Behind every Angry White Man ...

ANGER is good. If you read the entirety of this column, you may get a sense of my approach. Anger can also be bad. Maybe not bad, but a ruse for things more insidious …

Let me start somewhere. I met a German family in 2015. One day in about May that year, the 13-year-old son came home from school bearing a scowl and frothing at the mouth. He was angry. He said “girls” were getting all the chances at school, while he and his friends were being overlooked or ignored.

This was in microcosm an example of the way that equality is considered to be oppression and injustice by people who are not used to it, and who see the rolling back of decades of systemic injustice as a violation of their (unique) rights.

Before proceeding I should state again, as I always have, that South Africa belongs to everyone who lives here, but a good starting point for discussing our past, the present and the future has to be honesty. Nonracialism can be a good thing in a country that has not placed justice on a sliding scale of who deserves more or less!

Anyway, viewed broadly, the German lad’s sentiments are part of a more historical phenomenon; the panics of “white genocide” and “replacement”, of misogyny, white nationalism – and the anger of incel males complaining about involuntary celibacy as “reverse rape”. (See this brief introduction to the intersection of incels, misogyny and white supremacy; there is a little bit more about incels at the end of this article).

These fears and feelings are mutually escalatory. It is about a world in which white people – I am generalising – specifically males, are having to reckon with their end-of-era panics. They are intimidated and deeply dissatisfied by the thought of a world ahead filled with people who are not “white” and a contiguous loss of power for the male species. See the books Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, by Michael Kimmel, a leading scholar on the study of men and masculinities, and the novelist Pankaj Mishra’s The Age of Anger: A History of the Present. 

It may be at least two centuries in the future, but the world will probably be filled with people of mixed race. A good thing too, I believe. Outbreeding is better than inbreeding, eh? Seriously, now. Hybridity, outbreeding and diversity have made humans as successful as we have been. See the geneticist Adam Rutherford’s book How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality. 

While we should not traduce sincere feelings of anger, there certainly is enough to go around, and it can be a necessary force for change when applied in good faith. However, the anger of the white male, the incel and the once-were-powerful seems to be no more than aggrieved entitlement with particular venom directed at affirmative action, diversity and inclusivity. For instance, the anger of people on the Cape Flats or in townships around the country, is dismissed because, as Ian Cameron (who else?) would have us believe, emotional responses (anger), are “unscientific and emotional”. I doubt he would be as dismissive about the undeniable and necessarily emotional (angry) response to farm murders – which are widespread and abhorrent. (See also here, and here).

Here’s a placeholder. Affirmative action, diversity and inclusivity were perfectly acceptable, so it seemed when discussions about them were between the National Party, Andries Treurnicht’s Conservative Party and the Liberals in Parliament. As soon as inclusivity and diversity included “non-whites”, affirmative action, integration, and removing gender, racial or religious boundaries of exclusion resulted in a retreat into AfriForum, Orania and Solidarity. People who now are “angry” hide their prejudices behind conveniences or claims that Afrikaners cannot be racists because “coloured people also speak Afrikaans”. It’s hard to keep up, but once you are able to see beyond the thickets of obfuscation, the offence is clear and no amount of anger can conceal the racism (and misogyny) of the angry white male.

On another level, it is also no surprise that heaps of criticism, investigations into “tax abuse” (all necessary and good) and constant demonisation have become industries. And that the same public intellectuals, “civil rights” organisations and “anti-racists” failed to produce exposés of injustice before 1994.

This is one of the reasons why journalists at the first iteration of Vrye Weekblad and Weekly Mail (now Mail & Guardian) were such pioneers … We stood against injustice then (some of us faced the wrath of the apartheid state!). We continue to speak out against injustice today – still without exception. Much of the anger comes from the white male.

The white male in the age of anger

As people around the world become more integrated or “mixed-race” in countries like Hungary, the USA and South Africa, democracy has not been good for people who “don’t hate others and are not racist, but like their own kind more”. They now (suddenly) love freedom, choice, liberty and all that good stuff. They do draw a line (under rubrics of choice and that wonderful conversation-stopper, “the economy”) when it comes to extending all of these good things to “non-whites”.

For instance, mention national health care, and the first, most vocal opposition will come from the Angry White Male. Mention social security, and the first, most vocal opposition will come from the angry white male. Introduce Critical Race Theory to include the history of formerly enslaved or marginalised groups, and the first, most vocal opposition will come from the angry white male. Propose that South Africa should increase investment and relations with China, and the first, most vocal opposition will come from the angry white male.

With respect to the country’s international relations, the rallying cry is that South Africa would “lose the West” if it got too cosy with China, or, for that matter any country that is not approved in Washington … As if South Africa has to outsource its foreign policies like, say, the Philippines.

Of course, if you run a “think tank” or an advocacy group all you have to do is place black faces on staff or on boards of directors to ensure your credibility. I am not a critic of the government of national unity; it can and should, necessarily, be a good thing, but see this opinion piece about remaking or preparing old faces to meet the new faces (apologies to T.S. Eliot). And, what is the line from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo? “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

The perpetrators of the worst injustices across time tend to present themselves as victims of oppression when they lose power, or when their cruelty and barbarism are exposed. When they feel mildly uncomfortable, they conceal their nostalgia for the days of dominance and control behind a fig leaf of concern about democracy, justice, fairness and equality – and expect everyone to forget just who they are, and what they stood for when they were in power … Reconciliation without accountability has produced perversions of truth and has called for a suppression of memory.

My first social experience of reconciliation was on the grounds of parliament. It was the day after the Springboks had won the Rugby World Cup in 1995. I was (and still am) an unflinching supporter of the All Blacks. (I expect the bush telegram to go haywire). A group of Afrikaner men, part of the first GNU, were dancing and singing with great joy after their Springboks had shown the world how great they were. They invited me to join them in celebration and threw about references to enduring greatness, and questioned my commitment to reconciliation. Two years later, I was kicked out of the Springbok bar in London’s Covent Garden, by a group of white men – because I did not support their Springboks.

Calling for honesty when dealing with our past and the present, for that matter, is probably too much to ask. One person or group’s anger is maximised, and that of another minimised. Innocence had descended on the new cadres that are “anti-racist” and concerned about their “culture” (a rather slick disguise for race), the rest of us have to forget, embrace reconciliation, and move on.

When we read about the anger of incels and the panics of the white males, it is useful to consider, as context, the decline of “Western civilisation”, of global “liberal capitalism” of the “European world” and the failures of the Enlightenment, all of which served white people very well over the past 500 years.

The incels are a funny (and dangerous) bunch. I have put out enough in the preceding passages to start a discussion (and further panics, and charges of racism), so let me leave these words of Emma Jane of the University of New South Wales, in Australia, with you:

“Alek Minassian, the man charged with killing 10 people by running them down with a van, has been linked to a Facebook post declaring the beginning of the ‘Incel Rebellion’ and hailing Elliot Rodger as a ‘Supreme Gentleman’. Rodger, you may recall, was the self-identifying incel who killed six people in the US in 2014 in what he claimed was a ‘day of retribution’ against the society that had ‘denied’ him sex and love.”

And reflecting on the anger of the 13-year-old German boy I mentioned at the top, Chuka Emezue, professor of women children and family nursing at Rush University in the USA explained that: “Incels are ‘typically heterosexual, white males, who adhere to a violent and misogynist ideology of male supremacy’, according to the FBI. A new research study with 348 men (including 156 incels) links incel culture with female hate, finding a connection with ‘misogynistic attitudes (hostility towards women, sexual objectification, and rape myths) … even after controlling for personality.’ Incels consider themselves ‘victims of feminism', according to a 2022 study, and at least two active online forums for incels portray violence positively more often than negatively.”

Anger cannot be used as a weapon to suppress the truth or memory. Anger is real, but like most responses to society, it could do with honest reflection.

♦ VWB ♦

BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION: Go to the bottom of this page to share your opinion. We look forward to hearing from you.