Oluo makes connections from the nation’s founding all the way through and to the Trump presidency, drawing on a range of case studies mixed with her own observations as a Black woman in America.Įach case study reveals how well-trodden American tropes of “meritocracy” and “rugged individualism” have served as sneaky myths covering up the real workings of white male supremacist power and oppression, reinforcing the false image of white American men as supermasculine heroes while blaming marginalized groups for their own dispossession and dehumanization.

Deftly weaving past and present, Mediocre moves backward and forward in time, sometimes multiple times in one chapter. This has enabled mediocre white men to rise to power on the backs of Indigenous and Black people especially, but also Latinx and Asian people-and women of all races. Patriarchal white supremacist terrorism inflicted on people of color, as well as toxic masculine control of women, have been “baked into” the fabric of the United States, Oluo argues. In Mediocre, Oluo (author of the bestselling 2018 book So You Want to Talk About Race) chronicles how white men, using genocide and enslavement to lubricate their prosperity and ease, have structured the United States to serve and buttress their sense of entitled superiority at the expense of everybody else.

“It is standing at the edge of disaster with a gun in its hands, and it’s willing to take us all down with it.” “Right now white manhood is on a suicide mission,” Ijeoma Oluo writes in her newest book, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Ijeoma Oluo, author of Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (Photo credit: Courtesy of Ijeoma Oluo)

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