Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male Power

Must read. So insightful, and written in understandable language. No academic gate-keeping here!

Love the book and told friends and families to purchase same.

Absolutely incredible book. I would recommend this to everyone.

It’s just everywhere - the idea that being White and male is just “normal”, it’s the standard against which everyone else is judged. The accepted normalcy that to be a proper American, one is White and that white males should dominate (their opinions, their thoughts, their feelings, their efforts, should count more than those of the rest of us) has been established, institutionalized and enforced through policy, law, and popular culture since before the founding of the country. Ijeoma Oluo, the author of the 2020 book, MEDIOCRE: THE DANGEROUS LEGACY OF WHITE MALE AMERICA, is probably going to be misunderstood and again as she was after her previous book SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT RACE, be the target of vile messages threatening her with murder and rape. For asserting and exploring the history of how White men have been unjustifiably overvalued while women and people of color have been not just undervalued but often ignored and erased from history, she will likely be accused of being anti-American, of hating White people, of being divisive at a time when the country needs to find some unity. And, she would deserve none of that (comments like those would come from those who probably had not actually read her work.)Oluo looks critically and with wit and biting humor at the places that White male supremacy have found a home and the processes by which White male supremacy finds ways to make us all complicit in its maintenance. You would expect her to examine the Republican Party, but Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders also fall under her critical examination. She turns to consider why the Right wing leadership - full of White men with degrees from prestigious universities - is suddenly against properly funding public education from kindergarten through college. She asks why we collectively seem to have forgotten the progressive voice of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for President of the US. Why did Bill Clinton betray Lani Guinier? She looks at football as it is played at the college and professional levels and explores its racist origins as well as its on-going racist and exploitative reality in which Black bodies and lives are battered for the spectacular enrichment of a White few. Through it all, she asks her reader to consider the terrible damage to lives and the cost entailed of a system that regularly elevates White men, no matter how mediocre and lackluster their talents and achievements, while so often denying those of women and people of color no matter how remarkable they are.

I'm going to say this up front: "Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America" represents, at least for me, a full frontal attack on American white male culture. The attack is relentless, it is uncompromising, and it is shocking enough to slap one into a new state of awareness. It doesn't really matter that I began this book with a mindset of agreement as to its basic premise: the total failure of a culture created and sustained, through racism and a near unassailable lack of intellectual diversity, to achieve anything other than a clear and monolithic state of white supremacy. The book still packs quite a whollop.Author Ijeoma Oluo is nothing if not rigorous in her research, her interpretation of history, and in the articulation of her argument. She goes after the sacred cows of white American history, and leaves them utterly annihilated. And who can argue, when the provocations on display are so obvious and, at times, so vile?Still, Ijeoma Oluo has a big enough heart to include a final chapter that offers (but by no means guarantees) the possibility of hope for our sick and troubled society. And, for me (as a white dude), such magnanimity counts for a lot.It's a brilliant book, and I recommend it.