Book Review: "Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America"

Ijeoma Oulo's book is a searing, bracing, and necessary take-down of white male supremacy.

Every so often, you come across a book that’s so bracing in its critique, so searing in its political commentary, and so incisive in its historical analysis, that you can’t help but write a gushing review of it. That is definitely the case with Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. It’s a book that’s essential for anyone invested in helping to forge an America that’s not designed to work just for white men.  

Mediocre skillfully combines rich history with contemporary political analysis. The first chapter, for example, examines the legacy of the western colonialism. She shows how the idea of the cowboy--popularized by Buffalo Bill Cody and countless westerns--was fundamentally premised on violence and the extermination of Native Americans. And, while the west has now been fully “settled,” that image of the independent cowboy still exerts a powerful pull, and Oluo draws a line between that past and more recent conflicts, including the standoff between Cliven Bundy and his family and the federal government. 

Each chapter undertakes a similar braiding of the past and the present. Chapter 2 looks at the ways in which white men have inserted themselves into feminism in order to claim it for themselves, while Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which higher education has had to endure constant assaults from powerful white men, including Ronald Reagan. Chapters 4 and 5 examine issues of housing and labor, showing how white men have worked to segregate American society and the workplace, ensuring that Black people still struggle with homeownership and women, particularly women of color, still make a fraction of what men do. Chapter 6 looks at the power Black women have wielded in national politics and how that has always led to backlash and efforts to push them down. Chapter 7 contends with the racist past and present of American sports, focusing in particular on football and the controversies surrounding players deciding to take a knee in order to protest racist violence. 

The type of book that Oluo sets out to write is one of the easiest to do poorly. It’s sometimes difficult to draw direct lines between the (somewhat) distant past and the present. Fortunately, she has a deft touch, and she does an exemplary job of showing how it is precisely Americans’ collective unwillingness to acknowledge its past flaws that allows social ills to continue to fester and flourish in our current moment. As she points out again and again, unless we are willing to come to terms with and, yes, apologize, for the transgressions of the past, it’s going to be impossible to actually create a more just and peaceful society. 

Though Oluo clearly comes from a leftist perspective, she doesn’t spare Democrats from criticism. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Bill Clinton all come in for their fair share of criticism, since all of them have both benefited from their status as white men and have often betrayed some of the racial justice principles that they supposedly stood for. Biden has a deeply conflicted history when it comes to the issue of school busing (a key means by which desegregation was achieved), Sanders has a bad tendency of sublimating all issues to class conflict (hardly surprising, given that he’s a self-identified socialist), and Bill Clinton was all too willing to throw Black people under the bus when it suited him (including withdrawing a nomination when the nominee’s misrepresented views were politically inconvenient). It’s a potent reminder that we on the left have a lot of housekeeping to do when it comes to making sure that we are doing our part to undo white male supremacy.

For make no mistake, white male supremacy does a significant amount of harm to those who perpetuate it, as Oluo shows time and time again. The myth of white male supremacy convinces many white men that they are inherently better than those that aren’t them and, when those promises aren’t met--because they’re built on a pathological lie--they are encouraged to turn that rage elsewhere, usually at the people they’ve been encouraged to see as inferior. Donald Trump proved more adept at exploiting this tendency to his benefit, and we’re all paying the price for it, even now that he’s out of office.

Now, I’m sure that there will be those who find this book difficult to read. As a white, cisgender man there were times when I found it difficult, but that’s precisely the point. We’ve all been implicated and immersed in this system, often to such a degree that we don’t even recognize that some of our most basic assumptions about how the world works are premised on systems of power that were built to maintain and sustain our prominence. Oluo’s brilliance is that she forces us to confront this, time and time again. If this book makes you uncomfortable, that’s good, because that’s a sign that you’re truly beginning to grapple with the realities of the world that we live in and the ways in which you’ve been programmed to believe that “normal” is acceptable, when it so clearly isn’t. 

Though the book’s primary argument relies on deep historical research, Oluo also brings in her personal experiences, particularly on social media and in public. She speaks, for example, of the white male relative who simply has to share his opinions, no matter how toxic they are and now matter how much she’s made it clear that she doesn’t want to hear from him. She also recounts the way that she lives in fear that her one or both of her sons will fall victim to the racist violence that is so much a part of American society. And, most hauntingly, she writes of the many death threats that she’s received. Aggrieved men don’t just threaten to kill her, they also threaten to kill themselves. Their identities are so intertwined with white male identity politics that they literally can’t see outside of it. 

White men, we can and must do better. Mediocre shows us why and, more importantly, it points us the way forward. It’s up to us to take it.