Why we’re losing white votes…
Part 1: White Privilege
White privilege is the idea that if you are a straight, white male then you’ve had certain advantages others do not. It is often implied that therefore it easy your entire life and you need to recognize this, never complain, and probably apologize.
A moment of background...I’m a child psychiatrist and I used to work as a prison psychiatrist, so I’ve heard a lot of stories of broken lives. I have personal knowledge of the examples to follow.
For starters, white privilege is a real thing, and straight, white males, on average, have it easier. The problem is the “on average” part of that sentence. Most people are not average, people are individuals. Some of them, like Trump, exist on the far privileged side of that bell curve, and others live on the opposite tail. There are straight, white males who live through horrifying child abuse from an early age, sometimes, in the case of fetal alcohol syndrome, the abuse begins before their birth. Some kids are prostituted to pedophiles by their parents. Yeah, that’s a thing.
So, imagine you meet a straight, white male with fetal alcohol syndrome, abused as a child, removed from his parents by CPS, sent to foster care where he’s abused some more, has behavior problems from the FAS, more behavior problems from the PTSD, he’s dropped out of school and began smoking meth. Now, are you going to tell him how privileged he is?
People have problems, and when you go on about white privilege what you are telling white people is that you don’t care and they should take their problems elsewhere. They have...to the GOP.
Part 2: Straight Privilege
Kids aren’t bullied for being gay. Kids are bullied by the perception that they are gay. Clearly, gay kids are more likely to appear gay than straight kids...on average. There are gay kids who appear straight and straight kids who strike their classmates as gay. Since a lot of gay kids repress their feelings, and develop a reaction formation (those are the closeted homophobes), they can be the worst sort of bullies. Somewhere out there a gay kid is beating up a straight kid while calling him fag. Think about that for a second.
There is a similar problem with homophobic dads who, concerned that their straight sons aren’t masculine enough, tried to toughen them up. I won’t go into the details of how this is a problem because it’s too obvious. Bottom line is that homophobia hurts straight people too, so straight people can be bullied for “being gay,” or otherwise suffer. Would you tell somebody with a history like that about his or her straight privilege?
Part 3: Punching Up
One of the things that hurts my brain is to hear liberals defend the practice of “punching up.” In medical school a fellow student who was inherently thin. Like, really thin. She said her grandmother used to drink peanut oil in a futile attempt to gain weight. She never weighed more than 100 lbs. The student sometimes had perfect strangers walk right up and tell her that she was so skinny it was disgusting. That profoundly offended her. “You wouldn’t walk up to a fat person and call them disgusting, would you?” She didn’t have an eating disorder, I knew her, she ate whatever she wanted and moved as little as possible. She was just skinny.
But it’s okay to call her disgusting, because that’s punching up. You go and tell them skinny bitches that.
Also, the pretty girls. If movies are to be believed, and when have they ever steered us wrong, the pretty girls bully the homely ones, not the other way around. Except that sometimes the less attractive girls get jealous of the truly beautiful ones and respond by spreading sexual rumors about them and calling them slut and whore. Virginity is no defense. And yes, as a child psychiatrist I’ve come across that several times. But that’s okay, because it’s punching up.
Part 4: Mansplaining
Men are never allowed to have an opinion on a female issue. My wife – an OBGYN – reports that a lot of women think they urinate from their vaginas. She explains otherwise. It’s a good thing she isn’t a male OBGYN, because that would be mansplaining.
Men can have constructive ideas about gender relations, white people can have constructive ideas about race, straight people can have constructive ideas about anti-gay prejudice. I could go into detail, but could never do as well as Counter Arguments. Just watch. Also, I’m lazy.
When you throw about terms like mansplaining, you are telling a section of the population to shut the fuck up, their opinions aren’t needed. What do you think their response will be? Have you ever told a friend their opinions don’t matter? Were you still friends afterwards?
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Part 5: Only white people can be racist
The idea is that only if societal institutions grant your race privilege then you can’t be racist. By this argument, if I move to Japan, or Nigeria, or Bolivia, then I can’t be racist. If that sounds stupid, it’s because it is. Racism, bigotry, prejudice against the “other,” are a part of human nature. All humans.
Howard Stern extensively discussed the violence he experienced as a white male (okay, Jew, but he was abused for his whiteness) in a black neighborhood. His only black friend told him they couldn’t be friends anymore because he was getting assaulted by other black kids for being friends with the white kid.
Imagine a white (or Asian or Arab etc) kid who has been assaulted by a group of black kids for his race. Now tell him that the kids who assaulted him couldn’t be racist. What do you expect his response would be? Fuck you, I’m voting Republican. Also, watch this.
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Conclusion
These ideas are exclusionary. Is it any surprise that we have excluded people? We have been telling millions of Americans that their views, their problems, their lives, don’t matter. They have responded by taking their concerns elsewhere. If we want to kill the GOP we need to take the white male vote from them, in order to do that we have to stop marginalizing them. We need to listen and show respect.
No, I’m not suggesting this is the only reason we are losing white voters, the world is big and complex and many factors are at play. This is simply the facet I see and it’s something we need to address.
Addendum: Another problem I have with mansplaining is that it’s an ad hominem attack, it attacks the speaker, not the point being made. If a man or white person says something wrong, discuss that. It’s also bigoted because if the speaker had been of the correct race or gender, then the speech becomes acceptable.
Abraham Lincoln had some points about race. Joss Whedon has some thoughts about gender relation.
