On September 27, we got an historic, internationally-televised display of how the avaricious white males who momentarily rule the Western world are dooming themselves to eventual irrelevance.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a survivor of sexual assault who didn’t even want to be at the hearing, showed up because she felt she had to and blew Judge Brett Kavanaugh out of the water with her seared-in memories, her acknowledgment of there being things she does not know, and her scientific understanding of what her psyche has endured for 36 years.
And how did would-be Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and the brotherhood of winner-take-everything pledgers in his senatorial cheering section respond? Exactly the way that swaggering men whose minds are blown by a sudden loss of rule by force – which describes many a spouse abuser and strutting white male power figure -- would respond:
Kavanaugh lost it. He ranted and railed in self-pity at having been wronged as an innocent family man whose life is being inexplicably ruined by a woman who somehow suddenly decided to upend her and her family’s lives and to endure death threats and professional hell for the sake of denying a Supreme Court seat to a man she never knew well.
Kavanaugh’s cheerleaders also lost it. So much so that partway through Kavanaugh’s questioning they sabotaged their own game plan, which was to put a cooperative woman, Rachel Mitchell, in the hot seat as Ford’s prosecutorial questioner so as to dodge the optics of a mob of white men holding a witch trial for a woman. Once Mitchell proved an insufficiently compliant hire, the assembled male GOP mob broke the charade and rushed the stage with invective fury, talking over the woman they had hired while she shuffled papers and let them throw their rage party.
This is what men sick with addictive authority do. They do it in their kitchens when their female partners fail to cooperate with their being the boss. They do it in televised hearings when female accusers and female hired hands fail to properly behave. They do it because they have been taught that they can.
It may work yet again, in the Kavanaugh confirmation vote, for these desperately entitled white male defenders of their own right to do whatever they want in a closed room, bringing decades of unspeakable suffering for women in particular as a result. Or it may not. Either way, the slope of the fall of white male corporate rule steadily steepens. Reality – #metoo, climate change, global migration due to economic inequalities, the merciless parallels between today’s jobless people of color and jobless whites – continues to assert itself.
That is why, even on my vilest day as a black American man who has fended off ceaseless white suspicion on the street and on the job, I am thankful to not be a white American male.
Being unilaterally invested in the losing side would really, really suck.
