Uncle Joe and I chatted as we watched my cousins pick off beer cans on the makeshift shooting range in the corn field behind the barn. It was just weeks before the 2016 election.
We talked about his time spent teaching gun safety to local kids, and the reasons we both disliked Obama. I was twenty-eight, and had been working for several years as a journalist at progressive publications in New York City. Uncle Joe, who went into farming right out of high school, was and is as conservative as they come. But he’s a gentle, cheerful man with red hair like mine, and the person I’ve always turned to at our family gatherings on his hog farm in Iowa.
Uncle Joe recalled how Bill Clinton had ended subsidies for farmers back in the 1990s, and how it had turned family farming from a squeeze into a struggle. “To be honest, I know Trump is an idiot and Hillary would do a better job,” he said. “But I just can’t vote for her.”
I shared some of my own issues with Hillary Clinton, as a political progressive who considers her a corporate war hawk. “Well I’m glad to hear,” he replied to my criticisms. “Sometimes I worry about what they’re teaching you millennials out there in the big city.” Then the election happened.
“To all you simpletons who voted for him, yet claim not to be racist, to those of you who claim you were ‘forgotten’ so you needed Trump to ‘break the system,’ I've got some bad news,” a big-city millennial friend of mine, also a journalist, posted on Facebook shortly after Donald Trump’s Inauguration. The new President had just announced his ban on travel from majority Muslim countries, and my friend, a war correspondent who had covered ISIS and the plight of refugees in Syria, was justifiably angered. “You don’t get to be ‘frightened of terrorism,’ when it’s ‘coastal elite’ cities that always get hit by terrorists,” he thundered. “I see through all your bullshit you stupid fucking traitors.”
Another journalist acquaintance of mine who at the time worked for a hip, cutting-edge magazine, shared an image on Facebook of the United States split up into the blue states of “America” and a big red swath in the middle called “Dumbfuckistan.”
That’s when I knew it was time to move back to Wisconsin. There were stories that needed to be told about Middle America, and by those who called it home.
That’s when I knew it was time to move back to Wisconsin, where I grew up. It was clear there were stories that needed to be told about Middle America, and by those who called it home.
And in the years since I returned, I’ve been unsurprised by the tenor of journalism covering these stories, and by the reactions to them among lefties of all kinds. This was the case last week, when Esquire magazine released its new cover story, “The Life of an American Boy at 17”, which profiled a straight, white, Trump-supporting kid named Ryan Morgan from the outer Milwaukee suburb of West Bend, Wisconsin.
The story briefly set certain corners of media Twitter ablaze.
“Really @esquire ‘what’s it like growing up white, middle class and male . . . ’ tweeted Karamo Brown of the Netflix show Queer Eye, quoting the teaser for the story. “How idiotic! It’s the same as it’s always been . . . full of privilege that women, people of color, lgbtq people & immigrants don’t have! I’m done.”
Written by Jennifer Percy, the piece follows Morgan around his high school in West Bend. Percy notes that Trump made a campaign stop here in 2016, asking for the votes of African Americans even though they make up only 2 percent of the city’s population. Readers meet Kaitlyn, Morgan’s girlfriend since eighth grade. The writer travels up north with the teen to his dad’s place in an incorporated area less than an hour from my own hometown. Morgan talks about his goal to work at a water plant. That’s it. There’s no central conflict or fraught climax. Nothing much happens.
Esquire noted that the piece is just the first in a series of profiles on diverse young people in America today. “To have started with the straight white man, I'm sort of shocked that no one there thought how that might read,” responded Elana Levine, a professor of journalism, advertising, and media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
As with my New York friends’ reactions following the 2016 election, I understood the outrage. I even felt a sense of justice when some critics photoshopped the Esquire cover with images of black boys, including Trayvon Martin, as a sort of corrective.
But stories like Morgan’s must be told.
“The idea that we’ve heard ‘too much’ already from boys like Morgan is absurd,” wrote Jessa Crispin in The Guardian. “The only way a teenage boy from a small town in the Midwest otherwise gets on the cover of a New York City magazine is if he becomes a football phenom or commits a mass shooting. While the Midwest has a disproportionately strong political representation, it also has a disproportionately weak cultural representation.”
I call up my sister, Anna Mae, who teaches high school English in central Wisconsin, and aims in her classroom to offer diverse alternatives to the classic texts often written by white men.
“I feel like I know that kid,” she says. “I could name you ten students who would give the exact same kind of interview. As I’m going in and teaching a bunch of white, middle-class, conservatively raised students, those are viewpoints I expect.”
To fail to explore such viewpoints, to leave them out of a national conversation on race and politics in America, is folly. Though some, like Gene Demby of NPR’s Code Switch, criticized the piece and its subject as “kind of boring,” it’s defensible to profile a student so totally average as to be commonplace.
“Not gonna lie,” tweeted Nikole-Hannah Jones, a New York Times Magazine staff writer and MacArthur Fellow known for her reporting on race and education, about the piece. “We should be examining whiteness.”
The problem isn’t the subject, but the approach. Like so much coverage of the Middle American experience by national outlets, the piece totally fails to dissect Morgan’s beliefs or put his life in any meaningful context.
In fact, Percy comes across as largely uninterested in her subject. But one passage that stuck with me described Morgan’s wariness over social media these days, post-2016 election:
“One time, on a post he describes as ‘a feminist thing that said something about what men do,’ he commented, ‘It’s not true, and that’s really stupid to say that.’ The woman who’d posted it responded with something like, ‘What do you have to say? You’re a white man.’ Ryan is still confused by her response. ‘Doesn’t she promote equal rights?’ he says.”
Like so much coverage of the Middle American experience by national outlets, the piece totally fails to dissect Morgan’s beliefs or put his life in any meaningful context.
The piece quickly moves on to other controversial topics Morgan has confronted, but the author never presses him on his beliefs, or provides any insights on his inner life or external circumstances.
“White masculinity is not interrogated here,” black writer Roxane Gay tweeted. “There is no analysis of why he thinks what he thinks.”
We read in the introduction that Morgan’s hometown of West Bend is 95 percent white. But what is left out is that he lives in the most segregated metro area in the most segregated state in America. Though Wisconsin recently ousted Republican Governor Scott Walker in favor of Democrats Tony Evers and Mandela Barnes (the latter of whom is the state’s first African American lieutenant governor), state Republicans recently forced former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s name off a resolution honoring African Americans during this year’s Black History Month commemorations. Kaepernick, it should be noted, was born in Wisconsin.
Should we be surprised that a seventeen-year-old swimming in this sea might have a skewed perception of equality and justice? Living in his virtually all-white enclave, dealing with personal issues like his divorced parents’ icy relationship, has Morgan ever even been able to see his own privilege? The Esquire article doesn’t ask, and doesn’t say.
Iowa, for most of its history, legally barred blacks from the state and from purchasing farmland. Uncle Joe has lived his whole life in and around Independence, Iowa—a town that remains even whiter than West Bend, Wisconsin. So it makes sense that in a race between Trump and Hillary Clinton, foremost in his mind would not be big-city Trump’s racist campaign boasts but the Clintons’ past treatment of farmers.
This isn’t to say journalists or anyone else should let Trump supporters off the hook. Just the opposite: We need stories that reveal their problematic beliefs in granular detail. The more we understand the forces that have created support for Trump, the better positioned we are to change them. Progressives are keen to criticize America’s fetishization of rugged individualism—except when they can blame individual conservatives, many of them poor or working or even middle class, for an America in crisis.
Systems like segregation in housing and education, which create kids like Ryan Morgan who grow up into voters like my Uncle Joe have been built and maintained by the powerful. Blindness to privilege is not only endemic to the white men and boys of Dumbfuckistan. It is endemic to whiteness in general, including among the professional class that populates our journalistic institutions.
In his editor’s note, Esquire’s editor-in-chief Jay Fielden writes that the Trump election has ruined everything: “A crackling debate used to be as important an ingredient of a memorable night out as what was served and who else was there. People sometimes even argued a position they might not have totally agreed with, partly for the thrilling intellectual exercise playing devil’s advocate can be, but mostly for the drunken hell of it. Being intellectually puritanical was considered backward. More often than not, it was all a lot of fun.”
When those who run the Fourth Estate are first and foremost concerned that Trump has made dinner parties less fun, we know that journalists are increasingly divorced from the reality of the communities they cover. It’s no wonder they fail to produce journalism that tells the real stories of the Uncle Joes and Ryan Morgans of the world—stories with the power to change the way they see themselves.
And the urgency for this kind of journalism only mounts as we inch closer to 2020. Perhaps motivated by criticisms of Hillary Clinton over neglecting to campaign in Wisconsin, Presidential hopefuls Amy Klobuchar, U.S. Senator of Minnesota, and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke have both visited the Badger State within the last few days. O’Rourke noted that Milwaukee has a shot at hosting the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
“It’s an extraordinary opportunity for the people of Milwaukee to tell their story,” O’Rourke said in Milwaukee. “I think there are far too many communities that have been under-represented in the national conversation.”
On our phone call, my sister tells me about a teaching method she uses called “Love and Logic.” When a student acts out, she explains, teachers use “we” language to make them feel a part of a community. “We don’t do that in this classroom,” she might say. Love. Then, she’ll offer the student a choice. You can stop that and stay here with us, or choose not to and deal with the consequences. Logic.
“Part of healing is being held accountable and holding others accountable,” she says.
What’s good for the teenagers of Wisconsin, it turns out, might also be good for journalism.