Tag angry white men

The Question of “Angry White Men” and Complaints of Procedural Abuse

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I started to include the contents of this post in the last one, “Why More Falsely Accused Don’t Speak Out.” Then I thought the topic of angry white men might be due some room of its own.

The previous post outlined reasons why men and women who’ve been victimized by false accusations and procedural abuse are subdued from voicing their outrage publicly. This post criticizes how victims who have expressed their pain and fury have been perceived and treated.

What complaints have emerged in the past couple of decades have been derogated as the rants of “angry white men” (Google this phrase, and you’ll see what I mean; it’s even the title of a 2014 book). Complaints have been dismissed, that is, as nothing worthier of consideration than the cranky kvetches of the disenfranchised “patriarchy,” yesterday’s top dogs said to resent their loss of dominion.

What members of angry white men’s and fathers’ groups are said to object to really is not their being unjustly vilified, kicked to the curb, impoverished, and stripped of roles in their children’s lives (pfft) but their loss of power and status.

It’s an attractively tidy idea and syncs up with feminist dogma nicely, but it’s critically shallow, besides ethically and empathically vacuous.

One thing the conclusion ignores is culture. Consider the Jews you may know, or the Koreans or the Pakistanis. Do you reckon restraining orders, for example, or domestic abuse allegations are as commonly brought against Jews or East Asians as they are against whites? Would the action be as countenanced in these ethnic communities, whose members may be more accountable to the judgment of other members and whose community conscience may forbid the public airing of familial discord?

Now it could be true that entitled white men, as members of the patriarchy or former patriarchy, are meaner and feel freer to be abusive than Jews and East Asians. Certainly that’s arguable, but it’s not necessarily arguable on the basis of reports of abuse, because it could also be true that entitled white women, as the usurpers of patriarchy (and as white women), feel freer to exploit feminine advantage and cry wolf than Jews and East Asians do.

Consider that feminism—the origin of the characterization angry white men—is criticized even within its ranks as ethnocentric, i.e., Whitey McWhite. If white women are those who are preponderantly pro-litigation, thanks to white feminist indoctrination into the culture of victimhood and “empowerment,” then who would you expect to be a majority of the targets of procedural abuse?

Those who posit that complainants of courthouse dirty dealings are predominately angry white men aren’t necessarily wrong, but they may be right for reasons they haven’t considered.

Another one of these reasons is entitlement.

Has it occurred to them, I wonder, that only white people may feel entitled to complain publicly? Do they really imagine that certain minorities aren’t that much more vulnerable to legal abuse, or that they’re not invisible and mute because of their self-perceived or actual lack of entitlement? People who’ve traditionally been the system’s goats aren’t people eager to stick their necks out. They never had faith in social justice.

If you allow that a majority of entitled victims of procedural abuses are white men, then it stands to reason that a majority of complainants of procedural abuses will be white men.

It further stands to reason that these white men, who had been conditioned to the expectation of justice, should feel disappointed…and angry.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (2014) is by sociologist Michael Kimmel. Dr. Kimmel is a New York Jew with a Ph.D. from Berkeley. His book was reviewed in The New York Times by Hanna Rosin, a Stanford grad, a senior editor at The Atlantic, and the author of The End of Men and the Rise of Women. Ms. Rosin is also Kimmel-Rosina New York Jew. While neither one’s conclusions can be dismissed offhand, their cultural and class remove from the subjects of Dr. Kimmel’s book makes their identification with those subjects suspect, and Ms. Rosin’s objectivity and access are plainly dubious. From Ms. Rosin’s review: “Kimmel’s balance of critical distance and empathy works best in his chapter on the fathers’ rights movement, a subset of the men’s rights movement. Members of this group are generally men coming out of bitter divorce proceedings who believe the courts cheated them out of the chance to be close to their children.” Contrast this confidently categorical interpretation of men’s and fathers’ complaints to this firsthand account by a father who was ruined by “bitter divorce proceedings”: “The ‘Nightmare’ Neil Shelton Has Lived for Three Years and Is Still Living: A Father’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse.” A comment on Amazon.com credits Ms. Rosin with being sensitive to “real women’s experience.” The story highlighted in the previous sentence chronicles a real (angry white) man’s—whose telephone number is provided in a comment beneath the post.

Why More Falsely Accused Don’t Speak Out

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If procedural abuses are epidemic (and they are), why do so few vociferously complain? Why isn’t the Internet inundated with personal horror stories (and why aren’t state representatives’ in-boxes choked with them)? We purportedly enjoy the privilege of free speech, so why isn’t it exercised more?

The absence of rampant complaints of procedural abuse is misleading. Limitation of complaints to sketchy e-petitions and forum comments, often anonymous, makes them suspect and easily discounted by those with a political interest in discrediting them.

The dearth of forthright exclamations of abuse and injustice, however, is easily understood.

Rather than consider who isn’t talking back, consider who does. What distinguishes these men and women from what may be hundreds of thousands or millions of victims of false, exaggerated, or misleading accusations to the court?

For one, most of them are childless or without young children. They don’t face being further deprived access to their kids if they buck the system. Those with minor children who do speak out have often been denied all rights to their kids, anyway; they have nothing left to lose.

Too, most of them work for themselves. It’s a fact that restraining orders influence employers. Furthermore, studies have shown that employers are influenced even by Internet disclosures by employees or potential hires that may be negatively perceived by the public. Human Resources personnel are paid to snoop around. Mere injudicious comments on Facebook may be hazardous to job opportunities and careers. Declaring that you’ve been judged to be a stalker, for example, or a domestic or child abuser has obvious and grave drawbacks, never mind if you’re also construed as a wacko because you vehemently insist online that your accuser’s psychopathic. This is an express train to sleeping in a refrigerator box.

Women aren’t immune to false accusation. They’re a minority among its victims, and that status is itself isolating (from a community peopled mainly by men who resent women and the favored political status they enjoy). Many respondents to this blog are female—maybe most. By and large, however, women may feel like interlopers in male-dominated discussions, and women’s advocates, whom they should be able to turn to, don’t want to bring scrutiny to bear on the question of procedural abuse (which is mostly by women).

People who may be foully wronged and branded with accusations that may daily tear at them are coerced into silence by the feared repercussions of ventilating their rage and anguish. Their false accusers, moreover, may be violent people or, for example, extremely vindictive ones, and the accused may fear for their safety and their children’s safety, or fear further legal abuse, which can be endlessly renewed, particularly after false accusations have once stuck, and which can result in incarceration—possibly meaning loss of a single parent’s child(ren) to the state—or financial hardship or ruin. The falsely accused are squeezed between a rock and a hard place.

As you might imagine—and it’s okay to try imagining even if it goes against your partisan loyalties—this creates a hell within a hell.

Probably most of the falsely accused, besides, are not trained writers (like the loudest voices that discredit people in their shoes are) nor among the politically privileged class, whose members are typically the most able to free themselves from false accusations in the first place. They’re not suave, and they don’t possess the kinds of credentials that make people think twice.

(Also, ironically, the people who do possess the kinds of credentials that make people think twice but who fail to deflect a false finger of blame are often sensitive to “social decorum” and may be loath to air dirty laundry.)

Public outcry, finally, is discomforting to family and friends (and their family and friends). It compounds the alienation and isolation of false accusation with alienation from those who believe in you; they sidle away.

In a nutshell, it’s not merely coincidental that those few who do elect to talk back are mainly single, independently employed, without small children, white…and male. Men don’t fear violent retaliation from their false accusers, usually, and they may have nothing left to be stripped of except the lingering expectation of justice.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Bearing the foregoing in mind, it should be no surprise that the preponderance of publicized outrage originates from “just folks” who aren’t distinguished and who are easily dismissed (and mocked) as “rabble.” What should be a surprise is that their detractors are often those who are supposed to be looking out for them, for example, civil rights advocates like the ACL(where R)U and agents of the popular press.