White men being asked to be humble, not silent
The best-selling crime writer James Patterson, as you may have read earlier this week, has just had to apologise for saying that white men face ‘‘another form of racism’’ and are being pushed out of the publishing industry.
His claim echoes that of another cultural kingpin, the superstar podcaster Joe Rogan, who last year said straight white men were being ‘‘silenced’’ by woke activists.
These are perilous days indeed for a near-billionaire author who outsells Stephen King and Dan Brown combined, and for his fellow victim, the host of a podcast downloaded 200 million times a month. But jibes like this, though satisfying, only get us so far.
Rogan and Patterson are expressing a fear increasingly held by older men: that society no longer seeks their views. Indeed, they feel their opinions to be scorned and denigrated.
This frightens them deeply because they, like us all, are social beings, reliant on the regard of others; not to be heard is almost not to exist. (A point, of course, that traditionally marginalised groups have often made.)
The upswell of this fear is worrying, in at least two ways. First, it may lead to an aggressively masculine backlash. Second, it represents, I think, a misunderstanding of what is actually being sought.
Even if there were an attempt to cancel older white men en masse, it has clearly failed, given their constant presence on platforms like those that Patterson and Rogan enjoy. (And in this column, indeed.) More to the point, I don’t think the demand is actually that white men fall silent.
In some corners of the internet, one may hear calls for them to be forever quiet; phrases like ‘‘pale, male and stale’’ can be deployed in ways that imply every older white man is past his use-by date.
For the most part, though, what I hear is a request for something subtly different: humility. It’s not the speaking that’s the problem, it’s the dominating: the need of so many men to hold forth at length, to speak over others, to assume theirs is the most interesting and most important voice.
As Anne Elliot, one of Jane Austen’s finest heroines, says in the novel Persuasion, ‘‘Men have had every advantage in telling their story . . . the pen has been in their hands.’’
In my own working life, some of the most excruciating scenes have come in meetings where a woman is clearly trying to say something, but a succession of older white men talk over her until their attention is, slowly and belatedly, drawn to her existence.
All this could be avoided if they – if we – were more attentive to the wisdom and life experiences of others. We might better acknowledge their contributions, rather than feeling that we must claim all insights as our own.
Slower to speak, and quicker to listen, we would learn more, have our perspectives better illuminated and shaped by others, and find defter solutions. (Most problems benefit from the attention of different – and diverse – minds.)
Consider this, though: for a certain class of highly educated men, the speaker’s authority is all – or most – of what they have.
Strip that away, and they are left bare, exposed, even humiliated.
Nor can we pretend that greater equality will be painless. Contemplating the Patterson case, the journalist Adrienne Westenfeld is of course right to criticise ‘‘the erroneous belief that an expansion of opportunities for under-represented groups is an oppression of white men, rather than a necessary and long-overdue correction of imbalanced scales’’.
And when things are expanding – more jobs, more positions, more opportunities – this correction need come at no-one’s expense.
But many of the most prestigious spots are in limited supply: corporate management positions, senior academic roles, top public-sector jobs.
As we remove the barriers that once stood before highly capable women, Mā ori and other candidates, the less able white men – who previously got their positions through confidence, contacts or simply sounding the way we expect experts to sound – will, as things stand, lose out.
But that phrase, ‘‘lose out’’, points to a deeper problem. No white man – no-one of any stripe – should feel themselves a loser if they cannot climb a given hierarchy.
If our whole identity were tied less closely to our perceived occupational success, the rebalancing of the scales would not seem such a threat.
That state of mind, in turn, would be more readily achieved in a less competitive world, one that still values excellence but supports everyone to achieve it, and celebrates it in all walks of life, not just among the great and good.
Then it would be easier for older white men to see the current moment for what I think it is: a call not for silence, but for humility. For something, in other words, that makes us better people.