Maybe, just maybe, it’s okay to be a white guy again.

    I don’t say that lightly. All of my life, pop culture has told me that I was the bottom of the barrel, the source of all that was wrong with the world. It didn’t matter that I had no money, no position, and no influence. I couldn’t have oppressed anyone if I’d wanted to. But, I was a white guy and, thus, I was pond scum.

    If a television commercial needed a fall guy, a buffoon, it was always the white guy. If pop culture needed to show a character to be out-of-touch or stupid or a total loser, the part consistently fell to the white guy.

    This has been fed, in part, by pop culture’s either-or fallacy, the idea that you can only have things one way or the other, with no middle ground, no gray area. Pop culture would have you think that you can’t be pro-white-guy and pro-anything-else. But, the reality is that I, along with several other white guys, have great respect for people of other ethnicities, nationalities, genders, faiths, and colors. We just never had permission to expect the same.

    Under no circumstances were we supposed to defend ourselves. We were just supposed to sit there and take it.

    But, maybe, things might slowly be changing.

    I offer two stories for your perusal.

    A couple of days ago, a murder took place, just up the road from here, in Knoxville, TN. It wasn’t the only murder; I’m sure Knoxville will have several more before the year is over. But, this one was different.

    Erin McLean’s husband constantly made sacrifices for his wife. He put his education on hold so that he could work whatever jobs he could get, to finance her getting a master’s degree in education. He even delivered pizzas, to make enough money to hold things together. But, what did Erin do? Well, apparently, she liked the looks of the high school boys she was teaching and decided to go poaching. She uses her position of authority to get in one of her male student’s pants. I’m sure, to hear her tell it, she was exploring her sexuality. She was raising her erotic awareness, because her husband wasn’t sensitive to her needs. The rest of the world just wouldn’t understand.

    But, the rest of us do understand.

    That’s why the kid is in morgue and her husband is in custody.

    And, so far, she’s not been charged with anything.

    Throughout my life, to be male was to be automatically suspect. You didn’t have to be guilty, just male. And, the worst thing was for you to be a single male and good at working with young people; that was considered proof positive that you must be up to something. But, now, I can’t turn on the television without seeing a story about some female teacher who’s poaching her male students.

    And, now that someone’s been killed over it, maybe women won’t get a free pass anymore. Maybe folks will look a bit more circumspectly at all of those in charge of their young, instead of holding witch hunts.

    The other possible sign of a sea change in attitudes comes from an unlikely source-- Hollywood. In its first two weekends, the movie 300 has surpassed the $100 million dollar mark, while most critics didn’t expect it to do much of anything.

    And, the movie is unapologetically pro-white-guy.

    Sure, it’s a live-action cartoon. Sure, it plays fast and loose with the historical battle of Thermopylae. But, you don’t have to translate the value system for even the youngest of white guys:

    Never surrender.

    Never retreat.

    Family is everything.

    Your country demands your best.

    And, it’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

    Maybe our time has come. Maybe it’s okay to be a white guy again.

    TWH