White, straight men have often functioned as a norm for studies about men in the United States, standing in for men in general. One effect of this generalizing tendency has been to obscure the historical and ideological pressures that shape white men as white men. Just as the cultural status conveyed by a business suit depends on a kind of standardized anonymity, straight white men often function as a privileged standard by virtue of what they supposedly are not: black, "irrational," "flamboyant,"or "exotic." In short, colorful. While these terms and ideas might seem to refer only to shallow stereotypes, Michel Foucault's work suggests that such cultural representations profoundly influence people's sense of who they are and of what is possible for them. If white men typically avoid color and "flamboyance," the roots for this attitude lie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Several important things that still affect white men in the U.S. happened during this period: their integration into large bureaucracies, fighting forces, and corporations; the start of a continuing decline in the centrality of manual labor; the definition and dissemination of the idea of "the" homosexual; economic and cultural imperialism linked to Anglo-Saxon supremacy; first wave feminism; and the codification of a segregated society that found its fullest expression in Southern Jim Crow legislation, but also reflected many whites' attitudes in the North and the West.

In order for white men to rationalize their privileges under segregation, they imagined themselves as transcending their particular self-interests and speaking for society as a whole. As Toni Morrison has pointed out, this meant presenting whiteness as something neutral--the blending of all colors that somehow transcends and contains them. The belief that white men represented society's interests was at least as old as slavery in the Americas, but it had formally applied mainly to the wealthy. However, with the onset of universal male suffrage, first for whites, then supposedly for all men, the only way to maintain black disenfranchisement was to equate adult "objectivity" with all white men and "child-like" "irrationality" with men of color and women. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, racism in the U.S. was bolstered by political imperialism in the Philippines and economic and cultural imperialism elsewhere. White men, so the ideology went, were fit to be self-governing, while darker-skinned peoples needed help to be governed--the so-called "white man's burden."

The political belief equating self-governance with white skin was paralleled by an economic belief equating discipline with authority. The new middle class workers in the late nineteenth century portrayed themselves as detached observers whose individual perceptions and opinions were subordinate to their training and professional standards. As the twentieth century progressed, more and more occupations, from accountants to teamsters, adopted this professional paradigm. Similarly, businessmen's growing power was explained as the result of their "hard-headed" objectivity and disciplined pursuit of profits. In a society riven by race and gender inequalities, the cultural template for objectivity and expertise has thus tended to be a white, middle or upper class male. Women and men of color often have to prove that their ideas are not self-interested or naive while white men's attitudes are equated with objectivity itself. Yet the authority associated with white men depends on them continually translating their wants into an objective-sounding, universalist language. Speaking or acting otherwise is perceived as behaving like a woman, a gay man, or a person of color and threatens their cultural status.

Many of the things often said about white men today, especially straight men (that they have trouble expressing their feelings directly, that they focus exclusively on their careers, even that they can't dance) can be traced back to the historical mandate that they justify their privileges by disguising their desires. The alienation this causes is especially evident in contemporary representations of male bodies. As Eldridge Cleaver has pointed out, in a society where certain groups of men perform manual labor and others administrate, the groups that perform manual labor tend to be portrayed as more embodied. In a racially segregated society where men of color do much of the manual labor, they are associated with embodiment. Hence the cultural stress on black men's sexual prowess, "natural" rhythm, and athletic ability. Besides the racist implication that black men are unfitted to intellectual work, this thinking limits white men by assuming that they are less embodied, less sexual, and less expressive than other men.

Representations of working class white men's bodies, however, reveal the anxieties and fantasies of the men (largely of middle class origin) who create these images by emphasizing discipline and utility. Images of cowboys, soldiers, athletes, and other working class heroes have machine-like bodies that pursue specific tasks--winning the war, stopping the bad guys, hitting the home run, sleeping with a woman. In a different way, white men romanticized or celebrated as "rebels" are often working class men who act like men of color, but keep themselves distinct from them. Marlon Brando in The Wild One, the young Elvis Presley, and Steven Segal's martial arts films are good examples.

On the other hand, one reason that gay white men are often the object of violence is because they "flaunt" things that white men are not "supposed" to--embodiment and pleasure, a wide range of aesthetic and emotional self-expressions, and a willingness, in some quarters, to transgress gender constraints. In fact, one factor contributing to right-wing homophobia is a belief that most gay men are white and middle class but don't accept the sexual and expressive alienation that conservatives think is the price of middle class security. Furthermore, white gay men's bodies have often been portrayed as effeminate, "degenerate," or dying, images that may find their roots in late nineteenth century worries about eugenics, reproduction, tuberculosis, and race purity as well as theories about "sexual inversion" and concerns about the hardiness of men in urban settings. Unfortunately, the fact that gay men were one of the first groups in the United States to feel the impact of the worldwide AIDS/HIV epidemic has reinforced homophobic images of their bodies as diseased.

Given the alienation many white men feel from their bodies and feelings, it is not surprising that some of them turn to the mytho-poetic movement and non-European rituals such as sweat-lodges in an attempt to reconnect with embodiment and expressiveness. The historical framework sketched out in this entry, however, suggests that the flip side of white men accepting themselves as shamen, poets, and wild men is them accepting women, gay men, and men of color as supervisors, objective authorities, and Presidents. It also suggests that any change in images and understandings of white men in the culture will be tied to disassociating whiteness from objectivity and universality. One of the most helpful things that white men can do to better understand themselves, then, is to think about their concerns as white men's issues, as opposed to "men's issues" in general.

Having thought about what it means to be white, perhaps another useful step for white men to take is to question the concept of whiteness itself. After all, the label "white" only carries much weight in a racist society that places importance on not being "colored." Even on the superficial level of skin tone, "white" people tend to run the range from pink to rose to olive. But even more importantly, as Werner Sollors has demonstrated, few ethnic identities and traditions are "pure." Besides being composed of a variety of nationalities and ethnicities (Angles, Celts, Jutes, Prussians, Bavarians, Gauls, and Picts, to name a few) "pure" white culture incorporates elements of other cultures and traditions. White rock and roll, for example, is built upon borrowings and interactions with African American traditions, and it's probably safe to assert that most young white people identify more with rock musicians than with singers of Breton lays. Similarly, hardly an office worker today, white or otherwise, is uninfluenced by Japanese management concepts. The accent so central to many white southerners sense of themselves probably owes its lilting cadences to the influence of slaves' West African speech rhythms, and the white longshoreman who thinks of himself as "macho" is appealing to a Hispanic concept. Examples like these suggest that white identity is neither pure nor unchanging--that its genealogy is mixed. In a 1902 novel that helped reinvigorate the Ku Klux Klan across the United States, Thomas Dixon repeatedly asked, "Shall the future American be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto?" Today, a saner question might be, "If the United States is to prosper and thrive, how can its citizens think of their cultural ancestries, however distinctive, as anything other than a complex and enriching mixture?"

 Warren Hedges, English Dept., Southern Oregon University, 9/95