The family’s crisis team drafted a statement for the young man to give and, crucially, a strategy to shape the public’s perception. If America saw this married man in his late 30s as a boy — handsome and high-spirited, mischievous, not a criminal — he’d be able to squirm out of his misdeeds with minimal punishment.
.. If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s how, in the summer of 1969, the Kennedy camp managed the fallout after 37-year-old Teddy drove his car off a bridge off Chappaquiddick Island, and his young female passenger died.
.. We’ve all been having a good chuckle watching our president and his surrogates characterize Mr. Trump’s 39-year-old son, the married father of five, as an “honest kid,” a wide-eyed innocent
.. Those misdeeds were waved away by Rio Olympic officials, who defendebd the 32-year-old athlete and his partners in crime by saying, “Let’s give these kids a break.”
.. Readers who studied John Updike are conditioned to find those kinds of admissions adorably annoying, charmingly childish. Rich and his fictional brethren, from Alexander Portnoy all the way back to Peter Pan, are the man-boys we love to hate.
.. Women and nonwhite men don’t have it quite as easy.
.. If boys will be boys, then girls must be grown-ups, whose job it is to protect men from their worst impulses. Witness every administrative body, from middle school to Congress, that has decided that it’s easier and more culturally acceptable to police girls’ and women’s clothingthan it is boys’ behavior.
.. Brock Turner, once a promising Stanford swimmer, was convicted of sexual assault, his parents thought that even a six-month sentence was too much. “He will never be his happy-go-lucky self,” Mr. Turner’s father lamented
.. People of color, of course, never receive the leeway that “good kids” like the 39-year-old Trump son seem to get.
Real Men Might Get Made Fun Of
“How to build a better white guy” is a conversation that could turn academic fast, replete with all the jargon that the sneering class finds so tedious: intersectionality, emotional labor, systemic oppression, the dreaded “privilege.” But when I sat down with my friends, only one question sprang to mind, and it was personal, not pedantic.
“Do you ever stick up for me?”
.. So, if you care, how often do you say something? Maybe you’ll confront your close friends, but what about more powerful men, famous men, cool men, men who could further your career?
.. One of the subtlest and most pervasive is social ostracism — coding empathy as the fun killer, consideration for others as an embarrassing weakness and dissenting voices as out-of-touch, bleeding-heart dweebs (at best). Coolness is a fierce disciplinarian.
.. People of color not only have to deal with racism; they also have to deal with white people labeling them “angry” or “hostile” or “difficult” for objecting.
.. “SJW” is an acronym for “social justice warrior,” a sarcastic pejorative that purports to refer to online progressive zealots who cross the line from activist to moral scold. In practice, though, the term usually means “anyone asking me to adjust my behavior for reasons I deem annoying or frivolous,”
.. The “dirtbag left,” in contrast to these “warriors,” promises a world in which you can have it both ways: You can be good without ever seeming uncool in front of your buddies, you can be an advocate for social justice without ever considering there might be social forces beyond your ken, you can be a crusader for positive change without ever killing anyone’s buzz, you can be a progressive hero without ever taking identity politics seriously.
.. She testified that she and female colleagues were not invited to a business dinner with Al Gore, the former vice president. “It was said that if there were women there, the conversation would be tempered,” she said, “and it was because women kill the buzz.”
.. I’m frequently contacted by young women weighing the (iffy) benefits and (massive) costs of calling out sexism in their male-dominated industries. I always think: Why is this even our responsibility to fix?
.. One of my podcasting friends told me that he does stick up for women in challenging situations, like testosterone-soaked comedy green rooms, for instance, but complained, “I get mocked for it!”
Yes, I know you do. Welcome. Getting yelled at and made fun of is where many of us live all the time.
Speaking up costs us friends, jobs, credibility and invisible opportunities we’ll never even know enough about to regret.
.. But I need you to absorb that risk. I need you to get yelled at and made fun of, a lot, and if you get kicked out of the club, I need you to be relieved, and I need you to help build a new one.
When Is A Sandwich Not Just A Sandwich?
The point is, Brooks’s young guest was freaked out by salami and tomatoes in a way she wasn’t by enchiladas and refried beans. Though the young woman might have been of Mexican background (Brooks doesn’t say), in a place like Texas, say, Mexican food is ordinary cuisine even working-class white people.
.. I had to live with the disdain of some members of my Louisiana family for my allegedly fancypants and inauthentic tastes. It was all class anxiety on their part, but they found a way to put the knife in emotionally over these things. They were reverse snobs, and were at times really mean about it. I don’t believe that is excusable. That said, the fact that I was far more comfortable moving in cosmopolitan settings, and had more cosmopolitan tastes, meant that I had doors open for me, professionally and otherwise, that they would not have had.
.. I mentioned that when I arrived in Paris, the Dutch friends who were supposed to meet me had left a message at my hotel saying they had to cancel.
“What did you do?” said my dad, with tremendous concern.
“Checked in and spent the next few days exploring Paris on my own,” I said, as if it was no big deal. Because it wasn’t.
My father was visibly astonished.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Said he, “I would have just sat there in the hotel until it was time to go back to the airport.”
He wasn’t joking. He was serious.
.. conservatives tend to be “low openness” individuals — that is, people who are much less willing to try new and unfamiliar things.
.. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another.
.. This, by the way, is why I have a very short fuse for front-row pretenses to “diversity,” which are usually only skin deep. The white man who only has a high school education, and who lives in a trailer park on the outskirts of Bunkie, La., will never enjoy the privilege of, say, Jerelyn Luther, the black Yale student whose name lives in deserved infamy as Shrieking Girl. The refusal of the front-row Establishment to recognize the reality of class privilege, which is in large part cultural privilege, is a major barrier to meaningful reform. The way front-row kids in power assuage their status anxiety is by hiring more diversity deans, which is a lot easier than confronting the complexities of class.
How We Are Ruining America
Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.
.. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
.. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.
The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.
.. zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009.
.. Educated parents live in neighborhoods with the best teachers, they top off their local public school budgets and they benefit from legacy admissions rules, from admissions criteria that reward kids who grow up with lots of enriching travel and from unpaid internships that lead to jobs.
.. I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop.
.. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette.
.. the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.
.. To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.