Listening to the suits talk about their world

Someday I'll write a short, lighthearted post again.

Several weeks ago, Newsweek ran a cover story entitled “The Beached White Male.” As the aquati-dramatic headline suggests, the feature article focused on how the recent recession has plighted middle-aged, college-educated white males in America (…a.k.a. “The Man”).

The article could frustrate anyone who’s ever heard of homeless people. The story follows the post-2008 lives of a handful of formerly-Trumpesque businessmen. The men’s three biggest complaints are 1) they feel too ashamed to tell their still-credit-card-freewheeling wives that they’re unemployed, 2) they’re now struggling to afford their 9,000 square foot homes, and 3) their sex drives have been negatively affected due to feelings of lost masculinity.

Ninety-nine problems, man. Admittedly, “The Already-Impoverished-Prior-to-2008 Single Mother” is a considerably less snazzy tag line.

Still, I don’t want to aim my Mockery Death Ray at The Beached Man himself. All of us are psychologically wired to base our notion of what’s fair or tragic on our own experiences, our lives and immediate peer group—not on, say, sub-Saharan orphans. It’s unnatural to experience a significant blow, comparable to your own personal experiences, and feel unaffected, thinking, “Well, at least I’m not a starving amputee.” For the washed-up businessmen featured in the article, the unexpected deprivation of their Fortune-500 lives must feel at least as tragic and soul-crushing as, for example, failing a semester of college would have seemed to my own privileged, White Girl brain. Tragedy is in the eye of the beholder.

The more deserving target of the Death Ray, rather, is Newsweek itself, who, with their journalistic obligation to reporting Important Things, decided that this story was cover-material, over and above… anything else, frankly.

But I still don’t want to be too hasty. Perhaps the story about the plight of the impoverished Latina woman went out in 2009, and now Newsweek is scraping the barrel for new martyrs to feature.

To find out, I decided to turn to hard-hitting investigative journalistic techniques (and by that I mean, searching for “recession” in newsweek.com’s online archives and seeing what popped up). After browsing roughly 1,500 titles, what I found was that, since October 2008, Newsweek has published one or more lengthy (at least 3 pages on newsweek.com) articles on how the recession has affected the following specific American demographics* (listed in order of frequency, starting with the most frequent):

men
college students/new graduates
Baby Boomers
the West Coast
rich people
the Midwest
white men
small businesses**

Further, Newsweek writers are prone to calling the 2008 recession the “mancession,” and they’ve dedicated several short articles to how the recession was actually good for women, as more of them have been forced to work when their mancessed husbands lose their jobs. I managed to find one women-authored article arguing against that idea, but I found literally not one article focusing on the specific effect the recession had on the most famously disenfranchised populations in the U.S. (e.g., people of color, the working poor, the homeless, single moms, etc.).

You could argue that "Poor People: Still Poor" isn't cover-story news. Or that Newsweek is catering to their primary readerly demographic -- they want to write articles that will interest their generally white male readers, and an article entitled “I Know You Think Things Are Rough But People Who Don’t Have White Skin or Prostates Generally Still Have It Worse Than You” probably isn’t going to do the trick. “The Beached White Male,” on the other hand, not only interests their readership, but garners extra publicity by all the controversy it generates among its non-white, non-male non-readers.

Still, I can’t help but think of my Psychology of Racism class, where one of the more pointed lessons was that, in order for systems of privilege to be upended, those in the position of power need to get educated about the disenfranchisement of others. Newsweek, given their readership statistics, has the ear of The Man. And what do they do with it? Convince The Man that he’s the disenfranchised one. Someone deserves a Pulitzer.

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* This means I utterly ignored all articles that were about “Americans” in general, global (rather than American) concerns, Obama, and any stories focusing on the reasons behind the downfall of the market. Obviously, these topics comprised a fair portion of the article-age.

** I quickly found that titles can be misleading when you’re on a hunt for diversity. There was one article entitled “The Color of Money,” which turned out to be a profile of a deceased artist. Another called “Poverty Hurts,” about how new college grads will have a hard time finding a job. Another called “A Room of One’s Own,” about space issues on airplanes.