Angry, White and American
Angry, White and American (TV Movie 2017) - IMDbBritish journalist Gary Younge explores the issue of race in America by travelling from Maine to Mississippi talking to white Americans about the issues that make them angry - from disappearing jobs to the epidemic levels of drug use.
Acclaimed British journalist Gary Younge asks why so many white Americas are angry and what can be done to fix the situation. He drives from Maine to Mississippi - the whitest state to the blackest - to explore the range of white America's hopes and fears, expectations and prejudices. He goes to the front lines of the opioid battle, visits unemployed steel workers, and looks in on the Alt-Right.
It seems so obvious, and yet so startling to see middle-class white American men, arguably the most privileged human beings on the planet (excluding, of course, hereditary aristocracies and the upper classes) fuming with such self-righteous outrage. “I’m a white man,” he says, “How many advantages can one persona have?”
So, to research my book, Angry White Men, I traveled the country and interviewed scores of these guys — from “men’s rights” activists who think white men are the victims of the new discrimination, to the “white wing” on the rightward fringes of the American political spectrum, who believe they are watching “our” country being snatched away from them.
What unites them, I came to understand, was a sentiment I called “aggrieved entitlement.” Raised to believe that this was “their” country, simply by being born white and male, they were entitled to a good job by which they could support a family as sole breadwinners, and to deference at home from adoring wives and obedient children. And not only do their kids and their wives have ideas of their own; not only is the competition for those jobs increasingly ferocious; they’ve also been slammed by predatory lenders, corporate moguls, Wall Street short-sellers betting against their own companies and manipulated by cynical elites into believing that their adversaries were not the ones downsizing, outsourcing and cutting their jobs, but those assorted others — women, immigrants, gays, black people — who were asserting their claims for a piece of the pie. The middle class white American man expected to be more Don Draper, all self-made , in control, and upwardly mobile. Instead he’s more like William Foster, another fictional character who’s fallen off the cliff into that dark abyss of despair, violence and madnes
Acclaimed British journalist Gary Younge asks why so many white Americas are angry and what can be done to fix the situation. He drives from Maine to Mississippi - the whitest state to the blackest - to explore the range of white America's hopes and fears, expectations and prejudices. He goes to the front lines of the opioid battle, visits unemployed steel workers, and looks in on the Alt-Right.
It seems so obvious, and yet so startling to see middle-class white American men, arguably the most privileged human beings on the planet (excluding, of course, hereditary aristocracies and the upper classes) fuming with such self-righteous outrage. “I’m a white man,” he says, “How many advantages can one persona have?”
So, to research my book, Angry White Men, I traveled the country and interviewed scores of these guys — from “men’s rights” activists who think white men are the victims of the new discrimination, to the “white wing” on the rightward fringes of the American political spectrum, who believe they are watching “our” country being snatched away from them.
What unites them, I came to understand, was a sentiment I called “aggrieved entitlement.” Raised to believe that this was “their” country, simply by being born white and male, they were entitled to a good job by which they could support a family as sole breadwinners, and to deference at home from adoring wives and obedient children. And not only do their kids and their wives have ideas of their own; not only is the competition for those jobs increasingly ferocious; they’ve also been slammed by predatory lenders, corporate moguls, Wall Street short-sellers betting against their own companies and manipulated by cynical elites into believing that their adversaries were not the ones downsizing, outsourcing and cutting their jobs, but those assorted others — women, immigrants, gays, black people — who were asserting their claims for a piece of the pie. The middle class white American man expected to be more Don Draper, all self-made , in control, and upwardly mobile. Instead he’s more like William Foster, another fictional character who’s fallen off the cliff into that dark abyss of despair, violence and madnes
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