No One Is Talking About The Appropriation Of White Male Culture
America has a real problem with cultural sensitivity, and I can’t take one more instance of cultural appropriation disrespecting a maligned demographic of Americans: the white male!
There is barely anything that’s sacrosanct for white men that society doesn’t steal and appropriate for all kinds of offensive and disrespectful purposes, starting with failing upward. That’s our thing! It’s a time-honored tradition going back centuries where, no matter how lazy our work ethic is, or substandard our achievements are, we white men nonetheless get promoted and awarded salary increases. But now that women and people of color are beginning to rise up through the ranks of various professions faster than us white males, they’re beginning to take undeserved workplace promotions for themselves! My white male colonialist ancestors must be rolling in their graves!
Even more insulting, it’s now considered cool and “edgy” to denigrate our longstanding cultural tradition of puns and witticisms. They’re not “Dad-jokes,” they’re just jokes! I’m often disappointed how our sense of humor is always being hyphenated, and kept marginalized outside the mainstream of comedy. Our corny jokes and pithy, droll maxims are just as valid as any other form of humor! “Working hard, or hardly working?” “Don’t spend it all in one place!” “Fish and visitors stink in three days.” Hilarious! Ben Franklin was the godfather of white male humor, and his Poor Richard’s Almanac has been kept out of the canon of funniest works of all time for far too long, and I can’t help but think it’s because of his gender and race!
Speaking of books, I went to the bookstore the other day, and found some women and a couple of Hispanic kids in the history section. Thankfully I caught them just in time before they got to the WWII shelves so I could hold my hands out and tell them they were trampling through a sanctified space for white men! Being an expert on all things WWII is our thing! There have been so many other conflict zones throughout human history, can’t we white men just have one war to ourselves? I was so offended that I took all the George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Omar Bradley biographies I could fit in my arms and bought them just to make sure these venerated texts would be honored with the reverence they deserve!
And then I went next door to the shoe store, and found yet another insult to my people! A Black woman was buying a pair of New Balance shoes! When there are so many shoe brands and styles to choose from, why would she feel the need to pick a New Balance sneaker? I’d never do Blackface, so why would she think it appropriate to do Whitefeet? And I’m offended that corporate New Balance would cheapen my white male experience by mass marketing our cultural footwear to the masses with no respect for how sacred the big, iconic “N” symbol is for us white men! Talk about problematic commercialization! She was probably buying those shoes for a Halloween costume, or some other trivializing caricature of white men, but she has no idea what it means to us.
You see, a New Balance shoe is an integral part of one of our most cherished rituals: mowing the lawn. Our revered elders wear those shoes while cultivating and tending their yard sanctuaries, and, when they’re finally finished, they stand with hands on their hips in prayerful admiration of their godly labor before going in and leaving their grass-stained New Balance shoes in the garage. The deeper the shade of green on that holy “N,” the more honor and esteem is bestowed upon that white male.
So just remember, in our brave, new era of Wokeness and empathetic sensitivity to all points of view and demographic identities, to take a moment and consider how we white males interact with and exist in the world. We’re doing the hard work of adapting to our digital culture’s more enlightened societal consciousness, and slowly but surely making the changes in our behavior all the other genders and ethnicities ask of us. We only ask the same of everyone else.
Thanks for taking a minute and putting yourself in the New Balances of a white male.
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