Can A White Guy Represent For His People?

Can A White Guy Represent For His People?

By Channing Kennedy, Code Switch

“In my 32 years as a white person, I’ve self-identified (at various points) as a Midwesterner, a feminist, a nerd, a poor person, a redneck, a queer ally, an atheist, a punk, a Unitarian, a college dropout, a person with ongoing mental health issues, and any number of other nouns, opt-in or otherwise, which I experience on a uniquely empty palette as a straight white cisgender male. Some of them have had actual social and economic ramifications on my life, and some of them have just been me trying to feel special. But all of them are boxes inside a box too large to see the walls of; when a straight cisgender white male with mental health issues gets in the news for something horrible, I know the box is large enough for me to step away from him. And when my perspective on that box is shifted without my permission, like when a friend asks me why white people are so weird, I compulsively stick out my arms and legs and refuse to fit in.”

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