We Need a Revenge of the Jocks

W e find ourselves living through what’s likely the all-time heyday of the theater kid as public figure and performative politician. By this point, and I say this as a proud geek myself, Revenge of the Nerds’ Lambda Lambda Lambda would be embarrassed.

Most recently, Tennessee state representative Justin Pearson became famous as one of the so-called Tennessee Three, a small group of state lawmakers who led a mob into the legislative chamber during business hours. Pearson and another Justin (Jones), who disrupted the session with bullhorns, found themselves thrown out of the legislature (before being reinstated shortly thereafter). A bespectacled black dude known for his Afro hairdo and histrionic arm movements while speaking, Pearson always struck me as a Dollar General Malcolm X. But, the past few weeks have provided a deeper revelation about him: It’s all an act.

A few days back, Clay Travis of Outkick posted a clip of Pearson in his plush natural habitat — running for student-body president at Maine’s famously preppy Bowdoin College. In the roughly two-minute spot, put together by some genius internet anon, a shaven-headed Pearson rocks a natty dove-gray suit with striped tie, talks in upper-middle-class General American, and speaks about “bringing together everyone from the College Democrats to the College Republicans.” Then we see him as he presents himself today, hectoring from the podium.

Importantly, the current Pearson persona does not seem to be simply an example of “code switching,” in the way I and other well-off former Chicagoans can talk with a bit of a dese-and-dose, “Da Bears,” African- or Irish-American accent when back home. According to his Wikipedia page, Pearson, the son of a Howard University–educated preacher and a successful teacher, briefly attended inner-city high schools in Memphis but also went to Virginia’s pleasant Centreville High before going to Bowdoin, in his summers attending Princeton’s Public Policy Institute. It is rather unlikely that he spoke like man-killer John Brown before getting into politrix.

I don’t want to pick on Pearson too much — frankly he seems like a fun, and obviously flexible, guy outside of work. This sort of thing is becoming very common. Last month, for Spiked, I wrote a column about the phenomenon of prominent upper-class white women (many of them with acting or arts backgrounds) essentially LARPing as being black, Muslim, or from a desperately poor background. Two months ago, a well-known Muslim activist, “Raquel Saraswati,” the chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer for the American Friends Service Committee, resigned after being exposed as a white lady of European extraction rather than a Muslim of “Arab, Latin, and South Asian” heritage.

Not long before the “Saraswati” (actual name Rachel Seidel) episode, George Washington University’s Jessica Krug, a solidly respected “black” writer in the field of Africana studies, was exposed as a race faker. Krug, as I wrote, “presented herself as a salsa-dancing Caribbean New Yorker called ‘Jess La Bombalera,’ [but] was in fact a white Jewish woman from suburban Kansas City.” And, going back in time to honor the ancestors, who could forget Rachel Dolezal? That Caucasian woman, who rose to an upper-leadership position in the Spokane, Wash., NAACP as a supposed black woman before her exposure, later wrote In Full Color, a book that sold a fair number of copies, and now lives her truth near the left coast as “Nkechi Amare Diallo.”

This phenomenon of rich white burghers pretending to be “exotic” members of allegedly put-upon minority groups would have been unheard of in any previous era. If anything, racial and ethnic minorities have generally tried to “pass” as members of the majority group. But this reverse passing does not emerge from the ether, unbidden. It seems to me to be the direct downstream result of the postmodern theories that are increasingly prevalent in American society, especially what is sometimes known as the progressive stack.

Simply put, this is the idea that oppression itself has a prestige or cachet that perversely confers ranking within society, in that all those who lack oppression credentials should “do the work” of submissively listening to those who do. A corollary idea is that large majorities should, in general, strive to accommodate small minorities rather than vice versa.

The idea that one should “do the work,” listen primarily to “POC,” and so forth is the core thesis of quite mainstream trainings such as NPR’s “life kit,” “How To Survive In A Mostly White Workplace: Tips For Marginalized Employees.” The idea that a societal minority should be accommodated even when tiny also largely explains concessions made to the transgender movement, and is why, these days, the probably 99.5 percent majority of women who see themselves simply as women often find themselves referred to as “people with uteruses” or “people who menstruate/bleeders,” and see their anatomical features referred to as “front holes,” and so forth.

This shift in social preferences — combined with the existence of hard advantages like affirmative action — has apparently had an unsurprising empirical effect on behavior. No less a leftist than Ibram “X.” Kendi recently shared data indicating that one-third of all white applicants to American colleges now describe themselves as something else in racial terms, such as Native American or Hispanic. At the same time, 20 percent of all young (ages 18–34) Americans now say that they are gay, or at least members of the increasingly broad and alphabetically lengthening LGBTQIA etc. community.

Amusingly and importantly, there is some question about what this latter figure actually implies. At least among women, 55 percent of young “bisexuals” — up from 13 percent just ten years ago — say they have had only heterosexual sex during the last five years; many have never had sex with a woman. What this might mean is open to interpretation, but “why not look cool and check ‘yes’?” is certainly one such. To a large extent, the United States of today has truly entered the Heavenly City dreamed of in Revenge of the Nerds, where the very last thing anyone wants to be is a well-adjusted, upper-middle class, straight jock from some damned place like Cleveland. And people act accordingly.

Enough is enough, I say: We need a revenge of the jocks! There is obviously nothing wrong with being (actually) black or, for that matter, bisexual, but it simply is not functional for a society to cater to every alienated and angry minority rather than to the 75 percent or 95 percent or 99 percent majority of the citizenry — or to reward acting more like a Saturday Night Live caricature of a radical preacher than like the student-body president of Bowdoin.

The focus of mainstream conservatism over the next five to ten years should be to re-normalize normalcy, and to aggressively target the institutions that are currently promoting unnecessary division as a virtue. These range from the obvious (the various critical theorists and the entities hosting them) to the more subtly destructive, not least the organizations promoting the medicalization of every aspect of the human condition for money. How can this be done? I’m working on that. But in the meantime, two cheers for Cleveland, the middle class, and the Alpha Betas.