Ijeoma Oluo Mediocre Quotes

Perhaps one of the most brutal of white male privileges is the opportunity to live long enough to regret the carnage you have brought upon others.

And yet we have, as a society, somehow convinced ourselves that we should be led by incompetent assholes.

How often have you heard the argument that we have to slowly implement gender and racial equality in order to not “shock” society? Who is the “society” that people are talking about? I can guarantee that women would be able to handle equal pay or a harassment-free work environment right now, with no ramp-up. I’m certain that people of color would be able to deal with equal political representation and economic opportunity if they were made available today. So for whose benefit do we need to go so slowly? How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?

How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?

When I talk about mediocrity, I talk about how we somehow agreed that wealthy white men are the best group to bring the rest of us prosperity, when their wealth was stolen from our labor.

While we would like to believe otherwise, it is usually not the cream that rises to the top; our society rewards behaviors that are actually disadvantageous to everyone. Studies have shown that the traits long considered signs of strong leadership (like overconfidence and aggression) are in reality disastrous in both business and politics.

Ours is a society where white culture is normalized and universalized, while cultures of color are demonized, exotified, or erased.

It should be enough that this is hurting us. It is insulting that I have to point out the ways in which these issues also hurt white Americans in the hopes that I might get more people to care.

As white men saw that their degrees no longer put them as far ahead of women and people of color as the degrees once did, they began to question whether a diploma was worth the cost.

We must start asking what we want white manhood to be, and what we will no longer accept. We must stop rewarding violence and oppression. We must stop confusing bullies with leaders. We must stop telling women and people of color that the only path to success lies in emulating white male dominance.

Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” When writer Sarah Hagi said those words in 2015, they launched a thousand memes, T-shirts, and coffee mugs.

The thing about anger is that it needs a home.

Each day he sat quietly outside and refused to join his classmates at lunch. After three days, Ryan’s mother relented and began making lunches from home again. Nothing says “American” like a boy making a woman struggle so that he can seem independent.

Plenty of women have met the “male feminist” who can quote bell hooks but will use those quotes to speak over you. Plenty of people of color have met the white antiracist who is all for Dr. King’s dream until people of color start asking white people to make actual sacrifices for racial justice. Ego can undermine even the best of intentions, but often, when things like this happen—when someone we trust as an ally ends up taking advantage of their position and then turning against the principles they once claimed to fight for when that abuse is discovered—we find that the intentions were never that great in the first place.

When you can’t keep women out anymore, and you can’t force them all to become secretaries or teachers because modern social politics demand that you at least pretend to support gender equality in the workplace, what can you do to keep women out of powerful positions in business? You can set them up to fail—or, to be more accurate, you set them up to fall.

We have to investigate the way in which all of us, regardless of race or gender, have been conditioned to uphold white male supremacy.

We have to find where we have been bonded to these systems, both individually and collectively, and we have to sever those bonds.

White male identity is in a very dark place. White men have been told that they should be fulfilled, happy, successful, and powerful, and they are not. They are missing something vital - an intrinsic sense of self that is no tied to how much power or success they can hold over others - and that hole is eating away at them.

Does this sound like too large a task? Too monumental a shift? I can see that. But I can also see how much work it has taken to create and maintain a system of white male mediocrity in this country.

But when I tell my sons that they should be feminists, I don’t try to sell it to them based on the benefits they will reap. I tell them what I also tell white people who are looking for reasons to be antiracist: Yes, it will offer some real benefits for you. Your life will be better in many ways when we work to end oppression. But it will not always benefit you. Sometimes it may seem like justice is disadvantaging you when the privileges you’ve routinely enjoyed are threatened. But you have to do it anyway, because you believe that women and people of color are human beings and that we deserve to be free from oppression, even when that means you personally have to give some things up.

Women and people of color who advocate for diversity and equity are often punished for their efforts in peer, team, and management evaluations. Ironically, the people who are not penalized in their evaluations for their diversity and equity efforts are—say it with me—white men.

Most women and people of color have to claw their way to any chance at success or power, have to work twice as hard as white men and prove themselves to be exceptional talents before we begin to entertain discussions of truly equal representation in our workplaces or government.

If you are constantly assumed to be great just for being white and male, why would you struggle to make a real contribution? Why take a risk or make a determined effort that might fail when you can be rewarded for keeping your head down? Societal incentives are toward mediocrity.

But often these men are completely unaware of their hypocrisy because they are not doing anything out of the ordinary by centering themselves when they’ve always been centered, or by taking advantage of those who have always been taken advantage of—they’re just living according to the norms of society.

Sometimes it may seem like justice is disadvantaging you when the privileges you’ve routinely enjoyed are threatened. But you have to do it anyway, because you believe that women and people of color are human beings and that we deserve to be free from oppression, even when that means you personally have to give some things up.

But I have never had the luxury of shunning everything in our society that does not appear to be built 100 percent for me.

Instead of seeing humanity as a competition for status, we could all have faith that full equality can allow for esteem and respect to be spread universally.

At some point the silence is a sin against God—because you are required to be the person you want to be, you are required to speak up,” he explained.

But over generations, feminism has grown and changed. There is still what is called “white feminism”—the tendency for white feminists to center themselves at the expense of women of color—but at least now we have a name for it. And in naming it, we can think about how to move beyond it.

The man who never listens, who doesn’t prepare, who insists on getting his way—this is a man that most of us would not (when given friendlier options) like to work with, live with, or be friends with. And yet we have, as a society, somehow convinced ourselves that we should be led by incompetent assholes.

If we are going to continue to make progress on issues of race and gender, and if liberal white men want to be on the right side of history, they have to address their personal issues with race and gender.

It's the expectations that many white men have that they shouldn't have to climb, shouldn't have to struggle, as others do. It's the idea not only that they think they have less than others, but that they were supposed to have so much more. When you are denied the power, the success, or even the relationships that you think are your right, you either believe that you are broken or you believe that you have been stolen from.

A political movement that focuses on class and ignores the specific ways in which race determines financial health and well-being for people of color in this country will be a movement that maintains white supremacy, because it will not be able to identify or address the specific, race-based systems that are the main causes of inequality for people of color. Health care discrimination, job discrimination, the school-to-prison pipeline, educational bias, mass incarceration, police brutality, community trauma—none of these issues are addressed in a class-only approach. A class-only approach will lift only poor whites out of poverty and will therefore maintain white supremacy.

It was shocking, because you have the idea where you are a brotherhood. When you have an issue outside of football and you’re looking for your brothers to be there for you, and when you find out they aren’t, that hurts a little bit.

I tell them what I also tell white people who are looking for reasons to be antiracist: Yes, it will offer some real benefits for you. Your life will be better in many ways when we work to end oppression. But it will not always benefit you.

Trump and others on the right want to make sure that working-class white men don’t want to go to college and distrust those who do, and conservative educators want to make sure that people from marginalized communities don’t want to go either.

We find racism in our systems when we look at what the system produces. When we find systems with outputs that negatively affect people of color in a way or to a degree that they do not affect white people, we have a racist impact that can be tied to a racist cause.

At every college I went to—every single one—at least one teacher of color broke down in tears describing their struggle to advocate for their students of color in such a hostile environment. Higher education is not the racial utopia that Republicans are scared of. It is not some bizarro world where students of color wield power over white students and faculty. It is a white supremacist system at its core, like all our other systems are.

I have had to find a way to enjoy movies and television even when the script is not written for me and the only characters that look like me are peripheral to the main action because I would like to see more than a few movies in my lifetime. I have had to find a way to work in offices that don’t see me as management

everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.

It could be a place that dares to believe that the world does not revolve around white men.

We were that desperate for a white man to not be trash that we treated mediocrity like it was a masterpiece.

We are expected to support white male supremacy in order to get a promotion, to be respected by our peers, for our children to succeed in school.

White male mediocrity seems to impact every aspect of our lives, and yet it only seems to be people who aren’t white men who recognize the imbalance.

Women who lead with a more “male” style do not fare any better. Women are often punished for the same personality traits that men are praised for.

They have to battle to push forward every change they were brought in to make, no matter how incremental.

When we consider the privilege hierarchies of race, gender, and class, it’s clear that some of us have played a larger role than others in perpetuating this harmful image of white maleness. But I also think that all of us, regardless of demographic, have played a part in upholding white male supremacy. We are all told to aspire to the largest bite of our piece of the pie—no matter how meager our piece may be.

It is psychologically damaging to never see yourself reflected in positions of leadership in your own country. It limits our feeling of citizenship, and it limits the possibilities we see for ourselves and our children.

Whiteness is not only threatened when it takes on too many traits of identities of color; it is also threatened when communities of color cease to stay below whiteness, where society’s scripts say they belong. A white family may feel threatened not only when their daughter brings a Black man home for dinner (breaking from what is expected of her as a white person), but also if that Black man makes the same wage as her father (breaking from the expectations of Blackness that whiteness depends on). The same is true for masculinity. Men may feel threatened not only when their sons declare their love of the color pink, but also when their daughters choose monster trucks over dolls.

sometimes he will subconsciously work to maintain his position above those he is trying to “help” by elevating himself even further above them with his selfless deeds, by recentering the goals of the group to maintain his social and political power,

Mediocre white men who want to be heroes too often feel the need to fabricate villains to justify their imagined role—even if that means vilifying entire populations of people. Their dreams of grand adventures are mere whims and fantasy, but the violence such white men visit upon others is often very, very real.

What exactly do people who aren’t white men have that could be more inclusive of white men? We do not have control of our local governments, our national governments, our school boards, our universities, our police forces, our militaries, our workplaces. All we have is our struggle. And yet we are told that our struggle for inclusion and equity—and our celebration of even symbolic steps toward them—is divisive and threatening to those who have far greater access to everything else than we can dream of. If white men are finding that the overwhelmingly white-male-controlled system isn’t meeting their needs, how did we end up being the problem?

In discussing how hard the four of them have had to fight during their time in D.C., Omar sounded defiant and determined: “I think we have a beef with almost anyone here because there’s a lack of courage. It seems like we’re all radical because we deeply care about the people we represent and we want to throw down for them.

After sitting for two games, Kaepernick met with a military veteran. The man asked Kaepernick to kneel instead of sitting for the anthem, as a way to protest injustice against Black people in America while still showing respect for US military vets. Kaepernick took the veteran’s advice and began kneeling in protest instead of sitting.34

My education has served me well in this career, even if it was not what I originally imagined for myself. It also, like a job as an analyst likely would have, fits my introverted yet very opinionated personality. I spend a lot of time observing, thinking, commenting. I do not have to compromise my principles or soften my message to make friends or keep a job

But then, a funny thing happens when a woman or a person of color is promoted to the head of the company. White male managers stop collaborating with their coworkers—especially their women coworkers and coworkers of color. Why do white men decrease their level of performance when a woman or person of color becomes CEO? Because suddenly they feel less connected to the company.

In introducing the legislation, Pressley argued, “For far too long, those closest to the pain have not been closest to the power, resulting in a racist, xenophobic, rogue, and fundamentally flawed criminal legal system,” adding, “Our resolution calls for a bold transformation of the status quo—devoted to dismantling injustices so that the system is smaller, safer, less punitive, and more humane.

Mediocre, highly forgettable white men regularly enter feminist spaces and expect to be centered and rewarded, and they have been. They get to be highly flawed, they get to regularly betray the values of their movement, yet they will be praised for their intentions or even simply for their presence—while women must be above reproach in their personal and public lives in order to avoid seeing themselves and their entire movement engulfed in scandal.

The image of the ideal white man—the bold and confident ones we end up idolizing, giving promotions to, electing to office—that image is often the epitome of mediocrity. And when entrusted with these positions of power, such men often perform as well as someone with mediocre skills would be expected to: we see the results in our floundering businesses and in our deadlocked government. Rather than risk seeming weak by admitting mistakes, white men double down on them.

The following year, enrollment at Mizzou was down sharply, especially of Black students. This isn’t because Black prospective students disagreed with the protests. Black students who decided not to attend the previously well-respected school said that the racism highlighted on campus had turned them off. Some Jewish prospective students said that hearing about swastikas being painted on walls kept them away. And some white prospective students said they didn’t want to be associated with a university so widely known to be racist.

The 2018 election also saw victory for Palestinian American and Detroit native Rashida Tlaib. Like Omar, her election should not have come as such a surprise; she was well known and respected in her prior role as a state representative, regarded as someone who would vigorously fight for Detroit. She was a thorn in the side of big businesses that tried to exploit or neglect Detroit neighborhoods and an even bigger thorn in the side of Donald Trump. When Tlaib won her bid for Congress, representing Michigan’s Thirteenth District, she became the first Palestinian American to sit in Congress. She and Omar became the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.

While we would like to believe otherwise, it is usually not the cream that rises to the top: our society rewards behaviors that are actually disadvantageous to everyone. Studies have shown that the traits long considered signs of strong leadership (like overconfidence and aggression) are in reality disastrous in both business and politics—not to mention the personal toll this style of leadership takes on the individuals around these leaders. These traits are broadly considered to be masculine, whereas characteristics often associated with weakness or lack of leadership (patience, accommodation, cooperation) are coded as feminine. This is a global phenomenon of counterproductive values that social scientists have long marveled over.

Center of Southern Politics and Society found that, even though sexism was more common in white Republican men, “roughly 11 million white male Independents and Democrats feel enough animosity towards working women and feminists to make them unlikely to vote for one of them.”55 In the end, 12 percent of Sanders supporters ended up supporting Trump in the general election. When surveyed, almost half of those Sanders supporters turned Trump voters said they disagreed that white people have advantages in the United States, whereas only about 5 percent of Clinton voters disagreed that white people have advantages.56 Defection after a tough primary isn’t unusual. In the 2008 election, 15 percent of Clinton primary voters ended up voting for McCain in the general election, and many remember the racial tensions in that primary almost as vividly as they do the ones from the 2016 election.57 But the combination of the charged rhetoric of the 2016 election, the blatant sexism, ableism, and white supremacy of the Trump campaign, and the large policy differences between Trump and Sanders led many to expect that the number of voters who were willing to cross over to support the Republican candidate would be much lower than it had been in the 2008 election.

White male supremacy protects itself not only through the expected violence of white men, but also through control of societal norms that keep us invested in the perpetration of white male power.

Workplaces that devalue traits and skills like empathy, communication, and cooperation, which women are more likely to be socialized to have, almost always overvalue traits like hypercompetitiveness, aggression, and impulsiveness, which men are more likely to be socialized to have, even when those characteristics harm a work environment.

And it is easy to argue that the bile spewed during the primaries—with many Sanders supporters talking about Clinton with the same hate-filled, derogatory comments that Trump supporters did, and others insisting that there was no difference between Clinton and Trump—did serious damage to Clinton’s national campaign once she became the nominee. Sanders backed Clinton after the primary and asked his supporters to do the same, but many of those supporters had just spent a year talking about Clinton as a criminal warmonger who was no different than Trump, with very little effort from the Sanders campaign to curtail such vitriol until well past the primaries. Those riled-up voters were reluctant to throw any support her way.

Of the eight million WWII veterans who used the GI Bill, only about sixty-five thousand were women.34 That’s 0.008 percent.

Black veteran found that the GI Bill simply returned him to his lower economic caste. College aid was offered to Black veterans, but it was moot; the vast majority of US colleges and universities refused to accept Black students, and those that did accepted so small a number that most Black veterans were unable to use the tuition benefits. Homeowner’s assistance was of even less use to Black vets, since banks refused to work with Black buyers, and cities redlined Black families into neighborhoods designed to keep the return on their investments as low as possible. The GI Bill was legislation designed to benefit only white men.

I am a Black woman. True, I have been told time and time again that my best chance of success is to emulate the preferred traits of white maleness as much as possible. Still, mine is not the image of the great leaders in our history books, nor that of the heroes in our stories. For someone like me to expect any greatness without having exceptional talent and luck was, at best, foolish and, at worst, dangerous. This is not my birthright.

The rewarding of white male mediocrity not only limits the drive and imagination of white men; it also requires forced limitations on the success of women and people of color in order to deliver on the promised white male supremacy. White male mediocrity harms us all.

Many of our business and political leaders were freed to dedicate their time and energy to their professional success by the unpaid labor of wives and mothers and the underpaid labor of nannies and housekeepers.

how men without uteruses should not control our reproductive choices,

And it’s important to remember that the women and people of color most violently harmed by these systems are those who are also queer, transgender, or disabled.

Most white Americans have exclusively white friendship circles; three-quarters of white Americans have less than one friend of color.

Whiteness and masculinity are threatened both where their station or behavior begins to approach that expected of Blackness and femininity, and where Blackness or femininity strays from its expected role and no longer serves as a direct contrast to whiteness and masculinity. These dual constraints are important to realize, because while whiteness and masculinity are the two most powerful identities in a white male patriarchy, they are also wholly dependent on the identities they oppress.

They found that women were indeed more likely than men to be in leadership positions at distressed companies, but they also found that the problems were not the women’s fault.

In describing his beliefs to a New York Times reporter, Cliven Bundy went on a long racist tirade, opening with, "I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro," which is never a good start.

What I’m saying is that white male mediocrity is a baseline, the dominant narrative, and that everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent

I am talking about how aggression equals leadership and arrogance equals strength—even if those white male traits harm the men themselves and the kingdom they hope to rule.

By defining greatness as a white man’s birthright, we immediately divorce it from real, quantifiable greatness—greatness that benefits, greatness that creates. White men have assumed inborn greatness, and they are taught to believe that they alone have seemingly infinite potential for greatness.

It's as if when we continuously pass up the opportunity to listen to those most affected by the shortcomings of our systems, and instead continue to reward those who benefit most from those systems, we end up making no progress at all.

It could be a place where we learn to respect consent and pronouns, where we learn about intersectionality, where we learn the truth about our corrupt systems and begin to demand change, where we learn to respect and appreciate people who are different from us, where we start demanding justice for the oppressed, where we investigate our histories of bias and bigotry. Higher education could be all of that, and the world would be better for it.

People of color—especially Black people, Hispanic people, Indigenous people, and people of Middle Eastern descent—are convenient scapegoats for white people who are disappointed by life’s outcomes.

As I write this, we have white men holding major political office who believe that global warming is a hoax. We have white men holding major political office who believe that racial integration is bad for America. We have white men holding major political office who believe that women can’t get pregnant from rape. We have white men holding major political office who believe that there’s nothing wrong with being a white supremacist. We have white men holding major political office who have been accused of sexual assault. We have white men holding major political office who have publicly used racial slurs. We have white men holding major political office who believe that Muslims should not be allowed into the country. We have white men holding major political office who have physically assaulted reporters. These white men can say and do those things with little worry for their careers. In fact, for some of these men, it is their careers. Even openly defending white supremacy will get you little more than a slap on the wrist. To be a white man—a straight, abled, cisgender white man—in public office means never having to say you’re sorry and still getting reelected.

When I think of Shirley Chisholm, I think of another quote from her about how she wanted to be remembered: “I want history to remember me not just as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, not as the first Black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a Black woman who lived in the twentieth century and dared to be herself.

Over the years, merely existing as a self-proclaimed progressive white man was considered more than enough qualification to win votes. It has caused many of those white men to become lazy in their politics and in their connection with their constituents.

When he was asked about how to keep voters focused on the issues in the midst of Trump scandals, he replied, “I mean, I think we’ve got to work in two ways. Number one, we have got to take on Trump’s attacks against the environment, against women, against Latinos and blacks and people in the gay community, we’ve got to fight back every day on those issues. But equally important, or more important: We have got to focus on bread-and-butter issues that mean so much to ordinary Americans.”53 Oh man, fuck this. Seriously? Who exactly are these “ordinary Americans” whose issues are more important than the destruction of our environment and the systemic racism and sexism that are literally crushing women and people of color in this country? Hint: they don’t look like me.

And for a man with no job, few friends, and a family that couldn’t stand him, pretending to be a main character in violent American mythology was as close to belonging as he was ever going to get.

Trump and others on the right want to make sure that working-class white men don’t want to go to college and distrust those who do, and conservative educators want to make sure that people from marginalized communities don’t want to go either. All of this works by design. It is to ensure that enough of us keep our heads down, focus on surviving our nine-to-five jobs, don’t ask questions, and don’t demand more from a system that owes us a lot. The death of American higher education will harm the most vulnerable of us first, but its goal is not to harm or oppress only us—that work is fully implanted in all our systems. Its goal is to continue to oppress and exploit white supremacy’s most powerful tool: the angry white working-class man.

Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.

I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.

In July 2017 the Pew Research Center found that a whopping 58 percent of Republicans and right-leaning Independents thought that colleges and universities were having a negative impact on our country.

The very foundation of football in this country comes out of fears of ruling-class mediocrity and [fears of] the mediocrity of their own children.

Nothing says “American” like a boy making a woman struggle so that he can seem independent.

I have had to find a way to enjoy movies and television even when the script is not written for me and the only characters that look like me are peripheral to the main action because I would like to see more than a few movies in my lifetime. I have had to find a way to work in offices that don’t see me as management material while still believing that there is a chance I can get a promotion anyway. I’ve had to study history that erased my culture from its pages and know that it did not actually erase me. I’ve had to learn laws that weren’t written to serve me. I’ve had to learn to write and appreciate words in a language that was forced on my ancestors. Not only have things in America not been built for me; they have never been built for me. And although that has been physically, financially, politically, and psychologically disastrous for my community, I have come to see that it is also damaging to be led to believe that everything should be built for you and that anything built with the consideration of others is inherently harmful to you. It is harmful to the individual who believes it, and it is harmful to every system they interact with that is supposed to be built on coalition.

I shouldn’t have to write any of this. It should be enough that these issues are impacting communities of color. We should care about what is harming our fellow human beings, even if it affects only their communities and not ours. It should be enough that this is hurting us. It is insulting that I have to point out the ways in which these issues also hurt white Americans in the hopes that I might get more people to care.

We have to be honest about what white male supremacy has cost not only women, nonbinary people, and people of color—but also white men.

To me, the idea of sitting around watching a bunch of Black bodies crash into each other to the delight of white team owners and managers is not entertaining. Even though I can respect and appreciate the great efforts the athletes put forth, the sport has long represented to me the exploitation of Black labor and Black bodies, and little else. But I have come to value (if often with dismay) the way in which we can see the reflection of American racial attitudes through the sport.

Many white men see a political landscape dominated by white men and think it is that way because white men are just more politically minded. They think that the absence of women and people of color from powerful rooms is due to self-selection. They do not question how unwelcoming the room they have built might be. They do not question whether or not the discussions they are having in that room are inclusive and generate productive discussions for women and people of color. They don’t ask if there are other, equally important conversations happening in other rooms. And they don’t even bother to ask if anyone unlocked the door. They look at the room and say that women and people of color aren’t in it because women and people of color aren’t interested. Then they cite this supposed disinterest as proof that women and people of color are too unqualified to even be invited in.

In a 2018 case, the state of Delaware argued in its defense that the Constitution doesn’t require that the state provide the children of Delaware with a fair or “adequate” education system.