“Did you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”: 80s affirmative action backlash and contemporary alt-right masculinities

As Liam’s Bluesky posts above illustrate, the current occupants of the US presidency and vice presidency are seen to be deeply invested in the performance of a masculinity rooted in ressentiment or personal injury, and this style of masculinity is incongruous with more, uh, traditional and small-c-conservative versions rooted instead in calm rationality. Though white masculinity as personal injury is absolutely aligned with the way financialized markets and platforms reward the performance of masculinity, here I want to focus a bit more genealogically on how exactly this style of masculinity emerged.

As Jennifer L. Hochschild argued in 1999, throughout that decade the right continually reanimated the debate around affirmative action to use “as a political weapon in a broader cultural war about what America stands for.” In other words, the right was not interested not in the substantive matter of (in)justice, but in affirmative action’s ability to stoke people’s fears and prejudices; as Hochschild put it, “to be useful as a weapon, affirmative action must remain at the level of moral claims and single-dimensional outrage.” This outrage took the form of anger over so-called “reverse discrimination.” A term applied categorically to white cisgender men, “reverse discrimination” describes the purported harms experienced by individuals denied opportunities like university admissions, job offers, and promotions in order to advance the ends of affirmative action. In other words, “reverse discrimination” is an attempt to claim that affirmative action actively puts white men at a disadvantage compared to white women and non-white people.

In 1989, a sociologist at notoriously conservative Claremont McKenna College named Fredrick Lynch published a qualitative study of 32 “white-male victims of reverse discrimination” (7). This book, titled Invisible Victims, uses interviews with a range of white men who feel like they’ve been on the wrong end of affirmative action to articulate a systematic account of white masculinity as personal injury. I emphasize their feeling of injury because Lynch himself states that this is his central object of analysis: “the interviewers and I sought subjects who were ‘‘reasonably sure’ that they’d been excluded from a job or a promotion because of their race or gender….in terms of the study’s focus upon the subjects’ social psychological reactions, external validation was not of utmost importance” (54). Confirming Hochschild’s diagnosis, Lynch’s study focuses on the feelings of injury rather than the fact of injustice. For the purposes of his study funded by right-leaning groups the Institute for Educational Affairs and the Earhart Foundation, it didn’t matter whether these men were actually discriminated against, just that they FELT like they were and affirmative action was to blame. For example, one of his subject, the pseudonymous Cole, was an adjunct instructor who received a full-time one-year contract in the same department where he had been teaching part-time; during that year, there was a search to fill that role with a permanent tenure-track hire. Cole was passed over for an external Black candidate who had just finished their Ph.D. As academics know all too well, instances where a tenure-track search passes over their internal, visiting and/or adjunct candidate for an external one is so common it may be more the rule than the exception. However, Cole nonetheless felt he was singled out for de-selection because he was white. What mattered to Lynch was the feeling of being wronged, not the fact of actual injustice.

The overwhelming majority of Lynch’s subjects felt mad about their perceived injury: 21 of 32 subjects either expressed anger, quit their jobs, or protested in some way. There were 5 cases of ‘extreme anger’ (57). Perhaps the most extreme responses were the claims that “my reaction was one step short of violence…I didn’t commit murder, though’” (60) and comparing the experience of being transferred to another work location to achieve racial balance across jobsites to “a form of rape” (73). Most responses, however, were expressions of loss and vulnerability, such as:

• “Devastated…forgot what it was like to be happy” (62)
• “Thoroughly depressed and exhausted” (77)
• “Anguish and hardship” (77)
• “Shock, depression, and self-doubt. I now knew I was dispensable” (77)
• “In the doldrums” (77)

Far from expressions of fortitude or resilience, the data Lynch reports highlights feelings of woundedness, setback, and fragility. These men might have grown up in a culture that idolized figures like John Wayne and the characters he played on screen, but the style of masculinity Lynch attributes to them in his study foregrounds damage and weakness.

Though Lynch’s injured men model a very nontraditional form of masculinity, he not-so-implicitly endorses it to the extent that it offers a gateway to conservatism: “all reported varying degrees of rightward shifts in their political outlooks” (79), manifesting in protest votes for Reagan and even “switch[ing] parties” from Democrat to Republican; “No one became more liberal or moderate than they had been” (79). In Lynch’s text, to be a conservative man is to perform the spectacle of woundedness. As interviewee “Tim O’Neil” said,

A lot of us were sold a bill of goods. We were told if you went to college, you could write your own ticket. But for the Baby Boom generation, it’s no longer true. And, on top of that, affirmative action has lowered standards to the point where education almost counts against you. . . . I’ve gone from being a liberal to very conservative, even reactionary. It’s sad. I want revenge (79).

In “O’Neil”’s account, affirmative action denied him his settled expectations as a white, college-educated man, creating a situation where the scales are actually tipped against him. This sparked feelings of sadness and vengefulness, and caused him to embrace far-right politics. As he tells it, to be harmed by affirmative action is a straight ticket to vengefulness and reactionary politics. In fact, the most common sentiment expressed by Lynch’s subject is in fact not an especially emotional one but an ideological one: “most mentioned becoming more disillusioned with society as a whole or its major political institutions, especially the courts, the executive branch, or unions” (78). Two years after Margaret Thatcher’s infamous quip “there is no such thing as society,” to be skeptical of society itself, let along government or unions, is a definitively conservative position. Even though such wounded masculinity is outside traditional masculine gender norms, in Lynch’s account it is not-so-implicitly redeemed by its power to transform men into conservatives and reactionaries. 

Lynch’s book brought the figure of the white guy ressentful over perceived harms from affirmative action into being in 1989, and the press took this figure and ran with it for the next half decade. As Jennifer Pierce shows in her 2012 book Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash against Affirmative Action, from the late 80s to the leadup to the 1996 Presidential election, one of the leading themes in mainstream media like The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle were “reverse discrimination” narratives about white men who supposedly got short shrifted by affirmative action. As Peirce argues, “print media” in the 80s and 90s exhibited an “eagerness to construct sensational headlines about white male injury” (31). For example, in the November 1990 issue of SPIN, Jefferson Morley’s feature titled “Kulturkampf” stated that “young white males…resent integration, especially affirmative action, as an imposition and a threat” (70). Pierce’s study of mainstream American newspapers from 1990-1996 shows that white men were commonly depicted as “angry and resentful” (27) specifically over affirmative action; she shows how media misrepresented facts and manipulated polling data to “construc[t] the perception of white male resentment and injury” (38). The mainstream media was deeply invested in circulating representations of the young white man angry specifically at the personal injury he felt he suffered due to affirmative action. 

This figure of the injured and resentful white man has been associated with American conservatism since at least the 1980s. Most of today’s prominent figures of neoreaction (like the VP) were only kids at that time. Back in the Bush 41 era, this figure was useful, as Hochschild argues, in stoking the flames of the culture wars and circulating conservative ideas in the mainstream media. This figure serves a similar function today, except it also has the advantage of aligning masculinity with the priorities of financialized markets and digital platforms. As I argued in the linked piece in the previous sentence, markets and platforms actively reward the performance of masculinity as personal injury. The online “alt-”right has built its version of masculinity around this figure of wounded entitlement both because it has been seen as a type of legitimately conservative masculinity for 35 years and because it gives them an advantage in contemporary media ecosystems and political economies.