The unbearable whiteness of being

by David Benjamin

“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” —President Andrew Johnson, 1866

MADISON, Wis.—It did not occur to me, until maybe my eighth birthday, that I was white. Once that awareness had sunk in, I shrugged it off because until that epiphany—and afterwards, too—I had only thought about skin color in two contexts. One was the wish that my own surface was darker so that I might tan in the summer sun rather than burn. Second was curiosity about the taciturn “Indians” (since rebranded Native Americans) who lived next door, and about the black GIs who came to town from Camp McCoy to carouse at the local bars.

However, as I was uprooted from my small town, grew up and tiptoed toward an adult world of business and ambition, smoking and drinking, I felt almost imperceptibly the presence of a vast fraternity that was waiting for me to join up. White-guy culture had me in its sights. Gradually, I came to recognize the qualities that would make me a man’s man among manly men. I already had the prime qualification. I’d been born white. Beyond that, I figured out that I needed to cultivate an air of genteel vulgarity, an implicit sense of social hierarchy, and an arrogant knowingness secured by a stolid absence of curiosity.

Before I knew what I was doing, I demurred. By failing to embrace whiteness as the soul of my identity, I bumbled off in a direction from which I could not turn back. I didn’t begin to understand how this choice would affect the rest of my life until one day, on the Cherokee Golf Course. There, after flailing comically at the dimpled white ball, missing it entirely, slicing it into the weeds, skipping it along the fairway like a flat rock on a scum-green pond and finally flinging my club in frustration, I decided to walk off the third fairway and never play this stupid game again. I did this partly because I sucked at golf—a correctable condition—but mostly because I didn’t care.

Golf is a white-guy sacrament. White guys care more about golf, talk more and anguish more about golf, invest more feeling into golf that they can muster up for home, family, country, God, sex and even the Republican Party.

By kissing golf goodbye, I was cutting from my future an elite network of men who call one another “buddy,” who had the power to initiate me into a world of prosperity, camaraderie, misogyny and repressed inadequacy that can only accrue to a guy whose foremost, defining quality is a whiteness that goes all the way to the bone.

Not all white guys are alike, of course. You can tell them apart if you try, and you can tell them from guys who look white but aren’t quite white enough. But you have to study the species. For example, like birds of a feather, white guys cluster and flap together, preferably in habitats that are “exclusive.” This is why golf is so important, because country clubs are, of course, among the most exclusionary oases of white-guy privilege in every modern country. To paraphrase Jesus, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Jew, a woman or a black guy to enter Augusta National.”

It is in these cloistered quarters where white guys, soaking up Johnnie Walker Blue and Courvoisier, and smoking Cohibas, sink into a patois unique to their tribe, a language marked by mendacious sexual boasting, lame ribaldry, property values, stock market war stories, transactional ethics, golf-course anecdotes and the soothing intercourse of casual bigotry. Here, among their fellow white guys, conversation is fluid and uninhibited, unlike their efforts—outside the cocoon—to talk to women, whom they regard as inferior while haunted by a suspicion that the bitch sees right through me.

Whiteness, after all, is perilously close to outright translucence.

I tend to eavesdrop on white guys in airport lounges, where they are abundant and they think—for some reason—that nobody is listening to their phone dialogs. These exchanges convey a binary impression that veers from domineering to whininess, and back again. I listen as the white guy behind me announces who among his intimates are his favorites and the favors they’ve exchanged. I listen to disquisitions on the niche of knowledge in which he deems himself an expert and I hear his philosophy in that field, articulated in twenty thousand tendentious words over the span of a half-hour, which would be blessedly soporific if only the guy were not so goddamn loud. He talks, of course, about sports but superficially, as though he watches every game while texting and scrolling—like a teenage girl—on his mobile phone. In all his talk, the persistent theme is a haunting sense of teetering privilege. I listen to the relentless undertone of his neuroses. He unbreasts elliptically about a wife who doesn’t understand, about offspring who mock and ignore him, about a job in which he declares himself proficient and on the way up, but which—like Jonathan Edwards’ sinner—balances him on a slippery cliff above a fiery pit.

There is no music in his conversation, nor is there art, literature, history—nor interest in any such diversions from his manly affairs. He talks of travel, but only to compare hotels and boast of whom he had dinner with, in which multi-star restaurant in which city, and whether there were women involved. He doesn’t remember what he ate.

His sense of politics is derivative of his tribe and their commercial interests. It is thus, largely, more reactionary than conservative, and deeply naive because he’s not curious beyond his own shell and just doesn’t care.

Strangely, he perceives himself subject to countless discomforts, affronts and inconveniences. He lives a life so victimized that he regards as insensitive and even cruel anyone who does not share his outrage at the trouble he’s seen. His pain is exclusive, ineffable and inconsolable. It is the wellspring of his solipsism. It explains why, as babies starve to death in the Sudan and police in Memphis drag black men from their cars and beat them to death in the gutter, the deep and abiding rage of white guys focuses instead on the slow delivery of their cocktails by the stewardesses in Business Class.

Of course, it’s possible for a Jew or a black man to penetrate the culture of white-guy elitism, but the self-negation required leaves little room for dignity or self-esteem. Clarence Thomas purged himself thoroughly and desperately from the rich culture of black America, only to end up cadging handouts from a boys club of WASP organ-grinders who look down, piteously fostering his delusion that he belongs.

If there is a living patron saint of white-guy culture, it might be Jared Kushner, a recovering Jew so inept that he can’t even smile, but he looks—and acts—whiter than Albert Speer, Tucker Carlson and Donny Osmond all rolled into one. And if there exists a signature image of white-guy culture, it’s that video clip of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump leering and giggling while they assign grades to the tits and ass on the dance floor at a Palm Beach fleshpot called Maison de l’Amitie.

Today, of course, Trump says he barely knew the guy, and never laid a finger on any of the nymphets Epstein “provided” to his “friends.”

From which we can derive the secret of white-guy success. They might have people they call friends. But it’s a sort of skin-deep friendship that’s based on convenience, plausible deniability and ease of disposal.

Or, as Crocodile Dundee once said, “You can live on it, but it tastes like shit.”