To The New Yorker, white males are Untermenschen

Carol Iannone writes:

In a review of books on “overparenting” in the New Yorker, the normally sensible Joan Acocella casually betrays the unacknowledged but widely accepted prejudice that has come to attend discussion of white males as a group in our society. Acocella is writing about a book by a Columbia professor, Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004). The book claims that despite the “discourse of crisis” in which American youth are discussed, young people are actually doing very well nowadays. They are “bigger, richer, better educated, and healthier than at any other time in history.” To be sure, the professor acknowledges that “there have been some losses,” as Acocella puts it, and goes on to elaborate: “Middle class white boys from the suburbs have fallen behind their predecessors, but middle class girls and minority children are far better off.” According to Acocella, and evidently with her approval, Mintz thinks that we should stop obsessing about youth in general and worry more about how many children still live in poverty.

Aside from the ugly, reductive description of today’s youth as “bigger, richer,” etc., which sounds a little like something out of a futuristic movie such as Gattica, note the casual dismissal of the problem of white boys falling behind “their predecessors,” that is, white boys of the past. Young boys who did nothing other than to be born white are now faring less well than ever, and that’s ok, because girls and minorities are doing better. Why should it be an acceptable tradeoff for white boys to fall behind? Why do we dismiss their problems even while we try to address poverty? Is it because they belong to the hated oppressor group, like the bourgeois of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China? Could it be that the movement for minority and women’s rights is showing how little it is any longer connected to justice, but rather to resentment and payback for real and imagined wrongs done by the “oppressor class,” and the desire to see this class punished and diminished? We of course are all familiar with the reprehensible portrayals of white males as idiots and morons on television shows and in commercials—stupid, clumsy, barely human creatures with IQs of 60 or 70 who are simply tolerated as members of civilized society and must be instructed by their betters, women and minorities. These attitudes derive from the Cultural Revolution, not the Declaration of Independence, and should be exposed for what they are.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 03, 2008 07:34 PM | Send