'I want my country back'

Photo: The Canadian Press

Truck driver Ken Hindman says he doesn't "feel one iota of responsibility" for the wrongs committed against black Americans. 

The voices cascade into the studio, denouncing political hypocrisy and media bias and disappearing values. Hillary Clinton is a liar and a crook, they say; Donald Trump is presidential and successful. By the time the 16th caller reaches the air, Rick Roberts' show has reached an impassioned crescendo of anger and lamentation.

What has happened to this once-great land? What has happened to the better lives our children were promised?

Roberts, WBAP's bearded, rodeo-roping, husky-voiced host, has heard enough.

"I want my country back," he begins.

He repeats that sentence a half-dozen times in a 4 1/2-minute rant that darts from fear of crime to outsourced jobs to political correctness. He pans soulless politicians and has-been celebrities and psycho-babble hug-a-tree experts; he pines for a time when everyone spoke English and looked you in the eye and meant what they said. It's a fervent soliloquy that dismisses transgender people and calls for faith to regain public footing and for economic opportunity to return.

"I want America to be America," he says. "I want some semblance of what this country used to be. It's worth protecting. It's worth defending. I don't recognize this country anymore."

This is a white male voice preaching to a largely white male audience that has expressed many of the same sentiments, in dribs and drabs, in hushed watercooler conversations and boisterous barroom exchanges, around kitchen tables — and most of all, in the course of a presidential campaign.

Certainly, not all white males agree. But at this moment in American history, to be white and male means, for many, to question what happened to the opportunities once theirs for the taking, to see others getting ahead and wonder why, to feel centuries of privilege and values slipping away.

"They're taking everything from us," says one of the day's callers, Stephen Sanders. "I don't want my community changed."

To many, the notion of white men being marginalized is ludicrous, their history a study in power and privilege, from the Founding Fathers to the "Mad Men" era and through their continued dominance in boardrooms and government. Yet they have suffered some real losses, even as they maintain advantages:

• Whites saw their household net worth fall from a median of $192,500 before the Great Recession to $141,900 in 2013, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. (Whites still have an average net worth about 13 times greater than blacks and 10 times greater than Hispanics, however.)
• Factoring in inflation, white men's salaries have barely budged in the past decade, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. (Still, they cash paychecks, on average, far larger than those of women, blacks and Hispanics.)
• The home ownership rate for whites, 71.5 per cent in the second quarter of this year, is down from the same period a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. (Black and Hispanic home-ownership, already lower, dropped at a far sharper rate.)
• White women have overtaken men in earning college degrees, according to census data. 

"What's made their lives more difficult is not what they think," said Michael Kimmel, a Stony Brook University professor who studies masculinity and wrote the book "Angry White Men." ''LGBT people didn't outsource their jobs. Minorities didn't cause climate change. Immigrants didn't issue predatory loans from which they now have lost their houses and everything they ever had. These guys are right to be angry, but they're delivering the mail to the wrong address."