Understanding whiteness Part 7: Masculinity, gendered racism, 'Karens', and villains

Ok, question: Does whiteness have a gender? Obviously, logically, the answer has to be ‘no’. But how we feel about racism is not always all that logical.

I’ll admit it openly. When I stop to think of dominant whiteness, as a person, as a character, I often picture a man. To be specific, I picture a youngish middle aged man, with unremarkable features but not ugly, standing assertively but with troubles lurking behind the eyes, if you look hard enough. I picture Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders. Or James Bond. Bruce Wayne maybe. A white Luther perhaps. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Macbeth in the second act. Brooding. Unsettled. The potential to be good, but trapped by a neurosis that draws him, inexorably, towards tragedy. I picture a Byronic hero, defined by Albert Camus as follows:

"The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action."

-Albert Camus, The Rebel

It’s an archetype that was largely popularised by the Romantic poet Lord Byron. In short, the Byronic hero is essentially an anti-hero who is typified as much by his neurosis and flaws as he is by his potential for heroism, the flaws pulling against his better nature. In picturing dominant whiteness in this way, I realise that I am affording whiteness a level of sympathy that it may or may not deserve (let’s keep exploring). And it’s interesting that should picture dominant whiteness as a him. Male.

In terms of gender stereotypes and commonly accepted tropes, one of the prevailing characteristics of dominant whiteness might be its maleness. A kind of generalised empowerment and privilege met with naivety and frequent moments of idiocy. I say this with conviction. Having existed for over 40 years as first a boy and then a man in a patriarchal paradigm, I have reflected long and hard enough to know that masculinity’s biggest problem is its default power and privilege combined with completely unearned expectations of power and control.

The patriarchy has always encouraged us to be sympathetic to the socially constructed male – forgiving of his idiosyncrasies, needs and preferences. How else can we explain the parade of deeply inadequate ‘world leaders’ who are allowed, permitted, invited, encouraged to take the top spots. Including but not limited to the recent historical moment where the UK and US, an axis of Western control, were led by blonde haired buffoons with bullying tendencies and deep ignorance over key issues of the day. It’s no accident that both these countries suffered way bigger Covid fatalities than they should have under the leaders of inadequate white men, who, might I add, both caught Covid after denying and downplaying the risks. Bluster and bravado to a fault.

And then - consider the respect given to what might be considered the world’s largest religion: football. Decades of Saturday afternoons given over to this oh so manly of exploits, billions of pounds spent on building a global edifice of leagues, tournaments and international broadcast, happily feeding newborn boys into the cogs of the beautiful game, with no questioning over whether or not there might be something better worth doing with our time and resources. I’m not anti-football at all, but as a well-trodden, long accepted realm of masculinity, the size of football as a global social structure says a lot about what men are encouraged to lean towards. As a man who doesn't follow football, it fascinates me just how willing the world is to indulge a past time that so many men seem to define themselves by.

So here’s the segue: The way society has allowed masculinity to take the lead (or rather the way masculinity has forced society to allow it to take the lead) is much the same way that dominant whiteness has permitted itself to remain dominant. Like the brooding Byronic anti-heroes I listed earlier, whiteness really needs someone to take it by the elbow, sit it down, and say “it’s ok. You don’t have to do this anymore.” But the bravado and bluster of whiteness, like the bravado and bluster of blunt, default masculinity, is too insecure to let this happen. Batman really ought to hang up his cape, have a good cry, process his trauma and become a philanthropic force for good. Macbeth should have admitted his fears before killing the king. Tommy Shelby clearly needs PTSD counselling for his post-war shellshock. But true vulnerability, it would seem, does not come easy to the archetypal masculine psyche.

We can link white supremacy to patriarchal rule. The male insecurity and power-privilege that led to colonial exploitation is a huge part of the story of whiteness. The various masculine arms of the state, up to and including policing and criminal justice, are decidedly male in approach and outlook - leaning into stereotypically male notions of power and aggression. Not to mention the fact that capitalism has been spawned by male thoughts for as long as it can be said to have existed. It’s no accident that the richest people in the capitalist world are often men, often pitted against each other, as we’ve seen in the recent back and forth between Elon ‘Twitter/ X’ Musk and Mark ‘Facebook/ Meta’ Zuckerberg (which at one point led to Musk calling for an ironic/ non-ironic literal dick-measuring contest, to decide who’s the bigger man - I wish I was making this up).

Dominant whiteness in a female form