Rage

Just trying to write it down.

I gave my students Wednesday off preemptively. I knew that whatever happened on Tuesday, Wednesday would be a day they shouldn’t have to worry about research papers. The research papers are important because they (hopefully) help students develop critical thinking skills, but they could wait a little while.

When I did see students on Thursday, I desperately wanted to get on with the critical thinking stuff. Critical thinking was suddenly feeling even more urgent. But I also knew the students needed the fat White guy to say something about the other fat White guy.

Many of my students are recently American, or their parents are. I teach more women than men. Many are queer. The vast majority of my students are from communities that the president-elect has explicitly vilified for a decade. Do the math with me. My students are 18, 19, 20. They have spent their lives being bellowed at by a rich White man with the ethics of, well, him. I can’t find the right metaphorical language for what he is.

I fully flubbed it in my first class. I hadn’t put up the little invisible shield I use when I teach. The invisible shield is important because I have a tendency to absorb students’ trauma, which can make moving forward difficult. There were lots of tears and I felt like crap afterward.

Over the course of that day, and more particularly on Friday, I worked through it and got to the point. I want to remember what I said, so while I can’t remember it completely (there were still tears on Friday), I want to write it down.

I had a couple of audiences. I wanted to comfort the people who were terrified. I also knew I had to speak to the minority in the room: White guys like me.

In my classrooms, White guys have less power than they do as they move about the rest of their lives. They are outnumbered. Many of them, particularly in my classes, are progressive and think similarly to me when it comes to politics, so I might have been preaching to the choir. But the alienation of young White men is a serious problem, and I believe we are about to live through the consequences. So here is roughly what I tried to say to my classes.

I have spent a lot of my life thinking, academically and personally, about White male rage. It is a real thing. It isn’t genetic, but it is so thoroughly built into us via our culture that it might as well be.

White male rage is almost always destructive. Almost always. It can be constructive, but it’s hard to direct. To direct White male rage toward construction, you have to actively remember that your lived experience is not the lived experience of everyone else. That sounds obvious, but when you are always the loudest voice in the room, you can forget other people are there.

While I am gay, and I have plenty of experience with marginalization, bullying, and violence, when I walk around in the world, I am not generally afraid. I expect that people will listen to me. I expect that people will defer to me. I expect to have power.

It takes conscious effort to remember that I have not earned that power. It was given to me by a long history of people who look like me abusing people who don’t look like me.

I don’t feel guilty about that. I don’t feel guilty for the privileges I have or the history that gave them to me. I didn’t create that long history of abuse.

But I am absolutely, to my core, convinced that it is better to make things than to break things.

I may have read too many comic books in my life, but like Spiderman, I feel that my power requires responsibility.

It is better to make things than to break things. To make things of value requires relinquishing power sometimes because other people with lived experiences different from yours know things you don’t know. Other people have skills you don’t have. Other people deserve respect and care, and White men have the resources to build things that provide both.

That belligerent blowhard thinks he builds things. But look at the things he thinks he builds. They have no value. He doesn’t pay the builders who built his buildings. His hats are made in China. These are things produced by fraud. They are produced by people who do not share his lived experience. I take that personally.

But I’m not here to criticize one White man, no matter how stupid and terrible and unmanly I think he is. I want White men generally to build real things. I want them to build things that have value and are not fraudulent. To do that will require understanding that other people exist in the world differently than you do. When you start paying attention to it, it’s hard not to see it.

So, I saw the Trump ad ridiculing transgender people, and I saw when a transgender student walked out of my classroom on Thursday because she couldn’t tolerate being lectured to by a cisgender White man. I also saw the cisgender White man in the classroom who rolled his eyes at her as she left. He and I need to have a chat. She and I are cool (she told me so later).

White male rage is a real thing. I know because I have it. Just ask my Black husband. It isn’t helpful to pretend it isn’t real. It must be used to build, not break.

Then they wrote. What they wrote was informative. Some of them wished I would shut up. Some wrote about things completely separate from the election (my only prompt was “how do you feel?”). A lot of them wrote about their fears and their families. A lot of them wrote about their own rage and the particular ways it has manifested.

A lot of them thanked me. One said she was looking into ways to leave the country. I commented on her assignment that she should make whatever choice is right for her. And then I told her that my ancestors broke the place in which I live, so I will remain and build something.