Performing White Masculinity (Patreon)

By Sam (@LiberationistMA)

If you're an Asian American cishet man, you might've been harassed as a kid for being "gay" or feminine. Maybe it still happens. But why? Because we don't perform gender according to white standards. Then how much of what we think of as masculinity is just white supremacy?

This applies to all BIPOC who perform toxic masculinity, especially in the US. What you are performing is not masculinity from your culture; it's your internalized parroting of white masculinity. 

Even for white men or white women trying to "man up," that's just European caste and class systems controlling lower caste behaviors. It turns you into caricatures. What you believe is masculinity and empowerment is imperialism and your own subjugation.

Imperialism weaponizes masculinity and reinforces capitalism. As one comrade put it, "Imperialism plants and amplifies toxic masculinity everywhere it can because it is such a useful tool in rendering your subjects vulnerable to domination." In this universe, white supremacy is the supreme imperialism because of where it originated and who it benefits. There are other forms of power, but they're lower in the hierarchy and lack the same hegemony or any hegemony to speak of at all.

For a man, the inability to provide material comforts for his family leaves him feeling emasculated, making him easier to control. Not being a white man leaves everyone else disempowered UNLESS they become like white men, regardless of what's culturally appropriate for them. The white male standard must be the benchmark, even if it's not authentic to whiteness or masculinity but a parody of power. What's crucial is for power to be associated with whiteness and masculinity, leaving white men at the top. IF that somehow fails, then for their ideals to self-replicate within all of us so that we still perpetuate white masculinity, white supremacy, and imperialism as the norm. Still maintaining the master's house with the master's tools.