome to be a white dude! But you’d never know it if you listened to a
lot of white dudes these days, which as a white dude myself I find kind of
weird.
