White moves
On the CBC Arts site, Denise Balkissoon considers the two recent “white-guy” books, Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like (adapted from his website) and Stephen Hunt’s The White Guy: A Field Guide (adapted from his standup comedy routine). Her conclusion is that “neither book digs deeply enough or truly enough into either author’s psyche to be meaningful.”
Given that neither one appears to aspire to anything more than some breezy riffing and very mild satire, Balkissoon may have fallen into the common reviewer’s trap of deciding that the author should have written an altogether different book, rather than assessing the one they did.
But that line is, of course, hard-to-spot and ever-shifting, and anyway, Balkissoon’s own perspective on the subject is worth reading.
I have a Caucasian male acquaintance with whom I enjoy a friendly rapport. We don’t agree on everything, mind you, but there’s a lightheartedness and a respect to our interactions. Philosophy, world events and personal politics are all fair game, and the banter is interesting and thought-provoking and rarely gets too heated.
So I must say that I was taken aback a few years ago when, during one exchange, he made a statement that continues to strike me as ludicrous. “You know,” he said, earnestly, “I’m glad I’m a white guy. I don’t have to think about my identity.”
There are a few ways that a person of colour with a women’s studies degree could approach that statement. There’s anger: Of course white men don’t have to think about their identity. The world revolves around their identity and the rest of us have to deal with it. There’s hilarity: You don’t think about your identity? Like, ever? And, if you’re a bit of a softie like me, there’s sympathy: Perhaps white guys wouldn’t make so many heinous mistakes (like naming sports teams after people whose land they stole) if they just sat on the couch now and then and thought about who they are.
