Families planning to send their kids to the University of Kansas this fall may want to take a close look at the course offerings. “Angry White Male Studies” will examine the rise of the angry white male in the United State.
“This course charts the rise of the ‘angry white male’ in America and Britain since the 1950s, exploring the deeper sources of this emotional state while evaluating recent manifestations of male anger,” the course description said.
The description explains that students will be “employing interdisciplinary perspectives” to examine “how both dominant and subordinate masculinities are represented and experienced in cultures undergoing periods of rapid change connected to modernity as well as to rights-based movements of women, people of color, homosexuals and trans individuals.”
The class will be taught by Christopher Forth, who is a professor of history and the Dean’s Professor of Humanities, serving in the departments of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and American Studies. It’s not his first time teaching the material.
Questions that will be answered about angry white males in Forth’s class, according to the course description, include, “Where does he come from? What’s he angry about? Is his anger misplaced? Is he blaming the right people? How long has this been going on? Is he a global phenomenon? And how do we move forward?”
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The class has drawn criticism on social media and from Kansas Republican Congressman Ron Estes, who suggested in 2019 that the class could violate Title IX. “Instead of a course to unite people and empower women , KU has decided to offer a class that divides the student population and could pose a Title IX violation by creating a hostile campus environment based on gender,” he tweeted previously.
The University of Kansas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The angry white male is a myth, according to the late Charles Krauthammer. The popular and respected conservative Fox News commentator and New York Times best-selling author in 1995 wrote in the Washington Post that it was an invention by the media and Democrats to explain the 1994 mid-term elections. That was the election that gave control of Congress to Republicans for the first time in 50 years.
His words could be seen as prophetic to the 2022 midterms as the media begins using it again.
Krauthammer explained the myth as “an invention of political partisans who wish to rationalize and ultimately delegitimize the election of 1994. After all, neither anger, nor whiteness, nor maleness are coveted attributes these days.
A rabble of dispossessed white men — threatened by women, resentful of minorities, enthralled by talk radio — has been stirred, and that’s why the Republicans won. The myth is not just useful but comforting too. Defeat becomes tolerable, indeed virtuous, when you’ve convinced yourself that you lost to a lynch mob.”
Polling currently shows Democrats will lose the House, and possibly the Senate, by a historic margin.
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
