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A Reckoning?
The Death of Exclusive White Male Desire
By Kumbirai Khosa
I have been working with and teaching material related to youth culture for most of my career now, and one commonality across the history of American popular culture has always been White male desire. White males are the purveyors of American culture, the ones whose perspective is told, the ones who live to tell the tale, the ones who solve the mystery, rescue survivors, and get the girl.
From James Dean to Brad Pitt and beyond, White males had the virility, the tenacity, the audacity, and the intelligence to prevail. They were the ideal for all males — all men wanted to be like them, and women wanted to be loved by them. Allegedly. And even though I grew up on the African continent, my childhood was filled with them. Tom Cruise. Patrick Swayze. The Backstreet Boys. Though Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Tupac Shakur, Antonio Banderas, and others existed, they were always secondary, different, and there to add a little “flavor” to the pot.
This is not unique to my African childhood. When I spent some time in the Middle East, the students I worked with asked me about Robert Pattinson, the male lead in the Twilight series, never mind that at the time, I had not watched the saga, and would not have been able to tell him apart from other contemporary White boy…
