A database of progressive white men who are thirsty for credit
On Freddie deBoer’s substack site, he has a very funny, if lengthy, article which takes a few nasty shots at people I’ve mostly (and fortunately) never heard of but clones of which exists everywhere, The Good White Man Roster.
Freddie starts with an overview:
These are the guys who have carefully crafted personas as ALLIES, as the good ones, as the right kind of white guy. These are the dudes whose every engagement on social media functions to let you know how very sorry they are, but always seem to come out on top in doing so.
And then goes through a list. Here are some samples of his takes:
… this is the Good White Man in his Platonic form… He’s so very sorry, everybody, and it cannot escape your notice that he’s more sorry than everyone else; that’s what an advanced being he is. He apologizes, but only in the context of referring to some earlier, fallen self, and in doing so he inescapably valorizes his current self… He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.
[MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is] a living, breathing laundromat for the post-collegiate elite’s ugly feelings of superiority, reassuring them every day on his show that their snobbery and self-obsession are justified thanks to their superior moral virtue… I genuinely cannot remember the last time this man made an argument on his show that risked offending subscribers to the New York Times.
There are a lot of people competing for the “most ardent supporter of a totally undertheorized and substance-free vision of an ostensibly post-capitalist future” crown these days, but Higgins is not going to be outworked on that score. Dialectics. False consciousness. Defund the police, or abolish ICE, or whatever. Let’s uh build the exceptionally vague society of our dreams. Also he lists his literary agent in his Twitter bio, which I find truly amazing.
Hello! Would you like a sneering shithead to condescendingly inform you that the dead center of witless corporate liberal opinion is in fact the utterly spotless expression of the transcendent truth, delivered with total conviction by someone who spent fifteen minutes reading Quora answers to arrive at his position? Buddy, have I got a pundit for you!
This man is the basic bitch of Good White Men, a computer-generated NPC of a Noble Ally. Everything about his performance (and, if you’ll forgive me, his face) is so perfectly in the center of Good White Manness, I half suspect he’s been created by a creepy machine learning algorithm designed to mimic embittered social studies teachers who always told themselves they were destined for more.
The kind of guy who discovers body positivity only after his metabolism slows down at 24 and suddenly he can’t lose his beer gut. The kind of guy who develops a keen interest in Thatcher’s depravity during the Troubles while taking a semester abroad in Dublin surrounded by cute girls with republican sentiments and potentially-accessible vaginas.
His general take on such White Men is also precise
Any Good White Man who feels that their appearance on this roster is an injustice can easily be removed. They need only follow their ideology to its logical ends by shutting the fuck up.
Which they will never, ever do.
No Minister 