Filthy White Male Privilege

Although President Biden has appointed more diverse people in high government positions, such as Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior, there is no getting around the fact that he has the mindset of a privileged white male, especially when it comes to immigrants at the border. The latest uproar over white males on horses chasing down Haitians proves it.

What has changed this year for me is that I no longer accept white privileged males as the way it is. I am growing increasingly intolerant, and it is becoming more abhorrent and unacceptable. Instead of seeing it as our reality, I am seeing it for the ugly filth it truly is that needs to be cleaned up. It is time for women to rise like the phoenix.

Whenever I get bogged down by all the ugliness that I see in our world today, and begin to despair for the future of the human race, I remind myself that we have two saving graces: the burgeoning empowerment of women, and that is almost necessarily through women empowering themselves, and the wisdom that trees are beginning to impart more freely to the people who are open to receive their messages.

Recently I spoke to the director for Project Concern International in Guatemala. When we spoke about the empowerment of women, she said the women in Guatemala get it that women’s power is through collective strength and action, as opposed to men’s power that comes through competition, and jockeying for individual power within hierarchy.

She was concerned, though, that getting men to recognize women’s power seems out of reach. I’ve been thinking about that comment a lot. The truth is that men will NEVER recognize women’s power. That is NOT how it will be achieved. And it’s not real power if it requires men to recognize it.

Through our collective action and raising our voices to be heard so resoundingly that they cannot be ignored, women do have power that does not require recognition or acceptance by men. This is not just at the ballot box, either, but through the kind of attention and care to civic matters that women already wield in their families and circles of friends.

One of the greatest strength of women is the ability to face facts and deal with situations. I worked for many years as a secretary. Then I was an administrative assistant, and eventually I rose to become an executive assistant. From decades of office work, I learned that it was usually male managers who sat in meetings most of the day or were tied up on phone calls, making decisions. It was the secretaries who actually did the work of carrying out the decisions.

As an ESL teacher, the administration again made program decisions, and it was the teachers who carried out the programs and made them work. In families, it’s women who do most of the work of managing the household and raising the children. Most men act on the periphery of all the work the women do in the home. It is the women who deal with conflicts and emergencies, for the most part.

So what I’ve seen is that women make things happen both in the home and the workplace. Of course, there are broad, sweeping exceptions to this general rule. Usually women are forced to find ways around the strictures that men have imposed on them, as men usually make the decisions. Women have had to learn to be resourceful, to make do, to find ways to get everyone to get along, to take the edge off the alpha male’s failings.

Frankly, I am tired of alpha males and the pack behavior of men.

Women rise like the phoenix. This is my mantra now. We must rise. And we are beyond powerful, if only we knew.