The banality of white male rage, again

And affective labor on the debate stage

Remember that night in 2016 when Trump prowled the stage, hovering over Hillary Clinton as she calmly outlined her policies?

Last night, the mood (or should I say vibe!) was different.

CNN

How many of us have older white cis men like this in our lives? Men who talk about their warped view of the world with a frustrating certainty, turning wishes into fact, idiocy into conviction. Who address women who challenge them like they are scolding a child. Who have “concepts of a plan” and other dumb phrases on hand to obscure how clueless they are about how the world works.

Who insist that literally everyone sees the world exactly as they see it, betraying how terrified they are of having any part of their own warped reality challenged. Who talk and talk and talk and with each run-on sentence scramble the brain more and more, until it’s impossible to see the forest for the trees, or remember how the conversation began. Men who make their false reality everyone else’s problem, then make themselves the victim, because they cannot face what they’ve done. Men who seethe and spit with rage when they’re called on their bullshit.

There’s a level of narcissism and psychopathy and blatant racist misogyny to men like this. Last night, we saw Trump insist— double down even!— that immigrants eat pets, and women are killing newborn babies. I mean, what the fuck.

There is also a familiarity to men like this. Watching Harris stand beside this kind of man and somehow stay focused, reel it back in, take notes, recall her prep, not get too ruffled, not get defensive, all while holding him accountable for what he’s done, is something to which many can probably relate.

Men’s problems so often become women’s to solve, to cushion, to field, to calmly parse out and name. For Black women in particular, the feelings rules around anger are strict. But Harris refused to capitulate to the “weird” stupidity and the DARVO campaign the Right has been waging for years on the American public by calling women baby killers, all the while enabling and stoking real violence.

Last night, I found myself holding my breath, hoping that Harris would not get sidetracked, not get sucked into the convoluted tangents, not get distracted trying to reason with nonsense. Because you can’t. And she didn’t. Harris’s plain insistence that this is a guy who is having trouble “processing” the fact that he lost— that he actually has lost his mind, too, is an extremist, is being laughed at, is a disgrace, is easily manipulated— was cathartic.

She stayed on message, yes, but we also watched her perform an incredible volume of affective labor. Imagine the emotional and psychological effort it takes for a woman whose race is being called into question by a privileged white guy on a national stage to keep her thoughts straight and keep her face composed around this kind of man.

I don’t agree with all of Harris’s policies. Vibes are not enough. I also understand the impossible needle she is trying to thread, and the way in which for many this campaign stands as a poignant reckoning with white male power. That’s the contradiction so many are weighing. I am still thinking about the carceral language and the “right to defend themselves”; the lethal compromises candidates in this system make and the uncertainty about what she will actually do if she wins.

But this is a moment of reckoning, and as much as we need more than it, we need it, too.

In February of this year, I wrote about how the maintenance of white masculinity is defined by a kind of banal evil— a phrase adapted from Hannah Arendt’s study of totalitarianism.

The banality of white male rage

As I said then, we have become numb to the regularity of white male rage— the racist microaggressions, the misogynist trolling, the work of empire, it’s become the fabric of our daily lives. Trying to make sense of these men, these encounters, this behavior, only makes it harder to break through the false reality and call attention to the actual horrors of the world. We are wildly overdue for someone calling it like it is.