Best selling author Michael Z. Williamson is known for his amazing books and rampant libertarianism. He’s also an immigrant who once sat in front of an immigration official waiting to hear if he’d be sent back to England or not — as a teenager who was here legally and had certainly done nothing to deserve deportation.
So when fellow award-winning author John Scalzi went off on how being a white male is the ultimate in privilege, Mad Mike, as he is sometimes known, got a little … cranky.
Absolute statements are usually a bad idea. So when John Scalzi categorically states that “straight white male is the easiest setting in the game of life,” he’s wrong. Repeatedly.
Let’s start with one very obvious example (at least, obvious if you’re part of the culture in question). To graduate USAF Basic Training, a male, regardless of age, must complete 50 pushups. A female must complete 27.
50:27.
It’s worse in the Army, because they adjust for age, and require 50% of potential max score for your age group. So an older female can graduate with 9. That’s right, 9.
50:9.
Yes, the male has it much easier.
This continues throughout military service. Males are required to score much higher on pushups and running speed than females, and are held to standard. Ask any vet, and they can tell you of numerous females who pass with the ugliest, squintiest, not-really-pushups-but-she-tried flops.
Then there’s the fact that any male can be called from his official duties to serve as an infantryman. Females are forbidden by law from such duty. Yes, these days the lines are slippery, and some women have served up front and personal (and with honor and professionalism). But officially, by law, it cannot be mandated. Any male can be told to charge a machine gun nest. Such is “male privilege” in the military.
Please note I am not commenting on the logic or morality of said laws, just noting that these laws do exist. Men are combat troops at the general’s whim. Women are not. Men are required to maintain significantly higher standards of physical readiness.
Females can get out of a deployment or cruise in a second by stating, “I think I may be pregnant.” Bang, off the list, like that. Now, most troops are there knowing deployment is part of the mission and agreeable to it. And women do actually get pregnant. But there are some few who play the card, and for various reasons (legal, moral, practical), that reason must remain. But it is an available escape that any female has that no male has. (And note they don’t actually have to be pregnant, just claim they think they might be.)
Read the rest of it at his blog here. I don’t always agree with Mike, but he always provokes thought. And in this case he’s dead on.
I agree with much of his article but he backtracks too much. Mr. Williamson writes: Blacks are still taking a beating culturally. Similarly, SF is one of the whitest genres out there, and will remain that way unless readers can see themselves in the story, because the protagonist is black, Asian, Hispanic, gay, transsexual, overweight, blind, etc.
To me this is nonsense – black folks are 13% of the population – that is not taking a beating. By that standard science fiction can be seen as taking a beating compared to mainstream literature. If that is your attitude, it reveals more about oneself and misapplying empathy to statistics than a dispassionate view of reality. And do we then need a dialogue about Japanese in Godzilla movies? I like the moves: period. Others need their own skin in those situations? Fine, nothing to do with me.
And the idea that whites have some obligation to overcompensate by writing for blacks or gays while also reading those groups particular view of the world and so discounting their own is similar doublethink – why can I be at once lambasted for wanting to see myself in a story while awarding that to others? And whites like everything under the sun – there is no evidence whites are only interested in white things – there’s a ton of evidence blacks in America do that exact thing. In short, I don’t want to racially see myself in a story – being human’s fine, just fine.
Do black folks have some obligation to write racially – for themselves or the opposite way for others – and how is SF “white” merely by default? Should gays write for straights – the language and questions themselves are disturbing. SF certainly isn’t white on purpose. Neither is the NHL – join or don’t, I’m not having anything I do reduced to racism simply because of someone else who determines their own interests through a racial lens – I despise this language and dialogue I’ve been dragged into and that’s what white privilege does – seizes and drags people by the skin of their white necks while they’re minding their own business.
Science fiction has a long and distinguished history of telling stories to distance ourselves from ourselves so we could look back with better eyes, to escape from perceptual traps of bias and prejudice. SF therefore provides us with tools of self-criticism and examination that can be used on a personal and social level. E.M. Forester’s short story, The Machine Stops, from over 100 years ago, is an example of this. Within pop culture expressions of SF perhaps more better known would be example like E.C. Comics (Judgment Day) and the original Star Trek TV series (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield), which presented these tools to escape from perceptual traps.
For Scalzi, the head of the Science Fiction Writers of America, to fall headlong into such a trap is a disgrace. For Scalzi, a science fiction writer, to indulge in such indefensible gibberish while presenting a classic con man’s argument that is self-replicating, self-sealing and circular is somewhat amazing. The con game that is white privilege is like a black hole: nothing can escape it. The more one ignores one’s own white privilege, or refuses to acknowledge it, the more one cannot escape the backward facing anaconda-like teeth it is comprised of. The conclusion is inevitable: no matter how whites squirm, they are racists. No matter if they arrived from Poland yesterday, they are racists because they benefit from a perceptual apartheid composed of invisible walls that minorities with sad eyes bang on with their innocents little baby fists Scalzi has awarded them to break down, but to no avail – white people are simply too white.
Scalzi is using a language that can be used to demonize people by the color of their skin and that leads to the very real fact that in the past, clever and persuasive arguments using clever and persuasive language were used in courts in America and Germany to institutionally discriminate and even kill people because of their ethnicity. It is dangerous to cozen morons like Scalzi and it is dangerous to enable ideas that attach and detach morality by skin color or cheekbones.
Oh, it’s not just in the military. The standards that women have to meet to join the police force are just as low. If we were to truly be about “equality” then women would have to equally do the same amount of strength exercises as men. Of course, the thing about “equality” is that it requires us to dumb down many things so that we can be equal.
Liberty requires us to treat everyone equally; “equality” requires us to dumb everything down so no one is better than the other. Humanity has made its choice which one is preferable.
I recently met with some new affirmative silliness: I bumped into an old friend who told me he was helping organize a new playwrights’ festival. I wondered if I could enter a script or two. “Oh, it’s for gay-themed plays or plays written by gay authors.”
I guess that’s to help open doors for all those gays who have such a tough time breaking into theatre, huh? Sheesh! That’s like asking, “How can we get more blacks into basketball?”
I put the html em in properly but the italics went nuts. Williamson’s quote ends at the first paragraph.
Scalzi overlooks the fact that minorities get to play with all the cheat codes enabled.
Patrick, is the spelling in the title some sort of inside joke?
No, it’s a screwup I’ve emailed the editors about. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.
I’ve bought books by John Scalzi, and I even used to read his blog. He’s both a fine writer and a witless fool.
I stopped reading his blog, roughly, when he commented that he wished conservatives would be exiled the to the African desert, for some reason or other. I recall thinking at the time that I’d heard of him solely because Glen Reynolds had happened to mention one of his books, and I wondered if he also wanted him to die in the desert also.
Meh. I stopped buying his books and forgot about him- until all this.
Did I mention that he is a witless fool?
I have no idea how anyone who has happened to live in United States since about circa 1970 could think “white male” was the easiest difficultly setting in life- but then I notice Scalzi has lives in an overwhelmingly white area of Ohio.
I figure he just doesn’t get out much, or read much- or think much.
I pity him- and his pathetic grasp upon reality. It’s a good thing he’s such a talented writer because otherwise his life experiences wouldn’t allow him to believe such nonsense. And- considering that he’s a nice, politically correct white male- the cognitive dissonance would drive him insane.
Sad, that would be.
Wow.
What’s with the italics? It just seems like every comment has gotten some sort of strange emphasis.
Khaaaaaaaannnnn!!!!
Sorry, I’ve always wanted to do that.
I did that some how. I put tags in by mistake.
Happened to me once. I posted something dumb and every post after it was also dumb. Didn’t know it could happen with italics, though.
Hah. That’s funny.
What are these “tags” of which you speak?
I have no idea how to put “tags” on any comment I post here-hey, wait a minute. Obviously you used your “white privilege” to put tags upon comments that superseded yours- thus using that special white privilege to make everyone after you post their comments in italics- thus making those comments suspect…
Fail Burtonnnnn!!!!!!!
I used the same tags/white privilege Cortes used on the Aztecs – BOLD.
We are in html distress. Let me try:
The notion of white male privilege in modern American society is intellectually feeble. As noted, one glaring example is the difference between how men and women are evaluated for certain types of jobs.
Another statistical comparison that I would propose is the total annual per capita net tax burden of single white males versus any other racial or gender classification. While I don’t know if such demographic data exists (it’s highly unlikely since the results would not please our PC government bureaucrats) I’m sure it would show that US single white males bear the largest net tax burden.
For white males in modern American society, there is more responsibility than privilege.
“White privilege” is like “Jewish power”: an easy, self-justifying, resentful explanation for why many people who work hard and play by the rules do relatively well in life.
I’d love to know why, with all his white male privilege smoothing the way for him, my husband lost his 20-year career in the crash of 2008 and now must work nights and weekends for less than half the pay!
(Please forgive the personal rant. Sometimes the condescension DOES feel personal.)
John Scalzi is Exhibit #1 for the proposition that one must divorce one’s politics from one’s entertainment choices. If I were to cease to watch movies whose actors’, producers’, and directors’ politics differ from mine, I’d se about one movie per decade. It’s the same with fiction, music, and television.
I’m told Scalzi writes well. I haven’t read any of his books; his sort of story doesn’t appeal to me. But if he can produce a decent entertainment that’s not inherently anti-capitalist or anti-freedom, his fans can shrug off his personal views.
(Full disclosure: I write too: mainly SF and contemporary supernatural fantasy. My books are all imbued with a pro-freedom attitude. A few readers have written to suggest that I downplay that attitude. Inasmuch as the promotion of a pro-freedom mindset is a great part of my reason for writing, I shrug it off — but the criticism is an important one. The first obligation of a creator of entertainment is to entertain; if he fails at that, none of his convictions on any substantive subject will make up for it.)
The critical cultural undertaking in our time is to combat left-wing political statements embedded in the entertainments themselves. It’s all right if the actors in a movie are socialists; it’s emphatically not all right if the movie promotes the idea that capitalism is from Hell and socialism is from Heaven, or that individual freedom is evil and top-down command-and-control of society by a privileged, unquestionable elite is morally mandatory. That’s the cleavage over which we’re called to fight.
There’s been a fight for many years in Israel over whether to listen to Wagner publicly – some will, some won’t.
For me art is a very delicate thing, easily tainted. I associated art with the brightest qualities in humans, not the dregs. I can only remember 3 times in my life where I heard statements from musicians and never listened to them again.
When it comes to SF, for whatever reason, perhaps because of the fine art space I perceive it once occupied as a result of being an economic second cousin to mainstream literature and therefore somewhat freer to express itself in that non-traditional space, I expect more.
Probably best I don’t know more than I do about artists – on the other hand, all I really expect is intellectual and artistic honesty. I don’t really see how any artist in the world can participate in such casual racism as Scalzi and be capable of expressing true art. Maybe I’m wrong.