white jesus’ pachyderm puzzle

I don’t know who else is in the room with me. There are adjacent rooms populated by folks with whom I don’t care to associate but I know there are other people in this room and we should discuss a few things. Namely, the elephant. The big white swinging dick elephant we should all admit is crowding us out. I don’t want to leap into this thing and give any impression that I am displeased with this elephant, that I resent this elephant, that I carry any animosity toward the saggy beast. I don’t. This creature’s presence is akin to inclement weather, an inconvenient blast of sunlight during an evening drive. It’s just a fact of the day. But we need to examine its existence. Again, not saying its existence is unjustified, just proposing that we investigate it. Or rather that we—the poor bastards suffering with it in this room—investigate our relationship with it.


One wonders when the caucasoids (using this outdated, controversial term for reasons revealed soon enough) emerged in the general population of the world. History, as always, is a slippery thing when the object of yer inquiry is so old. After years of assumptions about Africans migrating into northern regions 40,000 years ago, it seems researchers have tracked the true emergence of light skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair to a mere 8,000 years ago, all thanks to a few genes with names like SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 in typical frosty scientific nomenclature. Regardless of timelines, robust eras of logic and thought flame the malicious tropes broached by ignorance and bigotry over the last few hundred years—Biblical and primitive scientific justifications for the subjugation of browner complexions and the destruction of aboriginal cultures. This element of white supremacy is a mere cut of the meat on our pachyderm subject, the other section: the matriarchal nemesis of our ignorance and misunderstanding. But we will get to this portion of the examination soon enough.

I am not entertaining any combat with Critical Race Theory. I don’t think one can seriously deny systemic racism at any level of history, governance, or culture without strenuous semantic diversions. Contrary to what many of my demographic have barked recently, a black POTUS and sixty years of feet dragging reforms haven’t changed anything in any significant way. We can label them baby steps. And that toddler is a slow learner. This shade of discrimination has existed for at least 8,000 years and still pervades top to bottom in every aspect of our daily lives, admit it or not. The day is warm, the nights are cold. You can call it all subjective if you wish but denying the dark doesn’t make the night any more comforting. History, as flawed as many of our more pointed interpretations, is as correct as our most obvious and brutal facts. At a certain time, the geography and biology of the environments in which the white skinned humans found themselves proved most advantageous to advances in agriculture, metallurgy, and chemistry. The reason white people rose to the top of the Western world by the dawn of the “CE,” as Jerod Diamond puts it, “…doesn't have anything to do with people and it has everything to do with people's environments.”


I find one splinter, one thin branch of this tale, ironic and hilarious. Most of us overlook a very simple yet ubiquitous detail about discrimination even though it is almost a cliche. “The other.” You’ve heard the phrase a thousand times. We all use it. We use it because it’s impossible to deny the weight of the phrase. It’s backed by so many examples that in hindsight land as ridiculous or even asinine. Dr. Suess wrote an entire story about “the other”: The Sneetches. Italian, Irish, Polish, and many other European immigrants—the direct ancestors of our original white folks—came to the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and eventually had to petition courts to be considered “white,” the category provisional to the most benefits and opportunities in the US. In other words, the white folks who had already established their empires and stolen the available land and created the requisite employment did not want other undeniably “white” folks threatening their work or possessions and all they could muster to fight off the invasion was to refuse the obvious pigment of the new arrivals. “The other” is an endlessly malleable and absurd term.


This tendency to push against “the other” for all the reasons that people push seems ever grounded in ignorance or malicious imagination or both. “They don’t look like us, they don’t act like us, they don’t come from familiar places.” This belief in otherness, hyped by generations of compounded dehumanization, fosters outlandish theories about race and human origins that have come and gone—and come again. The term Caucasian comes from a long abandoned theory of morphology that placed the origin of the white race in the Caucasus Mountains, the presumed resting place of Noah’s Arc—hardcore science. That was in the late 18th century. In the 1960’s some wackadoodle academic theorized that the Caucasian race evolved 200,000 years ago, long before the Congoids (Africans) and thus enjoyed a higher level of evolution. All this garbage has been destroyed by modern genetic research which has firmly established that any delineation of race in the human species is pure folklore.


We are simply different colors. And we are slowly loosing the more topological features that differ between humans. In Paleolithic times a much wilder and diverse variety of facial features and height existed, and yet even then, we were still just human beings. Our prejudices, for all intents, are invented by our brain’s—our amygdala specifically— unfortunate tendency toward knee-jerk animosity at the arrival of unfamiliar faces.


As for the other half of the elephant—I am splitting the animal from head to tail on the centerline; just putting that out there to avoid being accused of calling one half or the other the ass end—women have of course received a hefty portion of abuse at the hands of men and by simple math, we can say white dudes have perpetrated the bulk of the violence and other mistreatments. No way to deny to it. Not attempting to do any such thing. Women have from the dawn of time, from birth to death lived as victims of oppression from men. I know I’m going to get some pushback here from a certain bloc in feminist circles about theories of prehistoric, Paleolithic matriarchal societies but let’s not shoot ourselves in the knees. Men have had the upper hand from the jump and they are not stepping aside any time in the near future.


I am a huge fan of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wendgrow. Let me reiterate: I absolutely love and endorse the work. It may very well change our entire understanding of human history. However, even with all their radical examinations and propositions in regard to equality and social structures, they are not committed on the idea that patriarchy ruled the world before we slithered out of the slime of deep terrestrial time. It’s a mixed bag as is most of history. It’s a lumpy, stinky bag. Let’s not forget that most of the early proponents of matriarchal hunter gatherers were men, men who framed this idea in the light of a stronger, more evolved patriarchy, a reciprocal irony to the above mentioned reasoning behind the evolved supremacy of the white race. As Cynthia Eller states in her book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, “Feminists of the latter half of the twentieth century are not the first to find in the myth of matriarchal prehistory a manifesto for feminist social change, but this has not been the dominant meaning attached to the myth of matriarchal prehistory, only the most recent.” And yet, in many places and times, the matriarchy is there, illuminated by evidence in all the objects and images we use to establish all the other facts of history. It may not have been ubiquitous but it is there, scattered crystals in the walls of a cave. Women have always somehow clung to and achieved a connection to authority.


So we, a certain persuasion of white men, tolerate this beast as it shifts its great weight in the confines of our lives. We who agree with the foundations of the beast’s grievance. We white men who acknowledge the errors—albeit grown from ignorance and superstition—of our pale Y chromosome bearing ancestors. We sympathize with the victims and recognize the extent of the waste wrought by our history. Believe me. We are here. And we suffer from the effects although not so much in the way that our beast assumes.


In the other rooms, those adjacent spaces I spoke of in the beginning, there must be other white men stabbing and hacking in desperation at some clone monstrosities. The men who feel their grip on the future slipping, interpreting a barrage of clap-backs and accusations as an assault on their very existence. Who can blame them? They are told their opinions are meritless. They are told their very existence is a blot on the history of human kind. They have created entire industries in service of resistance to the activism against them. Comedians gain attention and audiences for provocative jokes about it. Insipid radio voices lash out with such obsession their skin tone soaks the sound of it. And they do have some solid observations at their disposal. Women live longer than men—not quite sure this weaponized factoid is as lethal as their enthusiasm portrays but it is empirical. Women have and still rank as high as men when counting medical and law students. When pay is compared with precision (specialty to exact same specialty) a negligible gap is all we can find. There are far more opportunities for assistance with entrepreneurial and educational pursuits for women than for the opposite sex. In most states, women are still more likely to acquire primary custody of children in a divorce, although this seems to be changing. When the grievances turn racial, the efficacy grows thinner still. Complaints about Affirmative Action and its dubious characteristics, mentions of any association or club whose membership is only available to white men would be the target of derision if not litigation, and then there’s the ubiquity of statements about some perceived bias in equal opportunity employment.


So here we are. White dudes who fully sympathize with our antagonist. White dudes who react with quiet annoyance that we are the targets of the world’s aggravation. We wade with subdued defeatism through legitimate injustices done to both women and minorities then we shiver the consequent guilt for our annoyance. Why should a white man succeed at anything? Art, writing, music, politics, sports, business, entrepreneurship, etc? Why should we who still hold a majority of the wealth in a world we conquered with violence and oppression still accomplish anything? It’s a question that vexes in silence. We must recognize the merits of the complaints and resist the temptation to fight back against the instinctive response, “But that wasn’t me. I didn’t do this to you.” At the same time, we find ourselves resisting the accompanying response, “In fact, I’m willing to speak up for you, fight for you.”


Any man who has stepped up to defend either women or minorities has felt clapback ranging from a mild poke to a bloody nose.


Feminist as a label is slippery when pasted on or worn by men, white men in particular. In our modern era, men who claim feminism are at times charged with performative usage even though feminism cannot deny the assistance of male heroes as far back as the 17th century. I cannot help but sympathize with the trepidation. Men still hold much of the power in all the relevant corners, business, politics, culture, however, the men who still wield relevant power in all those areas are obliged to recognize the unbalance publicly and vocally. Nevertheless, men still fuck up. They say the wrong thing, or make the unwanted advance, touch the wrong shoulder at the wrong time after misinterpreting the wrong signal. These pickles rise from the brine of thousands of years of behavior I can’t help but insist isn’t going to overnight morph into a protocol accepted by the tip of the spear of female activism. “…the problem of male entitlement and misogynist attitudes towards women is a social one, not a personal one, and certainly not one that will be resolved by more men insisting they are feminists,” wrote Meghan Murphy in Al Jazeera back in 2018. These statements are astounding in their ability to both praise and deflate in a single sentence.


One phrase that masters irony in labeling is “white savior complex” or the even more ironic and prevalent version: white saviorism. White saviorism, an admittedly clumsy phrase, isn’t mentioned in my novel River of Blood but it could be argued that the entire story hinges on it. It’s an accusation that stings worse than any other to me. It’s the catch 22 of this age. The single no-win arrangement with which we as sympathetic white men must wrestle every time we speak out. It’s both unfortunate and unfair and yet still true as anything else I’ve written in this essay. With that said, the phrase is ofttimes accompanied by a fair amount of hyperbole. As Health.com quoted Savala Nolan, JD "(White saviorism) perpetuates White supremacy as the system by which we organize our society." That’s a heavy lift. However, I understand from whence the consternation arises and though I can’t climb aboard the claim that a white guy who might possess some expertise in a problem afflicting some minority group and who might step in between that problem and the offended community is somehow the unwitting business end of modern colonialism, I see why some minorities might feel the need to pump the brakes on lavish praise for such a dude or his help. But let’s not piss in the bath water, either. Intentions matter and for the most part, we white guys who are sincere in our aims are mostly willing to step aside if asked to do so—without complaint, I’ll add. That sort of thing is a move made by the other white guys in the other rooms… the rooms with the bloody floors. And they are far more likely to demand recognition for applying the band-aids they begrudgingly use to justify their allegiance to “equality.”


What’s the answer? How does a good intentioned white guy maintain support of women and minorities in this climate where the air is thin and the landscape so bloody treacherous? The answer is, as always: suffer, bitch. Our lot will improve if we continue to endeavor our support. We inhabit a pendulum extreme at this moment. Gravity still reigns and we will see a day—not tomorrow—when the socially constructed term “race”will no longer carry the weight of immediate history, when women and men finally level the scales. As stated before—so many times—intentions matter. Intentions clarify as time passes and outcomes accumulate. We, as members of a historically guilty demographic, must struggle with that brand. We are the anti-venom, a classic vaccine, the turncoat, the once perpetrating element flipped on its head. It’s not glamorous or easy but, unbeknownst to the big fat creature trapped in here with us, it is noble and virtuous.