Cassandra Voices

Tag: 2018November

  • The Slow Death of White Male Privilege

    The history books are laden with white men changing the world, from Alexander the Great to Churchill. Look at our religions- Jesus and all his disciples are white. Every saint painted on a fresco is white. The great explorers of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were all white. Every astronaut who landed on the moon has been white. Every statue we have from antiquity to the Renaissance is a thing of white marble beauty. Even the most famous wizards of all time–Merlin, Gandalf and Dumbledore–are all white old men. And of course movie stars have been white males from the Silent Era to the present. Finally, who runs and has run the Western governments since time immemorial, only old good ol’ white men.

    This may create a perception that white men are exceptional. Is it any wonder then that people of all races, religions, social status and nationalities look to white people to lead them? It’s the perception of trust that leads to a feeling of entitlement: ‘I can be President. I can be an astronaut.’ And the stereotype has been fed time and again by artists, the media, politicians, universities, military organizations, educational systems and now marketing departments.

    It has been established that people who are more attractive have a better chance of landing a job than those who are not. Given our heritage, what is sexier than a white male fueled by innate self-confidence.

    And what happens when we come across white men in history who may have noble ideals but end up killing millions?  We frame them as tragic figures with flaws that lead to disastrous outcomes (Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Richard Nixon) or misunderstood (Julius Ceasar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lenin) and a warning to other white men not to make the same mistakes. After all it is assumed that white men in power are basically good guys, who will do the right thing.

    Is it any wonder then that we feel secure at a reptilian level when we see a white guy in power? After all, we know the history of white guys and with it the frequent narrative of progress: haven’t they done a good job for the vast majority of humanity? And if they haven’t, who are we to trust? In any case we can always (at least in liberal democracies) get rid of the white guys that are bad apples, and replace them with white guys who will do better.

    Of course this is a very Eurocentric view of the world, but who can argue that our interconnected world is not a product of the Age of Discovery (circa 1500 to 1700), the Enlightenment (c. 1600-1800) and Colonialism (1600-1900), all led by governments, leaders, and thinkers that were white men?

    We can argue about their methods, and whether we would be better off without them, but we cannot argue against the proposition that they have been largely responsible for creating the modern world. The representation of white men from history, from art, to science, to commerce is long and well-rooted, and it is there that we find the root of white male privilege.

    As a white man the odds of you getting the job, education, spouse, bank loan or a role in a major motion picture acting role you aspired to were significantly higher than if you were from any other gender or ethnicity. That is the American Dream we talk about, although what we all know is that it is really the white man’s dream. How can we question whether there exists White Male Privilege then? Indeed, if you are a white male and not in a position of power or wealth, many people will assume there is something wrong with you.

    From this perspective can you see the appeal of Trump? A rich white guy, who promises to change a broken two party system run by white men. A white guy, who promises to come in and throw out the other white guys, who have been corrupted by power and wealth. A white guy, who blames women and minorities and immigrants for the country’s woes. The country was doing dandy under the white guys, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., until that black guy came into office and some white lady became speaker of the House. Conservatives (mostly white folks) want a return to the status quo and can you blame them? America has been great for white people so far.

    If you’ve come this far thinking I am Conservative, or worse, then this next bit is gonna be a let down. I am not. In fact, my argument is that this long history is starting to crack, and indeed will crumble over the next fifty to one hundred years. Our children and grand-children could be in for a real treat, as the world moves in fits and starts out of the Age of the White Man, and into the Age of, well, whatever we call it in two hundred years.

    We have already seen the beginning of this in the twentieth century. With some exceptions, every country in Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania has thrown off the yoke of colonial white masters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yeah, people of Spanish, English and Chinese heritage control some countries, but they were at least born in those countries and serve the inhabitants instead of a bureaucracy in Peking or London of Madrid. This means that new leaders who aren’t white are getting a chance to change the course of their country’s political history.

    How about Europe, where the leaders of he two biggest economies, U.K. and Germany are women?

    The world’s second and third largest economies? China and Japan (the EU doesn’t count as a country) are run by indigenous Chinese and Japanese.

    African and South American countries are run by local governments, increasingly at liberty to forge regional alliances that do not involve European powers.

    In the US there are black television channels (BET), Hispanic television channels (Univision), movies with all black production units and stars that are no longer on the fringes of society: they are mainstreaming.

    As for university curricula, well you can major in Spanish, Chinese, African, Asian, African American, and Women’s Studies at just about every place of higher learning in the US.

    Artists? Who are the biggest stars on the planet today? Lady Gaga, Dre Dre, Madonna, Taylor Swift, BTS? Who makes the best music? Kendrick Lamar (Pulitzer Prize). White crooners like Elvis, Sinatra, Harry Connick have disappeared, boy bands have crawled back under the rocks from whence they came, even the most popular singer-songwriters all seem to either non-white or female.

    I am not saying that white males don’t have a leg up anymore. But the system has been rigged in their favor for hundreds of years. It is going to take some time for that ebb away. Now that increasingly all kids can look up and see people of their own skin color, sex, sexual orientation, and religion make it, they can have the confidence to do so too. They will work harder knowing it is possible to succeed.

    And we are just starting to see how the crumbling of their privilege is affecting white men. The confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh is a perfect microcosm. Why were Conservatives in such a hurry? After all, there were plenty of conservative white men more qualified than Kavanaugh for the job.

    Midterms are coming up, and to start the confirmation process again risked hitting the speed bump of an altered Senate, where there is no guarantee that white conservative men will control either branch. They had to get this guy and they had to do it now.

    The white male fears run deeper. With a majority of white male conservatives on the Supreme Court, white men think they can now rest more easily, secure in the knowledge they may have one remaining ally in the years to come, when white people will not longer be a majority in the country, and when Blacks and Latinos and LBGTQ and women, and Indians, and Chinese will start to win districts that were were once the preserve white men.

    The Brahmans in Congress know their time is limited, and this was the last major push to keep a hold on a power they have enjoyed since the foundation of the state. So hats off to them, but it it won’t last.

    What we’re seeing now is the last wheezing breath of old white men in power, pathetically clinging to it like an addict who cannot quit, and refuses to die, because their vanity demands they go on using others.

    Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court, but the tide of history is too powerful at this point. Instead of leaving a legacy to be proud of, they will leave a stain we will all wash out eventually, so that instead of being remembered they will be forgotten, once new leaders with vision take over.

    In one hundred years you won’t read about Mitch McConnell or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump, but about Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Ruth Badar Ginsberg, Angela Merkel, Serena Williams, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Neil Degrasse Tyson. After all, they are who kids look up to these days, and certainly not George Bush or Donald Trump or Samuel Alito. Wanna know why? Because if you are white, male, grew up in Kentucky, and have an eighth-grade-education, your whiteness won’t get you where you want anymore. Republican policies will ensure you don’t have access to a proper education, healthcare, a healthy environment, or social services. Live in a city however, where you can hustle, make connections, go to college, and kill it in law school, and you will have a pretty good shot at making Partner one day, or even the Supreme Court.

    We will see the fading of trust in white power and a belief in leadership which is colour and gender blind. That is my hope anyway.

  • Casino

    Part I

    You know your father used to go to school next to the Casino at Marino, him and his friends would play around it.

    For years I would ignore my dad’s connection with the Casino, it was too incongruous a pairing to stick. Two histories known to one site but held discordant in my mind and never sitting side by side—always one leaving as the other entered. One is a topic of the history books, with its subject clearly delimited through Italianate paintings and Enlightenment-era discourse. An illustrious period of history, as we are taught, basking in the light of privilege. The other is closer to the bone, a murky memory passed down a generation. A privation I didn’t know in detail, in language, but rendered visible over time as his years crumbled away into tragedy.

    Only later when studying the history of art would the two discrete worlds surface once again in my consciousness. Following the official account propagated by the history books and further confounded by the classroom teachings, the image of my father was conjured up and left floundering, left groundless against the staunch record that preceded him.

    A casino is traditionally a small house designed for leisure and entertaining, a folly for the upper-classes typically built on the grounds of a stately home. The Casino at Marino, as artefact, took up just a snippet of the curriculum. Its teaching, however, echoed the rehashed idealism of neoclassicism, where a masterly imitation of nature was replaced by a masterly display of the idea, of the rational mind or idealised subject. The Casino at Marino was taught as any phenomenon set steadfast in the history books; its features analysed; its fashion surveyed; a few connections to important men told. I am history, it said.

    As the record goes, for about two hundred years after Poussin, Lorrain, and Rubens, the institutional practices of the academies would nurture a host of painters across western Europe and, in turn, would see them ossify in their galleries and studios, regurgitating one mythological tableau after another. ‘History painting’, after the Latin historia, meaning ‘story’ or ‘narrative’, was the most hallowed genre of painting at the time. This ‘grand genre’—so admired for its glorified rendition of myth or historical event, or a blending of the two—justified a return to old styles and a retreat from the present.

    At college we studied the revival of classical architecture as fashioned in the homes of the landed classes in Ireland. The gentry lined their great houses with columns and pilasters, their halls with Roman busts and figurative sculptures set back in niches, an erudite display cultivated from their travels on the Grand Tour. Of the Casino, I learned that it commenced construction in the 1750s and it remains one of the most admired examples of neoclassical architecture in Ireland. I learned that it was the seat of Lord Charlemont, James Caulfield, an important figure in fashioning the tastes and minds of Dublin’s high society at the time. And so on.

    Such a history—stagnant, impervious to change, insisting on grand narratives—called for a re-examining. Looking askance, I learned that the land on which the casino resides used to be called Donneycarney, but as a sense of place is so tied to a sense of class, on acquiring the estate its new owner necessarily rechristened it ‘Marino’ after his beloved Italian destination. Thus, in one stroke, it was lifted from a locale that seemed too provincial, too mundane, and repositioned in the mind’s eye of its landlord. It earned a kind of classical placelessness, a new lofty trans-setting. In their world, everything became ‘grand’: the ‘grand genre’ of history painting; the ‘grand tour’ of Europe to sites of classical history; the ‘grand style’ of Michelangelo or Raphael, to be assiduously copied by academicians.

    Over a hundred years after the Casino was founded, with that golden light of the leisure classes waning, the estate came into the ownership of the Christian Brothers—a brotherhood of lay disciples who set out to get those poor-ragged boys off the street, offer a ‘basic’ education and to prepare them for industry, but most of all to teach them the ‘value’ of ‘hard work’ and religious observance. Their institution spread worldwide, as did the abuse.

     

    Part II

    Apparently he used to write poetry when he was younger but one day decided to burn it all. He said he used to write it spontaneously, squeezed into the white spaces of bus and train tickets.

    The Casino at Marino—in a cinematic turn, as I envision it from a history lesson that breathes so close to me—was then recast in an altogether different light. Snapped out of its delusion only to confront a stark grey reality. Those inner-city boys, my father included, playing around the Casino were shunned both literally and ideologically from the gold-lit world of the Casino’s origins. That beam of enlightened thinking, so preciously preserved in the history books, entirely bypassing generations of poor boys living on the very property. For those boys who chose to notice it, I imagine, the Casino lingered about their playing grounds like an apparition — an idealised past further haunting the gloominess of their present day.

    Allegations of child abuse against the Christian Brothers would start to emerge around the 1980s. Starting with a handful of easily dismissed complaints to an outpouring from the Brother’s global institutions. In a rare and reluctant admission of guilt, in 1996 the Christian Brothers released a statement starting with the line: “There are signs of that death in our congregational story.” It continued,  “Such signs include undue severity of discipline, harshness in Community life, child abuse, an addiction to success, canonizing work to the neglect of our basic human needs for intimacy, leisure and love.”

    “Signs of that death”, a phrase that both acknowledges the insidious force of clerical abuse whilst averting a direct collision with the issue. “There are signs of that death”, a clumsy sentence, weak and faltering in its expression of something so horrid. But it is a haunting set of words all the same. Clamouring, clasping at an expression that might hold the full weight of its implications.

     

    Part III

    Like flints from a fire History sparks into being. It wilfully shoots and splinters, enlightening some and leaving others in the dark.

    Through the telling of this oft-repeated story of history, as I experienced in the classroom that day, I saw the elaborate structures of ‘history-proper’ crash into the shadow it cast upon my father and family. I was told his story without his name being mentioned. I became the child I might have been, proud of her father, and, despite everything, in defence of him. I thought, his story can be told, maybe shame doesn’t have to bury it and uncertainty doesn’t have to muzzle it. I felt the staggering height and glory of the Casino’s tale owed something to my father’s life, or perhaps, owed something to mine. Where history fell silent was the moment it laid claim to my life.

    To see him, to talk to him, is to relive that death, not a sign, but an aching reality.

    I am beginning to see my life. I am beginning to see the forces that shaped it, that weighed upon it, and nearly snuffed it out. I am beginning to see my life from the position of the end, from the imprint of a negative allowed to fester for too long, stumbling through histories and plaguing generations, fusing many to the same struggle.

     

    Leah Reynolds is an art writer based in Bristol. Her latest piece explores the genre of auto-fiction, combining her academic background in the history of art with a personal narrative.