To: the angry white men of Kimmel’s angry white America

It’s okay, put it down. We came to talk. Just talk.

You’re going to keep it up? Okay, fine, but I’m going to talk.

See, I know something about you.

You’re scared.

Whoa. Easy. Just talking, remember?

We’re scared too. And no, not just because of that thing.

Now, more than any time in history, you have more in common with the angry black men bell hooks’ describes in “We Real Cool”. Behind the rage, behind the macho defiance, you both find yourself unemployed (hooks 31), “downwardly mobile”, “pushed aside” by the nation they helped build (Kimmel 3). Just as “Nothing in the world loves a black man more than another black man…” (hooks xi), white men find themselves only understood by other white men.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. When Doug the Trump supporter says “I don’t think so, that’s how they get ya”, it strikes a chord with the “Black Jeopardy” contestants and host, who understand what it feels like to feel taken advantage of by a distant, almost foreign government.

When Shanice expresses her desire to have the money withheld from her paycheck to spend as she pleases, you understand that that desire for self-determination and liberty is one you echo-who is this higher power, corporate or governmental, to dictate how you earn your honestly earned pay?

Both sides share the same disappointed indifference towards the political process. Doug’s answer of “Come on, they already decided who wins even before it happens” to a question about voting is no doubt echoed in political meetings of the far-left as much as the far-right.

Tom Hanks’ Doug and Keenan Thompson’s show host bond over the simple pleasures of a funny movie, the shared inability to afford a car mechanic that hints at the economic trouble plaguing both communities, and similar opinions about the benefits of “skinny women”. Perhaps even the final divisive issue of Black/All Lives Matter from the skit can be addressed. The invasive, unjust government that the far-right fears so much is the same invasive, unjust government that BLM fears–they’ve just started shooting earlier.

In their perceived isolation and decline, both ethnic groups retreat into violent hypermasculinity–black men in urban environments join gangs, white men in the suburbs join militias. In the frantic decisiveness of circling the wagons, Kimmel’s “Angry White Men” forget that while they suffer, they do not suffer alone–in a continuation of the compositional fallacy mentioned on pg. xiii, just because white men are angry, does not mean all angry men are white. While the others may be different, does not mean you are alone.

Works Cited

Hooks, Bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Kimmel, Michael S. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Nation, 2015. Print.