Hey guys, I've got a great idea! Y'alls know how there's always all these special interest groups everywhere right? Well, you know who doesn't have one? White guys! Let's call it the Association for White Evangelist Sons Of Manly Men, or AWESOMM! It's even got a great acronym, it'll be sweet!
What's that? What do you mean I'm a racist, bigoted, sexist chauvinist pig? I'm just looking out for the average joes out there! Why do you hate me now? Where did that even come from?
See, here's the thing. I look around campus, and there's a group for just about everything. There's Black Students United (BSU), the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), the Central American United Students Association, Chinese Student Association (CSA), Korean American Student Association. It gets even more specific; there's a Jewish Russian Club, a Black Law Students Association, Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, Women in Public Policy. You know what there isn't? A club for whites. Or a club for men (frats being excluded here, since for one thing, there's the female counterpart, sororities, and besides, frats aren't about male advancement, like the other clubs being talked about).
Why is that? Can you imagine the uproar, if someone actually tried, around here, to start a club that was for white men only? They'd be compared to the KKK in a heartbeat. And yet, we hold up activist groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as paragons of diversity, herald them as champions of social progress. If I were to start an organization with the express purpose of helping only white men, I would be immediately blacklisted as a racist, a sexist, a bigot, and any number of other less than savory things. Yet this is exactly what these existing groups do; they work for the sole purpose of advancing their constituent groups, over the interests of other groups.
I think it's time to stop being so apologetic. We are so afraid of coming off as politically incorrect, that we happily buy into this idea that racism, or sexism, or any other -ism, only works one way. If I were to say that I choose to avoid a certain city district because of its high crime rate, I run the risk of getting called a racist, simply because that district is dominated by African American residents. Never mind the high homicide rates, or the storefronts with smashed windows, and the rampant vandalism everywhere. No, obviously I just hate black people. And the thing is, we let people get away with politically charged accusations like that. We back down from people who make such ridiculous assertions, because being called racist or sexist is political death. Those accusations stick, warranted or not, and forever tarnish your reputation, no matter what you do. And that is only made worse by the fact that we like to take the side of the "little guy," if only because it seems like the right thing to do, regardless of the situation.
When was the last time you questioned an accusation of sexism, or racism? I remember once, a speaker came to talk about women's rights and rape. Specifically, she talked about how if a man were to have sex with a woman who was drunk, that it constitutes rape, because she could not give proper consent while intoxicated (since you know, intoxication = impaired decision making). When asked, "What if the guy is drunk too?" she replied with a comment about how men don't try to have sex with a pencil sharpener (insert obligatory tiny penis joke), and are therefore clearly not too drunk to make a conscious choice. Everyone laughed, and she moved on with her spiel. Except.....does that logic really make sense? After all, I would posit the question: do women try to have sex with a knife when drunk? I think not, and therefore, unless the man forces himself on the woman (which is then actually rape), then clearly, she made the conscious choice too. So why is it then the man's fault, when she decides in the morning that hey, maybe that wasn't such a great idea? Why shouldn't the woman take equal responsibility in her actions, if she considers it a mistake? Because you know, the only other explanation would be to assert that women are incapable of making that decision, and oh wait, that's the exact opposite of equality.
I'm not saying that whatever -isms have been eradicated from society. Far from it. I don't believe it ever will be. However, I would say that, depending on how you define it, there's either a hell of a lot more or a hell of a lot less than people seem to think. As a general rule, only whites are ever accused of racism, only men singled out as sexists. But to define it so broadly as many people do, then it must be acknowledged that for every racist Caucasian out there, there is an equally racist Black, or Hispanic, or Asian; for every chauvinist man who thinks women belong in the kitchen, there is a female feminazi just as ready to denounce all men as useless wastes of space. I've heard Hispanics rant about how dirty and smelly blacks are, seen black kids bully a white kid for being white, read about women physically abusing their husbands. Racism and sexism exist universally; it is only a matter of which cases we choose to notice.
So you know what? Let's do it. I, an Asian American male, do hereby found this association for socio-political equality for white men, an association which will be open to free-thinkers of any and all races, genders, religions, orientations, etc. Let us accept no judgement on our morality, for we have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, and nothing to apologize for. Let's find out just how far the truly bigoted are willing to go to shut down our voices. And it will be AWESOMM.
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