White Male Paranoia

But is the white male truly an endangered species, or is he just being a jerk? It's still a statistical piece of cake being a white man, at least in comparison with being anything else. White males make up just 39.2 percent of the population, yet they account for 82.5 percent of the Forbes 400 (folks worth at least $265 million), 77 percent of Congress, 92 percent of state governors, 70 percent of tenured college faculty, almost 90 percent of daily-newspaper editors, 77 percent of TV news directors. They dominate just about everything but NOW and the NAACP; even in the NBA, most of the head coaches and general managers are white guys. So now they want underdog status, too, and the moral clout that comes with victimhood?

The white male may still be holding his own (and most of everybody else's) in the world of hard facts; but in the world of images and ideas-where we also live, and where our feelings about ourselves reside -he's taking a clobbering. On TV, the white male is a boob or a villain, not just in such shows as "Roseanne," but in the ads, too. In 1987, one researcher found that in the commercials' mini-conflicts between men and women, the woman won out 100 percent of the time. In the movies, he's a target for Thelma and Louise, or a loutish and entirely unwanted suitor for Belle in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." Mainstream literary scholars have become so gun-shy that the distinguished classicist Bernard Knox preemptively calls his forthcoming book on the ancient Greeks "The Oldest Dead White European Males." Essayist John Leonard calls his forthcoming volume "The Last Innocent White Man in America." In the art world, white guys are the bullies who once "marginalized" everybody else but who are now getting their comeuppance. This year's Whitney Biennial Exhibition (the museum equivalent of the debutante ball) showcased gay, female and nonwhite artists who, as associate curator Thelma Golden wrote in the catalog, "work consciously to deconstruct and de-center the politically constructed site of whiteness." Everywhere in the culture, from low to high, is the image of the white male as Ice Person: can't jump, can't dance, can't feel.

That sort of talk is part of what's eating white men these days: what if they talked like that about blacks? About women? A double standard, they think, is now applied to both their speech and their behavior. Peter Keihm, 29, recalls a woman at his Atlanta computer company joshing about tying up a male colleague for sexual-bondage games. "If it was a guy saying the same thing," he says, "it would be harassment." Good thinking. Or is it? These days it's hard to tell when the fear of committing sexual harassment crosses over into paranoia. Dave, 49, a Tampa newspaper editor who no longer dares ask female colleagues to lunch, seems close to the edge: "The crowd that wants to make people so aware of nuance in things has almost frozen me into inaction." Then again, we don't know the women at Dave's paper.

Sexual harassment is an issue with no consensus, no clear rules-and lawsuits for guys who just don't get it. Insurance companies will now cover firms against sexual-harassment suits; one Boston-area company with about 100 employees had a close brush with such a suit last year and now pays a $25,000 annual premium for $1 million worth of coverage. Men like to indulge in bitter overstatement about the pitfalls of this uncharted territory. "It's getting to the point," says Georgia state legislator Sonny Dixon, "where you better not extend your arm for a handshake unless she extends it first." As sociologist Kimmel recently told The Boston Globe, "What we called traditional workplace behavior may be called sexual harassment. What we called dating behavior ... may now be called rape. Most men are not happy with this."

And then there are all these little things that can nag at a white guy-it sounds crazy even to mention them, but they add up. His cash machine asks if business is to be conducted in English or Spanish. A panhandler pointedly wishes him a pleasant and safe day. He's passed by a car, more luxurious than his own booming rap music. (He has lately acquired a taste for country music.) He opens a door for a woman who didn't need it opened. At preschool they're teaching his kids songs in Swahili: what happened to "Three Blind Mice" or aren't you supposed to say "blind" anymore? Certain public figures begin to get his goat: Spike Lee, Sinead O'Connor, Al Sharpton, Faye Wattleton, and he hates to admit it-it's so trite-but Hillary Rodham Clinton. He's beginning to feel like Bob Dylan's Mr. Jones, who knew something was happening here but didn't know what it was. People seem to be talking in code-wack? def?-and he's getting sick of feeling obliged to pay attention. He hates the word womyn, and anything with the suffix -centric. He worries that he's a becoming a fascist. He has been thinking about buying a gun.

Liberal guilt: