The N-word scrawled on a wall. Swastikas on a Jewish student’s door. Telling Muslim women to take their veils off. Writing “feminazi” or “die dykes” on women’s-center posters. On college campuses, these manifestations of hate are all too familiar. According to a recent Education Department report, campus hate crimes increased 25 percent between 2015 and 2016, with most of them directed at racial and religious minorities.
Colleges respond to hate in depressingly similar and ineffectual ways: Find the “bad apples,” punish them, make some public display of “inclusivity” or whatever term is in vogue that year, and then move on … until the next flare-up.
As someone who teaches about men and masculinities, I have come to believe that there is a way out of this mess. Let us start with the facts.
- Hate acts are not randomly committed on college campuses. They are primarily committed by white, straight men against those who are not white, straight, Christian, or male.
- The only way to stop hate on campuses is to challenge the cultural context that produces it.
- Institutions of higher education are part of that context, but they don’t need to be.
White supremacists have been making a concerted effort to provoke campuses large and small, public and private. Have both short- and long-term response plans ready.
Despite the obviousness of these facts, too little is said about the campus culture of dominant white masculinity. Why is that? Why do we act as if these incidents are the result of a few bad apples rather than symptoms of a larger culture of anger and entitlement that permeates the lives of these men, the fraternities they live in, the sports teams they play on, the dorms and social houses they occupy?
These men live in a world that the sociologist Michael Kimmel has called “guyland,” where boys want to be men but have only each other to follow and so they teach one another the “guy code.” The guy code says might makes right, bros before hos, and the only acceptable emotional response is anger (unless it’s about sports, and then it’s OK to feel sad and even cry). Guyland also teaches these young men a sense of entitlement — that they deserve women, jobs, and to dominate the campus space. Perhaps 30 years ago, their power unchallenged, they could have been happy. But in 2018, the campus — and the country — are no longer oriented primarily toward them. And so, when things don’t work out, when they see their assumption of privilege challenged, they lash out — with words or actions.
We cannot solve the problem unless we change the culture. There are efforts in that direction, programs at Stony Brook University and elsewhere to call out and examine toxic masculinity, but too few.
For years this 800-pound white gorilla has been raging and screaming, and most of us have been loath to see it.
The reluctance of colleges to confront the toxicity of white masculinity reflects a similar reluctance nationwide. For years this 800-pound white gorilla has been raging and screaming, and most of us — educators, politicians, journalists — have been loath to see it. This was obvious when police described the confession tape of white (and homophobic and Christian-raised) Mark Anthony Conditt as “the outcry of a very challenged young man.” (You can easily imagine how they would have characterized him if he were African-American and/or Muslim.) The Virginia Tech shooting was committed by a Korean-American, but the vast majority of mass shootings are by white males. Pundits ignore the obvious connection between mass shootings and white masculinity. We mark white mass shooters as suffering from “mental illness” rather than a cultural problem. Kimmel and Matthew Mahler point out that focusing on mental illness or “bad actors” shifts “the blame away from group characteristics to individual psychological problems, assuming that these boys were deviants who broke away from an otherwise genteel … culture.”
We do the same on campus when we pretend that hate crimes are randomly distributed rather than far more likely to be committed by white, straight men — embodiments of “normal” masculinity. These are the bros we see walking on any campus, hats backward, the guys who throw the parties, buy the booze, play video games more fervently than they study. The guys who tell each other not to be a “pussy” or a “fag,” and live in such constant need for approval from their bros that they participate in hazing rituals that can cost them their lives. These are also the guys who help to create rape culture, even if they themselves don’t rape. They don’t stop it. They don’t report it. They protect their bros.
These young men are drowning in their bro culture, failing at school, at relationships, even, according to some recent surveys of hook-up culture, at sexual pleasure. They are also being taught all the wrong lessons in guyland: that they can do what they want, say what they want, spend their time how they want, and still have a wonderful career and an amazing life. They suspect that might not be true, but they are paralyzed by the fear of disapproval from the ruling bro-geoisie.
Let us return to the N-word scrawled on a wall. There are a variety of questions we could ask: Who did this? What kind of punishment do they deserve? How can we restore the community after such an event? But there are other questions we should ask too: How does white bro culture normalize the use of the N-word, like when these guys are playing Call of Duty or singing a rap song? How does the absolute commonness of this racial entitlement make writing the word on a wall not an aberration but rather a continuation of everyday practices? Even if an individual bro is opposed to writing the word in a public space, he still says it privately with his bros, uses it as a badge of honor, proof that he won’t be defeated by “political correctness” and the “feminazis” who try to control him.
This is not a great way to enter the work world. The bros are frozen in their Mad Men lifestyles, but the men of the 1960s were responding to the social requirements of their time, social strictures that made telling racist jokes hilarious, that made sexually harassing your secretary par for the course, that privileged white men in ways that did not allow for any fair competition from other groups.
Now, #MeToo and economic and demographic changes mean that being a straight, white man is no longer a guarantee of privilege and wealth. No doubt structural sexism and racism will not soon disappear into thin air, but they are weaker. Nagging doubt that these bros are going on to successful careers, lives, and relationships only makes them angrier.
It is among colleges’ jobs to prepare their students for the world. But instead of doing that for young, white men, we continue to pretend that the bros are all right. Social-science data tell us otherwise. These young men are psychologically, and often physically, unhealthy, self-sabotaging, and furious, thwarting themselves and threatening others.
Instead of helping these students develop the skills they need to thrive, colleges fear alienating donors, sports fans, and frat alums. Never mind that toxic masculinity and aggrieved whiteness are curdling the cultures and ideals cherished by most students today, and by the successful citizens and alumni of tomorrow.
Even if an individual bro is not caught perpetrating an act of hate, he is trapped in an ugly parallel universe. There he is taught not to care about school, about women, about people of color, about LGBTQ people, about anyone who is different from him and his bros. His obsolete world is colliding with new global, cosmopolitan realities. Help him understand that. Or let him wallow in a corrupted yesteryear, and then wait for the next hate crime.
Laurie Essig is a professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College. Her forthcoming book, Love, Inc., will be published by the University of California Press.