I’m not much of a gamer. I play a little video soccer. I own Madden football but I don’t play it. I basically think video games are a gargantuan time-sink that are ruining the health of a whole generation of teenagers who should be riding bikes and playing basketball. Perhaps for just that reason, a gaming analogy is the best way to explain to straight white men that they’re playing the game of life on the lowest difficulty setting there is. That’s what John Scalzi did, and the reaction was hilarious.
The thing is, I don’t really care. According to a 2005 study, MIT rejected 50% of applicants in the top percentile for SAT scores. Yale and Princeton rejected 60%, and Harvard rejected 80% of students with top percentile SAT scores. If you failed to get into those schools despite being worthy, you’re not alone, and it’s probably not because you’re white, you’re a man, or because you like to date women. If you got rejected by a lesser school, pick another one. There are a thousand to pick from that will give you a similar bang for the buck. The same is true with jobs. The highest paying ones are very competitive, and you shouldn’t expect anyone to hand you one of those. The rest? If you’re worthy, you’ll eventually find one. It might take a long time in this down economy. But everyone’s in the same boat in that regard.
I don’t want to hear straight white guys complain about how the cards are stacked against them. People who make that argument are stupid, and that’s why they find life is hard for them.
I don’t want to hear straight white guys complain about how the cards are stacked against them.
The cards are stacked against anyone not in the 1%, white or not.
I was going to put it like this: The cards are not stacked against straight white guys as such. But many of the people the cards are stacked against happen to be straight white guys all the same.
In a certain sense, I guess. But this is still a land of opportunity. Given enough basic resources, a person of modest to average intelligence can do almost anything here. But they need a decent education and some money to get started. And they’ll probably need a support group to fall back on if times get tough. Without that, you can’t afford to take a risk.
And, if they spend their whole waking life up to age 18 doing nothing but playing video games, watching internet porn, downloading music and checking their Facebook, they’re disadvantaging themselves.
I would also suggest that it’s a fool’s errand to live as if one will get by on the lowest difficulty setting for much longer. There are plenty of kids who seem to be deluded into thinking that the lowest setting is some sort of birth right. It isn’t. Demographic changes will see to that.
then they’re stunned that the only jobs available are retail and can’t even pay the rent on a crappy one bedroom apartment.
And even those aren’t as available as they once were. Thanks to places like Amazpn.com and other internet retailers.
where I am, there is no shortage of retail jobs. The difference is that white suburban kids aren’t just doing those jobs for a couple of years in high school. They’re discovering that’s all there is for people who don’t have college degrees and even some that do. They’re also discovering that the total lack of work ethic they’ve refined their whole lives means that they can hold a retail job for more than short period of time because they’re unreliable and unmotivated.
The cards are stacked against anyone not in the 1%, but there are fewer cards stacked against straight white males.
Note that the percentage of SWMs in the 1% is significantly higher than the percentage of SWMs in the 99%. Somehow I doubt that’s because SWMs are inherently better at accumulating vast quantities of wealth.
(Relatedly, the 99% is not a homogenous mass of equally-distributed powerlessness.)
The cards are stacked against anyone not in the 1%, white or not.
But not to the same degree.
Well, Boo, you really pissed my 23 year old straight white female daughter with this post (and the origin post). Some context. I’m one of those SWM of whom you speak, and I understand that I had many advantages. My family was well to do, my parents were quite literate, we never wanted for anything that mattered. My daughter understands that she has many of the same advantages, not being male the only one lacking. But we live in WV, where there is a preponderance of SWMs who do not have those advantages. Many come from poor, barely literate families, many from broken homes, they speak with a country accent that will make them “seem stupid” to city folks even if they are not. That said, here is the rant she produced on the Facebook post of your blog, a rant of which I am very proud – because she is dead-on:
“The dismissal of wealth and class is again what gets me about this- I would argue that is a huge, huge factor to be writing off. A hell of a lot of it IS inherited, especially when it comes to just learning how to exist within that ‘sphere.’ While the upper classes may give lip service to the admiration of poor people who ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps,’ that really only tends to apply provided they stop looking poor, acting poor, sounding poor, etc- people who were born to the same class, otoh, can continue to have the advantage of just knowing how to do all of these things, to be accepted in those classes, even if they lose the wealth. ‘SWM’s are all operating on a lower difficulty setting ONLY if those are the only factors you look at. Now take one and make him the homeless runaway from an abusive household, and don’t even try to tell me he’s still going to have an easier time succeeding than the black bisexual woman with a wealthy lawyer daddy who has been easily able to afford sending her to all of the best schools. The reason the previous article pissed people off is because it essentially says ‘If you’re a SWM, you inherently have things easiest (so if you fail it’s your fault),’ which is bullshit; it also takes broad sweeping averages and pretends that they apply equally to every individual, then is condescending when people disagree. I absolutely don’t think that the path to a more egalitarian society is going to be forged by dismissing, mocking, or ignoring the hardships of individuals based on race, gender, or sexuality- this doesn’t encourage empathy, which is crucial to getting people to change the ideas and behavior that hurt others, and it continues the precedent that whether someone’s words, experiences, etc matter/should be listened to respectfully is determined by race, gender, or sexuality (however well-intentioned and atypical it may be, it’s still reinforcing the idea that this kind of discrimination is ok).”
All good points.
I think because the criticism of affirmative action programs takes place, usually, in the context of either college admissions, government contracts, or professional jobs, it doesn’t normally apply to a poor kid from rural West Virginia who isn’t going to college at a competitive university, isn’t bidding on government contracts, and isn’t applying for jobs where firms are looking to diversify their staffs.
If the poor kid from West Virginia thinks he’s getting a raw deal from affirmative action, he’s probably wrong. But he’s probably not thinking about it.
It’s the suburban kids who miss out at going to Michigan and have to settle for Michigan State, or the guy who didn’t get the job at the insurance company, or whatever, that are the ones who have some plausible reason to be aggrieved.
And my point, if not the author’s, is that even those who think they’ve got a legitimate beef, really don’t. They’re operating on the lowest difficulty setting.
Now, as for your daughter’s criticism, I agree with it except that I don’t think the point is that straight white men have no excuse for failure or that white kids born into grinding poverty are the targets of the piece.
Boo says: “I don’t think the point is that straight white men have no excuse for failure.” Actually, that is the explicit point, by lumping all SWM into one basket. It’s a too big basket, and a bunch will not succeed because life was stacked against them just as much as it is against many other groups. The basket needs to be refined for this argument to be treated as serious. If it was directed explicitly at me, and people like me (and the even more fortunate), I would agree wholeheartedly.
It’s not the explicit point. If anything, the point is that Affirmative Action is not an excuse for failure. But that leaves many other available excuses. Many of them completely legitimate.
“Actually, that is the explicit point, by lumping all SWM into one basket.”
If something is explicit, it is unambiguously stated. If that is the “explicit” point, you should be able to quote something from the piece that explicitly makes this argument.
I don’t think the “…so it’s your own fault if you fail” part is even an implicit point in the piece.
I think part of the point is that it’s easier being a SWM regardless of social or economic level. A poor SWM will have an easier time of it than a poor non-SWM.
I think that’s why the original author stripped out all the conversations of class since it applies at every level.
If you look across economic levels then there is a point that it doesn’t apply, but that wasn’t the point of the article, I don’t think.