The Slow (and much-welcomed) Death of the Middle-Class, Middle-Aged, White Man

We live in an age of reckoning apparently. And not everybody is happy about it. Especially, if you are middle-class, middle-aged, white and male, you are prone to having, what I have come to call, “nightmares about white genocide”. Oh, please, pull the other one, will you?

All that has happened, chiefly in the last two or three years, in the west, is that a tiny bit of space has opened up to groups who have long been deprived of any. Think of the women behind the #MeToo movement, or the students protesting against gun violence in the US. Think of Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Think of these examples and go back a few years or decades and where were these voices?

It says something about middle-class, middle-aged, white male privilege that at the first sight of a different voice asserting its right to exist and be heard, it crumbles. I sometimes wonder how on earth these men were ever capable of building an empire. One in which the sun never set.

This age of reckoning that we’re living in now has long been overdue. For so many centuries we have been the six-year-old in Kayo Chingonyi’s poem “Some Bright Elegance”, “tapping a living out of beer garden patios to the delight of a crowd that wasn’t lynching today but laughing at the quickness of the kid.” Place us in the wrong time and place and we could have either been hanging from a tree or being cheered by a rowdy crowd in a theatre. And still they wonder why some of us are angry. Please, spare me the victimhood-infused backchat, will you?

Women who refuse to be seen as sexual objects, black people who just want “to breathe”, trans people who want to be treated as human beings; these are some of the battles being fought today. They are nothing more or less than a reaction to a centuries-old world order, designed and controlled by mainly public-school-educated, white men. And they claim to be victims now?

The irony is that the issue they worry more about is free speech. Let me come clear: I think freedom of speech is far too precious to ignore or overlook. It is central to our development as a democratic society. Which is why I would never trust guardianship of this hard-earned right to the likes of Nigel Farage or Jacob Rees-Mogg. But the reason why I think it is ironic how these “downtrodden” men keep going on about freedom of speech is that they seem to forget that it is fundamental in every debate or argument to have a thesis, antithesis and synthesis. At least that is how it is done publicly. Turn your telly or radio on and you will see two well-known figures presenting their views, defending them and, hopefully, arriving at some kind of consensus or compromise. Our “poor” privileged white men, who have framed almost every single debate since time immemorial, are suddenly struck by an amnesia-related condition; one that makes them forget the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was the first to come up with the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

We live in an age of reckoning apparently. May it be the harbinger of much-needed social and political changes to come. And I, for one, don’t care one jot what middle-class, middle-aged, white Johnny has to say. His voice is no longer the only one. I, too, have begun to raise mine.