Susan Reimer
June 8, 2009
These are tough times for the middle-class white male.
He discovered a vaccine for polio, split the atom and landed on the moon. But he seems to have an empathy deficiency that no multivitamin can cure.
The poor guy can now add "no meaningful life story" to a list that includes sexist and clueless. I can see a third act for Defending the Caveman, the one-man show about a guy in love with a television set, in which he talks about growing up in a suburban cul-de-sac in an intact family.
And the audience laughs out loud at the shallowness of his life experience.
The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, a Puerto Rican woman who grew up in a single-parent household in a New York City housing project but went on to the Ivy League, is just the latest excuse to say things or imply things about middle-class white males that we don't get to say about any other ethnicity or gender. Not without lawyers and human resources people flooding the zone.
I happen to like white males. I am married to one. And I often have dinner with other white males who arrive in the company of women who, apparently, find their modest, white middle-class life stories worthy. But we might be in a shrinking minority.
White males make up the majority of the greedheads on Wall Street and the stubbornly wrong auto executives - men mostly likely to be burned at the stake if we ever return to that form of punishment. So they haven't done their tribe much good.
Even so, it has seemed for a while that nobody had any use for middle-class white males. Not unless they have a power-washer or a pickup truck. Then everyone is their friend. On the odd Saturday, at least.
Nobody looks around the classroom or the office and says, "You know, we should recruit more middle-class white males."
But I have to say, this latest charge with which middle-class white males have been tattooed - no meaningful life story - seems a bit of a reach to me. Just how Dickensian does a life have to be before it has any value?
I mean, not everybody can be the child of migrant workers, Haitian refugees or Rwandan genocide survivors. And not everybody will have taught himself to read by a lantern's light after a day in the fields.
We are all the sum of our life experiences, and those experiences impact our thinking and our decision-making. But not all of us have a life worthy of a made-for-TV movie.
Some males are the product of an intercontinental, interracial marriage, grow up all over the world (and in Hawaii) and become president.
Some males just grow up and go to college and law school, without much of a back story. Would such a blank slate color judicial temperament, or would it leave that temperament, well, blank? What exactly is the link between crucible personal experiences and job performance?
I am all for a Supreme Court that looks more like America - or at least more like law school, where female graduates almost equal male graduates. And I am all for diversity, because the report card on white male leadership in government and business hasn't been stellar lately.
But - empathy being the strong suit of women - I am feeling bad for the middle-class white males these days. They can't seem to catch a break, either in Connecticut firehouses or Supreme Court short lists.
There's hope, though.
The middle-class white male can use the experience of these trying times, these 40 years in the wilderness, to color his pale life story.
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