My struggle to own who I am as a White man

(along with my struggle not to own what doesn’t belong to me)

I am, just like you, a human being—a member of the human race. But in North America, in late 2019 C.E., I am gendered “male” and raced “White”—in other words, a White man. (if curious, here’s why I capitalize “White”)

I‘ve never been emotionally attached to these identities; I never felt any pull to “be a man,” and I certainly never felt any affinity around being “White.” I, like all children, arrived in this world innocent of the boxes society would put me into.

Me circa 1989, playing with a portable lawn sprinkler in my grandparents’ yard

I was a high-functioning autistic child (a.k.a. Aspergers, yes) who integrated late into public school, where for a while I was constantly tormented for not fitting in. I had to quickly learn to accept that I was not “normal,” and three months before my 13th birthday, after a particularly tough day of bullying, my conscious search for my own identity began.

My struggles with race

I grew up in a very liberal town that was majority but not overwhelmingly White, with plenty of immigrant families of various origins. The high school student population was not majority White, in part because some of the White families in my town sent their kids off to private schools. The rich diversity of the student body gave me access to certain experiences that most North American White adults today did not have in childhood.

Throughout middle and high school, I often found refuge from being bullied with immigrant children, almost all of whom were not raced White, who also often occupied the status of outsiders. I loved being able to speak Spanish and Haitian Creole with my friends and momentarily escape the Anglo-normative straitjacket. I did everything I could to avoid “being White,” including wearing appropriative clothing from other cultures (which I do not recommend, in case that isn’t clear).

My high school had both a Black Student Union and a Haitian Club; I was the only White kid in either space. And it was in Black Student Union that I found out that no matter how much I tried, I would never stop being raced White and be simply “human”—just as I would never be simply “normal” — even though it is often much easier for me to momentarily forget how I am raced than it is for many others.

“You are protected in your skin. You have no idea what being Black is,” my classmate and fellow Black Student Union member K told me. She was determined to make sure I knew that Blackness was not some identity I could just take up as my own. In one tense exchange after school, I left a room in tears after K and other Black students rightfully confronted me hard on some racist assumptions I had made about “talking Black.” I’ve long since recognized how those tense interactions taught me much more about our shared humanity, across race, than I would have learned otherwise.

Race is a painful artificial construct. We are all human beings and we all bleed red. These awful divisions by skin color and other features serve no purpose but to divide us against each other, and make us easier to control and exploit. Many White people feel the beginnings of that dreadful pain, that others know only too well, once our Whiteness becomes too explicitly named for our comfort. But after 500 years of this history, we would be fools to deny how it has constructed our reality: ALL of us—not just people of Color—live a raced life, and it is “Whitist” (or “racist,” if you prefer) to deny this. Wishing something away doesn’t make it go away. White supremacists understand the inescapability of race, and the rest of us would do well to understand it also, so we can more effectively deal with them.

This did take me a long time to fully accept. Today I feel no more connected culturally or spiritually to any “White” identity than I ever did—but my attributed race-status of “White,” unwanted as it is, can still be put to good anti-racist use, with time and learning. I believe that the more we get to know what our White-racedness means [without glorifying it of course], the less we’ll feel the temptation to appropriate and police others’ racial experiences, as I have unwittingly done many times.

My later struggles with masculinity norms

I was lucky to grow up in an environment that did not pressure me much around masculinity. My father, though very much a masculine man, was and is a warm soul, free of pretense and always eager for loving connection. Neither of my parents ever exhorted me to “be a man,” or even framed “manhood” as something I should actively strive towards. And while there were certainly a great deal of normative socializing pressures in school, my struggles in that area were felt much more through the lens of my neurodivergence (i.e., my high-functioning autism) than through the lens of gender.

Looking back, I can identify two other factors, in addition to my supportive family environment, that protected me from gender struggles in adolescence: I was cisgender; I did not struggle with the basic idea that I was a boy, as much as I wasn’t overly attached to it. And the fact that I was a boy meant that I never faced the inevitable flood of ubiquitous sexualization of my body that teen girls are usually subject to, which spared me from having to think hard about how to perform boyhood well.

Things changed when I got into my first long-term relationship at 22. I had had a few shorter relationships, but this was the first time I had lived with someone that wasn’t my parents. It became stormy very quickly, and I got very angry very often, which would make things much worse. I didn’t fully see how much worse until I had to go through anger management and a domestic violence intervention program in order to stay out of jail.

I remember thinking many times, after my blow-ups: “Why am I acting like this? Where is this rage coming from?” Though I was a stubborn kid who had a history of getting angry, I did not think of myself as violent. I felt like I was simply going out of character every so often. I knew it was a problem—but I didn’t take the problem seriously enough, because I rationalized that this wasn’t really me.

I now look back at my biggest masculine role model by far—my father—and see the intergenerational roots of these toxic behaviors I picked up. When my father’s warmth turned hot, he would bare his rage loudly and fiercely; as a White man, his anger was validated and taken seriously. I took after him in this respect. I learned that brandishing my anger could get me what I wanted. I remember several instances in which I publicly yelled at people, smashed objects, and once even threw a whole rack of clothes to the floor in a department store (the police didn’t even get called). I justified all this by telling myself that it was OK as long as I never physically assaulted someone out of anything but clear self-defense—which was the limit my father had generally put on his own rage.

I now very much associate this public rage with being raced White and gendered male. Why? Because up until I crossed certain lines in my relationship, there had been few to no negative consequences for my combative behavior. Whereas the anger of people who are not White and male too often gets ignored, pathologized, or used as an excuse to repress or injure, my anger was mostly respected, and thus rewarded.

Somewhere deep inside ourselves, those of us White men who get outwardly angry often integrate this hidden knowledge into our psyche—that our rage will be taken seriously and handled with care (even if we don’t associate this with our race and gender). We take after the White men around us, like I with my father; we develop expectations of being able to get what we want if we show a willingness to throw down for it. When people talk of “White male entitlement” in the context of anger, this is what is meant—and in many of us, it only gets worse in moments when our rage doesn’t work. We often will try again, with a higher intensity of fury, with the [entitled] thinking that this should work—or we give up and turn the anger inward, into a stone-cold numbness, until it one day bursts out again, often uncontrollably, in a manner that harms ourselves and others.

I had to give up this entitlement—to use rage to enforce ownership over how other people should respect me—to get free of the cycle of rage. My anger is my own, and it does matter; I pay attention when I get angry. But I’m also aware that being angry entitles me to absolutely nothing extra from anyone else.