I haven’t said that all white men are immoral and unscrupulous, but it also took 100 years of fighting for women to get the vote. 100 years!! They were spit on and beaten — by policeman — for asking to be treated like full citizens. Please don’t act like it was simply handed over out of niceness.
Abraham Lincoln himself didn’t believe in racial equality, so again, don’t act like the Civil War was all about wanting that.
Yes, we have made some progress. Yes, the US doesn’t have the kinds of civil rights issues that China does, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have significant deeply ingrained and systemic inequality issues, which there is still a huge amount of push back to addressing. Marginalized people wouldn’t have to resort to what we think of as identity politics if it were being addressed.
And guess who is doing the vast majority of the the pushing back? You guessed it…. the people who have the most to “lose” if their cultural centrality is challenged. White women are in there too but we still live in a society where men hold the vast majority of social, economic, and cultural power. I’m reminding you again:
White males make up about 30% of the population in the US, but still hold the vast majority of social and economic power and they are still represented in media as being the normative citizen.
- White people and males are the best-represented identity groups on television. White people, for starters, have an 81% “share of screen” — their representation among shows’ top 10 recurring cast members — even though white people make up only 60% of the U.S. population
- Women make up 52% of the U.S. population but appear on TV screens only 38% of the time.
- Men speak 70% of all film dialogue
- And four in five experts cited in online news are male
If there were no white male identity politics we’d have proportional representation in our Congress by now. Although we do have the most racially and ethnically diverse Congress we’ve ever had, particularly in the House of Representatives, the US Congress is still 79% white (even though whites make up 60% of the population). Women make up just over a quarter of the Congress, although they make up just slightly more than 50% of the population.
Pretending like existing power structures aren’t trying to maintain themselves is the true illogical premise.
