Western Media: The White Male by Mackinley Clevinger, April 10, 2016
In much of western media, such as movies or literature, there is an oft-seen running theme that is difficult to get away from due to how ingrained the idea has become in the minds of the people creating these public works. Not a theme about the story itself, but more in how they’re framed; that is, the frequency with which the natural state of a person is to be both white and male.
This position is taken to be the default, from which any deviance is, itself, a plot point; more than that, it’s a veritable rarity in enough works that immense applause is given to any work that accurately portrays the variety of human life that exists in the real world. This isn’t to say that women or people of any race besides Caucasian don’t appear in movies and stories, but they often only fill secondary or ‘token’ roles instead of being important or fully fleshed out characters.
When the story is about a white male, their gender and race are taken as a given and receive no second thought from the story. The events therein aren’t about the fact that they’re white, or male, but about other characteristics and plot points that are the main focus of that story. When you’re a white male in a story, you are just white and male with nothing extra attached that isn’t a part of the story. There’s no shady background or assumed motivations unless told to the audience; they’re a blank slate that the story fills in over time.
However, you’re rarely ‘just’ your gender and race if you’re not a white male. Those aspects of a character often come to the forefront in the shape of stereotypes and assumptions about their nature that are heavily reinforced by repetition in both fictional and real-life interpretations of people, these stereotypes overriding any other aspect of a character that the story may have told beforehand.
This is unfortunately seen rather often in the Legend of Zelda franchise. In Ocarina of Time, there’s a character that appears rather frequently as someone who helps guide the main character, their help paramount to the story, who is presented as essentially a ninja that had been trained all their life to be really cool. The moment they turn out to be Zelda, the princess, all the abilities and powers she had as the mysterious character disappear and she has to be saved from the game’s big bad by the player character.
White males in stories are free to explore any number of backgrounds and plots to create a diverse array of character types for the story to follow, but women in western, and many other, culture’s stories cannot get away from the same plot arcs time and time again that strip them of any strength they may have had and make them the driving factor for another character’s motivations, even when they’re supposed to be the main character. Black Widow, one of the freaking Avengers, gets caught by the big bad and has to be rescued by blind-side romantic interest Bruce Banner, and during that movie most of her on-screen time is spent relationship-building while everyone else is shooting lasers and punching robots, despite being an Avenger.
We assume that white male is normal, a blank slate, and that changing anything about their race or gender is akin to replacing an integral part of a vehicle, like its engine, when it’s more similar to changing a paint job. Yes, stories can be about race and gender in our world today, and those stories can be very important, but not every story where a person is a woman or black has to revolve around those aspects of their lives; they are more than that, and the ascribed stereotypes are not the end-all be-all of their characters.
A black man or woman does not have to come from the ‘hood’, or be embroiled in racism or slavery in every single story they’re in. Black people, or people of any race, do not only show up in life when those kinds of situations are present, and nor do women only show up in life when a man is looking for a love interest or needs to either die or be captured to give motivation to someone. Muslims do not need to only show up when terrorism is involved, Asians are not only present when martial arts are the story’s main focus; people are not their stereotypes, but the white male obsession in media only enforces this while driving out any ideas of individuality in other races or genders.
To expound upon this, nor is heterosexuality the norm from which everything deviates; there is no baseline for writing a character or judging another human being from, there is merely their existence which, as much as I have talked negatively of the subject, is as unique and complex as any white male in real life. With so much variety available in character building and design, it’s a shame to see the expectation for a story to be of white men and for anything different to be a quiet delight before returning to a fictional world inhabited by people of one race and one gender.
Even when discussing matters of another race or culture, you will so very often see a white man planted in the middle of it to give their perspective and view on it all, with those very aspects of the story slowly being ‘normalized’ over time until any attempts at cultural exploration devolve into it being a passing interest given up after it’s run its course, and any remaining plot points are turned around to be about the white male instead of whatever culture it had come from.
In a very shocking case of this, in the movies “Noah” and “Exodus: Gods and Kings”, both biblical stories that take place neither in Europe nor in America for very obvious reasons, all the actors were white. In Egypt, millennia ago, there were not white people running around performing acts of god in any religious book from that time period, and yet no attempts were made in the creation of either of these movies to accurately portray the setting or time period, instead preferring to use the normal skin tone for any kind of media made by western society.
This obsession needs to end, because it really points towards a frightening and growing idea for western media: the subjugation of other races, genders, and cultures that aren’t those of the white male; painting anyone that’s different as beneath you, and trying to enforce the idea that that is the proper place for them. People learn through stories that get told through literature, movies, and real-world examples, and if they’re all teaching the same lesson – that white males are the dominant presence in the world – then everyone, not just the bigots you hear about or see day-to-day, is going to start believing it, too.
Another form of media, the news, likes to use this as well, numerous news outlets presenting a world populated with white people that is only interrupted with a story about any other kind of race when a Caucasian was involved, or when they can enforce a negative stereotype about other races. There was an attack on Paris, a terrible tragedy, that killed over a hundred people and was covered by media outlets for days, social media springing up to show solidarity, and it was truly a heartwarming story of people coming together to support the victims of a shocking event.
Except the day before, there was another attack in Beirut that killed dozens and maimed hundreds, but no one talked about it; no solidarity was shown, and no one cared. Paris? Primarily white. Beirut? Mostly Arab. The majority of people killed by the recent spate of terrorist bombings have been Muslims in the region engaged in that conflict, and yet the western media would present a world in which every Muslim is a terrorist and the only people hurt have been the default race: white people, creating a very strong ‘us against them’ mentality between white people and any other race.
It is systematic that in all forms of media – the news, movies, literature, any of them – a stereotype is created and presented for anyone that isn’t a white male. A white male can be anything, but if you’re a Muslim you’re a terrorist, if you’re a woman you’re a love interest, if you’re black you’re ‘streetwise’ and likely uneducated (see: the Ghostbusters re-boot,) but if you’re a white male? Superheroes, spies, troubled writers, movie executives; anything you want.
The idea that seems to be present in carrying out a story is that only white men, as a social group, are capable of having a stable enough life to actually experience some of life’s complexities, while anyone else is constantly beset by racial or gender issues which can only be solved by a white man strolling in to save the day. Women are scientists that discover things too, Muslims write books as well, black people are not either uneducated, Neil Degrasse Tyson, or Morgan Freeman.
There needs to be a change in western civilization’s representation of what a human being is; that it is more than a person’s gender or race, more than their sexual orientation, more than the stereotypes and assumptions that have been spread around for centuries, and above all else, more important than any of the rest of these; that being human is more than being white and male.