Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

The South fought the Civil War because it could not envision life without Black labor. It was a cause worth sacrificing hundreds of thousands of white Southern lives to.

White America does not need us merely for what we contribute to culture, science, or the arts. It needs us as an outlet for its rage.

We were that desperate for a white man to not be trash that we treated mediocrity like it was a masterpiece.

The concept of race in America was created for the subjugation of Black and brown bodies for the seeming benefit of white Americans. There are no pockets of America that are exempt from this. There is no liberal utopia that got a different memo.

But often these men are completely unaware of their hypocrisy because they are not doing anything out of the ordinary by centering themselves when they’ve always been centered, or by taking advantage of those who have always been taken advantage of—they’re just living according to the norms of society.

When I talk about mediocrity, I talk about how we somehow agreed that wealthy white men are the best group to bring the rest of us prosperity, when their wealth was stolen from our labor.

A political movement that focuses on class and ignores the specific ways in which gender determines the financial health and well-being of women in this country will be a movement that maintains the patriarchy.

Poor Southern whites had sold their souls for their sense of racial superiority, and for many, it was all they had. They would not let go easily.

Nothing says “American” like a boy making a woman struggle so that he can seem independent.