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.