Heterosexual White Guy

I don’t feel guilty being a heterosexual white guy, but evidently there are many people who think I should. Three years ago, a friend working in the mental health field showed me an essay entitled: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” distributed to everyone, every year, at the agency where she worked. Written by Peggy MacIntosh, Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, it was full of the usual leftist, victim-group buzzwords, like: empowered, outraged, systemic, consciousness, heterosexism, etc. MacIntosh said that while spending years bringing materials from Women’s Studies into the regular curriculum at Wellesley, she “often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged . . .”

My reaction is: thank God that back in 1988 there were still some men expressing that unwillingness among the Birkenstock-wearing, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, bicycle-riding, sensitive he/shes MacIntosh be likely to encounter around the Wellesley College campus. But that was nearly two decades ago and I fear there are fewer men left who are willing to to tell MacIntosh she’s crazy in those trendy, blue-state, Boston suburbs. Twenty years of mandatory sensitivity training in universities and work places have done a lot of damage to men down there. Testosterone is ebbing dangerously in the region that gave us Michael Dukakis back in 1988, and then John Kerry in 2004. At least those two had an excuse, catering to their coo-coo constituency in Massachusetts. But what about Al Gore in 2000? He wasn’t sure how to be a man either and he came from Tennessee. Then again, he did go to Harvard for four years. That time in Cambridge must have damaged him so much that, during his presidential campaign, he had to hire feminist Naomi Wolfe at $30,000 a month to tell him what a man should be like. And it didn’t work, did it Al. All that money wasted.

Speaking of Naomi Wolfe, I saw her on Book TV last week giving Harvey Mansfield a hard time about his recent book “Manliness.” I was gratified that Mansfield wrote such a book in spite of having taught at Harvard, where he was the only faculty member to vote against establishing a Women’s Studies Department there. I watched the whole interview waiting for him to bring up Wolfe’s work with Gore, but he never did. It’s good to know there’s at least one person left to represent the male sex down there in Cambridge now that Larry Summers has been run out of town.

But back to MacIntosh’s essay. I asked my friend if there were any objections at her agency when it was passed out. She said there weren’t and that disappointed me. “No one spoke up?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “And nobody laughed either the way you did.” That surprised me and made me wonder what kind of men she worked with.

A couple of years passed and I had nearly forgotten the essay when a student-teacher in my classroom said, “Tom, check this out,” as he handed me another copy of MacIntosh’s diatribe. There it was with its list of twenty-six white “privileges,” such as #12: “I can swear or dress in second hand clothes or not answer letters without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.” Not answering letters? Is this the kind of thing they’re outraged about at the Wellesley College Women’s Studies Department? How much does it cost to send a kid to that school? Isn’t that where Hillary Clinton went?

After we read sections like that aloud and chuckled about them, I asked the intern if anyone spoke up about the essay to the instructor. “No,” he said. “We have to pass the course if we want to become teachers.”

Trying to hide my disappointment, I asked, “Well, do you mind if I write about it?”

“Not until I graduate, okay?” he said. “I really need this course. We get these kinds of things a lot and I have to keep my mouth shut or I won’t make it through. After I get my certificate, I won’t care. Write about it then.”

“Okay,” I said. “What will you do if you should get a testosterone surge before June? How will you handle it?”

“I’ll get a muzzle,” he said. “I’m in enough trouble now.”

That’s how it is on campus nowadays for a heterosexual white guy who is unwilling to grant that he’s overprivileged. If he spoke up, he’d be a racist, misogynist, heterosexist oppressor.

Number 22 on MacIntosh’s list of white privileges said: “I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.”

Excuse me? Affirmative action puts women, blacks, hispanics, Eskimos, and just about everyone else ahead of heterosexual white guys in hiring, awarding contracts and admission to colleges and universities, awarding scholarships, etc. HWGs are last on the list and we’re supposed to be overprivileged?

No. I don’t feel guilty being a HWG. And I don’t feel guilty about not feeling guilty either.