The unbearable habit of denouncing unbearable whiteness

Is anything gained by kindling resentful backlash?

What makes Proud Boys want to assert their pride?

If for some perverse reason you wanted to goad a population into violence or political extremism, how would you go about this? You would humiliate them and turn their existence into an epithet. You would make it clear that you don’t give a shit about them. You would openly discriminate against them and resist policies and programs that could benefit them. You would tell them that you’re tired of hearing them talk. Using these tools to diminish the despised population’s material and emotional well-being, you would then ridicule their downward mobility.

Embittered by shame and resentment and with little left to lose, the dispossessed will then lash out. Mission accomplished.

Humiliation is a mixture of shame and anger. German social psychologist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Evelin Lindner calls humiliation “the nuclear bomb of the emotions.” By stripping away the other person’s dignity, humiliation inflicts a deep emotional wound, leaving the humiliated mind to convince itself of the need to inflict even greater pain on the perpetrator. Lindner identifies horrific spirals of humiliation in the genocidal histories of Germany, Somalia, Rwanda, and Serbia, where she learned the Somali proverb, “Humiliation is worse than death; in times of war, words of humiliation hurt more than bullets.”

When a professor tells an assembly of laid-off foundry workers that she’s “tired of listening to white men talk,” what is that if not humiliation? When women issue blanket condemnations of men and act victimized by their “manspreading” and “mansplaining,” the message is clear: Maleness is shameful.

When we dehumanize others, we invite them to dehumanize us. When they do, our ill will is confirmed, we respond with contempt, and round and round it goes. Says Lindner, “For our own sake and safety, we must give serious study and attention to all feelings of humiliation, because even if the injury is imaginary, the revenge is just as real [emphasis added].”

Image credit: New York Times

When it comes to white men, is the injury “imaginary”? It’s complicated. Men, especially white men, on the whole have higher incomes and are more likely to hold positions of power and prestige. (1/15/26 correction: Asian-American men and women have higher median earnings than white men). At the same time, boys and men are struggling to adapt to cultural, educational and economic changes and to gender role transformations that have left them confused about what it means to be a man. Absent healthy definitions of masculinity, there’s always Andrew Tate.

Jacob Savage’s detailed exposé of discriminatory hiring and admissions practices in high status professions and universities reveals the collateral damage of DEI and affirmative action among would-be elites. No one was hiding the ball. Anti-racist thought leader Ibram X. Kendi openly stated in 2019, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,”¹ and many white liberals endorsed that, perhaps without thinking through the consequences for themselves or their sons.

Arlie Hochschild’s exploration of the “stolen pride” of working class men in Kentucky (a depleted resource colony for coal, timber and tobacco barons) lays bare the shame roiling those on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. As one young unemployed white man told her:

“If you’re white and poor, people think, ‘What’s wrong with you that you’re stuck at the bottom? I came from nothing and I got to nothing and I’m not a victim of racism because I’m white. So, to most Americans, I’m less than nothing. If it’s such a privilege to be born a white male, what could explain me except my own personal failure?”

Arlie described to me Trump rallies as “de-shaming rituals” for people who felt that something had been taken from them (by liberals).

Political economy aside, white men are relentlessly bashed in media and social media. This cottage industry serves as a humiliation generation machine capable of reaching the vast majority of men across all strata. For men who don’t read Salon, Fox News will make sure they see the latest broadside.

Actual headlines from 2015-2025 (h/t David Dennison)

This has been going on for a long time but has escalated over the past decade. A 1995 article in the New Left Review was entitled, “Sympathy for the [white male] Devils,”² and who could forget Michael Moore’s 2001 masterpiece, Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation.

It’s hard to imagine that there remains a sentient being in America who has not gotten the memo: White men suck. And they have only themselves and their toxic masculinity and white supremacy to blame for their declining fortunes. They are “dying of whiteness” as the book by that title proclaims, victims of their own spitefulness and mediocrity.

Most liberal, college-educated white men take this opprobrium in stride or pile on to show that they’re one of the “good” ones. Conservative men are not amused. Moderates (and some liberals) are repelled, embittered, and move to the right for protection. For MAGA, it’s the gift that keeps giving. For white nationalists, misogynists, and the manosphere, it’s recruitment gold.

Pushed into far-right corners that burnish white and male victimhood, the next step is radicalization and, from there, for some, violence. Men have agency, and can choose to enact or refrain from acts of violence. It would be unfair to lay responsibility for grievance-tinged violence at the hands of anti-male tormentors. But the center-left has agency too. It can choose to inflame race and gender-based grievances or it can refrain. It can use white men as scapegoats for the gruesome precarity wrought by deindustrialization, automation, Big Ag consolidation and devastating boom and bust cycles. Or it can recognize that white men have been harmed by many of the same forces that have harmed working and middle class people of all races and genders.

I challenge the “unbearable whiteness of being” partakers to name a single upside of their project. If you can’t, please just stop. We need to help white men, alongside everyone else, endure the dystopian futureshock we are all living through. To do otherwise is to not only obstruct the work of those trying to build multi-racial working-class solidarity, it is to summon demons.

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1. In the 2023 edition of his book, the wording was changed to: “The only remedy to negative racist discrimination that produces inequity is positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity.” I don’t understand what that means.

2. The author recounted: “A few years back, Kathryn Robinson of the alternative newspaper The Seattle Weekly asked various members of her own hip, alternative circle of friends to come up with as many good qualities as they could for men and women, respectively. What she found was that her male and female friends had no problems coming up with any number of female virtues, from the traditional caring and sharing ones to the newer ones of autonomy, sisterhood, and empowerment; but about the only one anybody could come up with when it came to men was—shamefacedly, from a couple of the women—that they made pretty good providers sometimes.” As for white culture, it was “‘materialistic’, ‘greedy’, ‘obsessed with the self’, ‘false’, ‘removed from nature’, ‘entrapped by a linear view of time’, ‘controlled’, and ‘violent’; whereas ‘Native Culture’ (or African or African-American culture, Balinese culture, or ‘womyn’s’ culture if you’re into them instead) embodies all the good opposites to this evil.” This all sounds very 2020, but it was the early 1990s.