Good White Men
Does my son need role-models and who the @#%! are they??
As I wrote about a few months back, my five-year-old son is obsessed with money. Since we decided to give him an allowance, he comes come every day and counts his cash like Stringer Bell in the backroom of Orlando’s strip club, announcing his current take to the household. The whole thing has been mostly positive. Yesterday he carried seven lovingly filled penny-rolls in a Ziploc bag to our local CitiBank and exchanged them for three dollar-bills and two quarters, and I’ve never seen a kid so proud of himself, or a bank teller so tickled. Having his own money has made him surprisingly generous; he buys little gifts for his sister and friends, makes sporadic donations to a hospitalized snake named Ribbon who doesn’t have a stomach and has to be fed cut-up pieces of frogs (we love you Ribbon!), and constantly presses money into my hands like an elderly aunt, saying things like, I shit you not, “you can spend this on anything you want mama!” about 21 goddamn cents.
But, like so many aspects of our culture, you cannot introduce a child to currency without discussing that sacred American albatross; white men. Lord there are so many of them. The two dollar-coins aside, how are there still so many of them??? And, unless you want to lie to your kids, you cannot discuss white men, especially of the “made it on to printed money” ilk, without discussing slavery, misogyny, racism, the evils of capitalism, and the machine of war. I have tried my darndest to find an innocent face in the bunch, but not a one of them is defensible.
“Mama, who’s that?” “Oh, that guy abolished slavery, but also said that people with different skin colors were unequal.” “This guy thought that people with different skin colors shouldn’t be allowed to have babies together, unless it was with him.” “Some people think this dude was a good president because he gave people jobs and built a bunch of bridges, but also he took Japanese-American families from their homes and made them live in prison camps.” “That dude had a fun accent and people were sad when he died, but he treated women as objects and touched their bodies without their permission.” (And then my husband pipes in with, “and he built his political career off of his Nazi-friendly-father’s money!”)
When Biden won, we were of course in many ways thrilled. I was relieved to tell my kid that Biden was now President and not Trump, but in the days following the election results, I realized that I could not, in good conscience, get my child too excited about a man who had presided over the shameful Clarence Thomas hearings or who by many accounts gives young women weird shoulder rubs.
I texted a friend, a sweet, white man who does anti-racist and community-oriented work and who has not been known in any way to grope women, asking “Who are the good white men????” The challenge I was proposing was this: If your white son wanted to put a poster of a white-male role-model up on his wall, who would you be happy was on said poster? My husband and I tried to play this game over lunch one afternoon, but kept getting tripped up. Bill Gates? Nah. Jeff Bezos? Absolutely not. Matt Damon (we hail from Damon country)…perhaps. I found myself googling phrases such as “stephen colbert anything weird?” and “is tom hanks really nice?” After 30 minutes, the only one we could agree on was Mark Ruffalo, and we worried that, being a white man in power, even the likes of Ruffalo possibly had some skeletons in his woke, adorable, closet.
In the tiny liberal pocket of the country in which I was raised, we also were taught not to revere people like George Washington. We read Howard Zinn and critiqued the Founding Fathers and said things like “thank goddess.” But Bill Clinton (don’t get me started) was basically untouchable. Woody Allen was a cultural touchstone. J.D. Salinger was my favorite author. The craziest part is that, for most of these men, many of the facts we are all now aware of were already widely known at the time - but not enough people in power considered them to be transgressions or cared enough to hold the transgressors accountable.
But now that we are, thankfully, getting daily reports on just how shitty white men, with and without money and fame, have been allowed and encouraged to be, it takes work to find the good ones. This isn’t, IMHO because cancel culture has gotten out of control, it’s because there is just such an incredible backlog of bad behavior perpetrated by white men to get through, and it is a sad but ultimately good thing for each and every story to get its due. And there are still, lest we forget, so many that remain frighteningly un-cancelled (see Bill Clinton above).
Let me be clear: I don’t think we need more white men on coins or bills or posters or in the cast of a new sitcom or so that my son can feel like every room has someone in it who looks like him. I am not under the impression that my kid is forming his identity amidst the suffocating lies, assumptions, and violence that non-white children in this country have to work against. Not for a second. Not even close. But having all of these a-holes on the currency that fuels our country, not to mention everywhere else, tells my son that he can be a dirtbag and get away with it (*ahem* to both our past president and, I’m sorry to say, our current one), and that where the assumptions of goodness and smartness and success for someone who looks like him may be unreasonably high, the actual standards for greatness, as far as being a good human being goes, are extremely low.
And then on Tuesday, I watched the CNN feed of the Derek Chauvin verdict, which showed his masked face on a split screen as the judge read out the charges. I thought about all the families all over the country and world watching this, and how high the stakes were for so many of them, the conversations parents were having with their Black children about this day, and the one I would have with my son when I picked him up from school. “You have a choice,” I wanted to tell him. “You can perpetuate the privileges that allowed this man who looks like you to murder another human being with little concern, in public, or you can fight against them with everything you’ve got.”
I could fill a childrens-coloring-book with all of the not-white-males who I would be thrilled for my kids to emulate. I’m eager to tell them about so many people: Katie Porter and Yo-Yo Ma and Questlove and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I would be honored if my kids did a school report on these people or made a diorama of their childhood homes or sent them fan mail. But when I think of who the anti-Derek Chauvin is, who my child can look towards for guidance on how to walk through this world as a white man and do more good than harm, I would really like more than dear Mark Ruffalo.
My neighbor and self-described “sister-wife,” who has been raising her children alongside mine and another family’s this past year, pointed out that there are role models all around us. The three white fathers of this little crew, though they have plenty they to examine about their place in the world and how they got there, are loving and sensitive, curious and present, involved in their communities and engaged in philosophies and practices that attempt to give voice and power to women, people of color, and people of differing abilities. They apologize when they make mistakes. They try to do better. My son has uncles and grandfathers and godfathers and neighbors who didn’t get everything in their lives because of hard work and talent (neither did I), but who know it. Who give back. Who don’t ask their assistants to find women for them to sleep with.
Is that enough? Maybe not. But it’s a place to start. As my neighbor, a Black woman in her eighties, said of the Derek Chauvin conviction yesterday, “It’s a beginning.” A tiny sliver of hope, not only for those who have been so grossly victimized and violated by other people and by the systemic forces that led to George Floyd’s murder, but also for the Americans who look like my son, whose centuries of racism, misogyny, and impunity are maybe, just maybe, starting to catch up with them. They need to see the Mark Ruffalos of the world. And they need to see the Derek Chauvins and the Thomas Jeffersons too, as a cautionary tale, though I don’t think it should be on anything as delightful as a two-dollar bill. We don’t tear down statues to erase history, but to envision a future worthy of idolizing. For every white man called out on his shit somewhere, perhaps a better one grows in his place.
*If anyone out there wants to add names, illustrate, or start a Go Fund Me for my “Good White Men Coloring Book,” let’s firkin’ do it. So far I’ve got Talking Heads frontman and Reasons to be Cheerful Magazine founder David Byrne, disabled activist Jim Lebrecht, the politically-minded NBA coach and $5,000 tip-leaver Gregg Popovich, and Project Runway host and dude-who-totally-justifiably-cried-at-a-magic-show-while-not-role-model-Bill-Gates-barely-batted-an-eyelash Tim Gunn.
Thanks for reading. Now, who are the Good White Men in your life??
Things I’ve Read This Week:
-Black Parents Give Their Kids ‘The Talk’, What If White Parents Did, Too?
Jokic, Harvey Milk, DJ Savarese, Paul Wellstone, George Saunders?
Mr. Rogers checks out.