Abstract
In Angry White Men, sociologist Michael Kimmel does what all my favorite sociology does: he reveals the invisible threads among seemingly disparate phenomena, and provides a vocabulary we didn’t know we needed, helping us to concretize something we have experienced, but failed to fully understand.
Kimmel uses a pastiche of fieldwork, interviews, existing statistics, and previous research to explore some of the most virulent rage in the country. The book includes a close examination of men who have gone on shooting rampages in their schools and workplaces, and of seething white supremacists trying to mobilize a race war. Angry White Men also contains stories of jingoistic Tea Party activists, callous batterers and rapists, and misogynistic Men’s Rights activists. While many of the chapters profile those who lash out violently, the sentiments that drive these dramatic behaviors bear something in common with more mundane bitterness that will hit close to home for many readers. Echoes of the anger Kimmel describes are heard in complaints about political correctness at the office, in the rants about welfare made your family friend at Thanksgiving, and in the exasperation of that subset of students who feel they were penalized by race or gender when applying for a graduate program or job.
While white men as a group may be faring well, at the individual level, many are overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness. They have been blindsided by the shifting structure of wealth in the United States: a sea change of deindustrialization, globalization, increased “efficiencies,” and economic recession have created the greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age. At the same time, civil rights movements have opened the doors to many sanctuaries previously the province of white men alone. Kimmel argues that these men have a right to be frustrated. Jobs are harder to find, hours longer, and compensation packages for the middle and working classes have been whittled away—and, for the first time, they are expected to share what remains. This is what downward mobility feels like.
To make things worse, existing gender norms mean that this diminishing economic and social position not only undermines their ability to pay the bills and save for retirement, it threatens their masculinity. In response to what for many is a hovering sense of emasculation, displays of violence present themselves as readily available resources easy to deploy in an effort to live up to existing notions about what it means to be a “real” man.
No one likes to struggle, but this sense of deprivation is a particularly bitter pill, because these men presumed their future would be secure. This is a group who felt a career they could take pride in was their birthright. This is why the dominant emotional response to insecurity is not fear, sadness, or disappointment (though such feelings are present), but rather a profound sense of what Kimmel insightfully pinpoints as “aggrieved entitlement,” a slow burning rage stoked by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, and by a swarm of advocacy groups seeking support (e.g., anti-immigrant groups).
The life they feel entitled to—a sense of entitlement most people of color and many white women have never had the luxury of experiencing—has been taken away. Rather than questioning the privilege they felt was guaranteed them, they look to assign blame. Their anger is misdirected, landing not on growing class inequality, downsizing corporations, big box stores that have obliterated small businesses, or on our eviscerated social safety net, but rather on white women, people of color, and immigrants who they see as having taken what should be theirs.
Rather than seeing the birthright their forefathers once knew as predicated upon inequality, they mistake the recalibration toward diversity as the injustice. In an ironic twist, programs like affirmative action are mistakenly thought to have introduced injustice rather than slowly begun to ameliorate it.
Kimmel does more than establish that these men are sexist, racist, and/or xenophobic. He artfully illuminates how and why they feel this way, and chronicles the disconcerting consequences of these caustic resentments. Scholars of race, class, and gender, and especially of masculinity, will receive Angry White Men enthusiastically. It is provocative, accessible, and often wry. It will inspire robust debate in many undergraduate classrooms.
It will not, however, be popular with angry white men. I say this not in jest, but as a lone critique. Had Kimmel spent more time on the segments of the book that establish why this anger is misdirected, and less time on its grisly outcomes, I think it would have proven an effective tool for diffusing aggrieved entitlement among the “everyman” he describes. It is a shame that the men I recognize in these pages would not want to read it. Still, Kimmel’s sharp analysis and insights are a treasure trove for those of us not in his crosshairs.