America's Angry White Men | Michael Kimmel

America's Angry White Men | Michael Kimmel

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 madness.