Does ‘White Male Rage’ Exist?
Last week, Brett Kavanaugh stood accused of sexual assault and gang rape. He insisted in Senate testimony that he was being smeared. In doing so, he showed anger. And the press sought to comment on that anger.
Many compared his approach before the Senate Judiciary Committee to that of Clarence Thomas, another Republican nominee to the Supreme Court who stood accused of sexual misconduct and lashed out at Democrats, angrily impugning their motives with a show of indignation. But despite those parallels—and prominent voices that preemptively urged Kavanaugh to draw on Thomas’s testimony as a model for getting confirmed—many other observers cast the anger that Kavanaugh displayed as a trait of the racial and gender groups to which he belongs.
Variations on the phrase white male rage were everywhere. Some meant only to suggest that Kavanaugh could get away with shouting and crying in a way that an African American or a woman never could. While anger would be a more accurate word than rage, I have no objections to folks who raised that hypothesis; indeed, I am convinced by the evidence for gender inequities in responses to male and female anger.
Many others, however, used white male rage to suggest a group characteristic, implying that white men manifest a kind of rage worth distinguishing from the familiar emotion known to humans of all races and genders. Had they carefully marshaled evidence for the proposition that white men are disproportionately “enraged,” rather than angry within normal parameters; that they are statistically more likely to manifest rage; or that their rage is different in kind from that of other groups, I’d have read their arguments with curiosity. But that isn’t what happened.
Around the turn of the century, when I began to study journalism as an aspiring reporter rather than as a dedicated newspaper reader, Keith M. Woods, then dean of faculty,” that captured what most newspaper editors I would work with in the aughts regarded as enlightened best practices.
