Reddit reviews Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era

I just finished reading Angry White Men by Michael Kimmel where he talks about why there's a market for people like Beck and I kinda want to make an effort post to draw parallel between that and GG but I'm so tired and lazy and oh God why is it 4 am already ;_;

> What I don't understand is this... obsessive hatred. It's nothing short of disturbing. There are apparently people who are willing to literally devote their livelihood solely on their hatred towards a single person on the internet. Why?

I think about this a lot and all I can come up with is entitlement and parents that never told them "No". Used to being the only ones heard, etc. They can't stand the fact that they can't scare certain people away. Especially those who hold them accountable or, worse, question everything they hold dear to validate themselves.

Basically, they're angry, entitled, violent children.

Personally, this book is an eye opener. Irony? It only has three stars because, get this, AWMs flooded the comments and reviews and proved every single point made in the book.

> Now why is it somehow a sin to be white and unexceptional?

Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh. I love that this isn't what I said at all. It just so happens that unexceptional white men are the driving force behind these "Dudes pretending to be oppressed in order to better hate WIMMINZ/THE BLAX" movements.

>What has race got to do with it anyway?

Insecurity in a supremacist society where you aren't living up to a contrived, bullshit image of supposedly perfect and dominant Aryan hyper "masculinity" leads to shit like this. That is what "Race has to do with it."

>How do you know I am white?

Because this question is the mating call of White people on the internet who think that just because you can't see them, the other signs must not be obvious.

It's not your skin color, so stop whining. Unlike the actual racism me and mine suffer, nobody's calling you subhuman and inferior, so wipe your eyes and quiet the fuck down.

But. It's painfully clear that when a certain type of white man gets angry? He lashes out at those perceived as lesser. Jewish people, women, lgbtqia people. Minorities. And then he struggles, while still trying to validate himself through supremacist nonsense, to paint himself as a victim. Unfortunately, men of color do something similar when it comes to gender, but that's a story for another day.

That's you, the MRM and TRP in a nutshell. Angry White Man syndrome...people have noticed.

There is no way, shape, or form in which race has any bearing on the quality of a human being. I'm not going to try to change your view about that because it is entirely and admirably correct.

But I want to try and explain why some people are racists. Being half-Jewish and being descended from slaves makes this an existential question for me. I am lucky to live in a society in which people do not judge me for the colour of my skin or the religion of my ancestors, but I recognize that this is quite possibly temporary. Possibly the safest and most cosmopolitan place for a Jew to live in the 1920s was Germany.

My impression is that people become racists as a response to social problems. In the particular case of Stormfront, I think we see a generation of disenfranchised Americans that are looking for easy answers to the complex questions of why they cannot simply live as their forefathers did. The Stormfront people see a world in which the culture they know and love is fading in the face of social, cultural, and economic change.

I highly recommend this article for an in-depth look into the important question of who these people really are and where their rage comes from. It's an excerpt from this book, which I have not read. It seems to be an examination of a larger trend in American politics that underpins the radical elements of the Republican party.

So I don't think white supremacy is baseless. Oh sure, it's not rational. But there is a legitimate problem that often sparks racist beliefs in a certain segment of the American populace. Recognizing this helps me to maintain the one emotion that a racist really can't handle from a person like me: pity.