I have written a proposal for a potentially best selling book called, The Trouble With White Male. I am just waiting for a white male to offer a reasonable advance for me to write the book.

This book is more important now than ever before. Whether it is Brazilian President Lulu or President Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the trouble with white male has become the primary trouble of our time.

For centuries, white males ruled the world, absolutely. It is easy to forget now that less than 100 years ago, they did not count women and people of color as fully developed humans. They met in closed chambers and named themselves to any post they wanted, virtually anywhere in the world.

Then the First and Second World wars came. They fought along side people of color who saw that they were not aliens but mere humans who cried and died like others. At home, because they were away at war, their women went to work and saw that what most white males did for a living was not nuclear science.

That was when the world of white male was turned upside down. The emperor lost his robe and his empire.

The white male has not recovered from that.

This is the background you need to understand the immediate uproar that followed the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

If you have been in a position of privilege for a very long time, like white males had been, you are likely to loss the capacity to understand others – what they are saying, what they are thinking and what they are feeling. It is not white males’ fault. It is one of the side-effects of privilege.

Sotomayor is taking some heat because she once said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

The conservatives jumped on it. Rush Limbaugh screamed that she is a racist.

“Here you have a racist — you might want to soften that, and you might want to say a reverse racist,” Limbaugh said of Sotomayor on his show. Liberals, “of course, say that minorities cannot be racists because they don’t have the power to implement their racism,” Limbaugh continued, “Well, those days are gone, because reverse racists certainly do have the power. ... Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he’s appointed one.”

You see, the trouble with white males is that they do not understand. The reason why white males kept power to themselves for centuries was that they believed, strongly, that
a wise white male with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a woman or a person of color who hasn’t lived that life.

In the next few days, you will hear white males make a wide range of arguments. They are already saying that if a white male had said what Sotomayor said in reverse, there would have been an outcry. His nomination for a post like the Supreme Court justice would have been dead. You will hear them point at the case of the firemen in Connecticut where reverse discrimination is alleged.

Reverse discrimination? I thought you go on reverse when you have come to a dead end or when you realize that you were on the wrong path? Have we reached the end of the discrimination road? Have we realized that we are on the wrong path? Is the same ‘rogue’ driver the one making a reverse for us?

White males do not understand why things are the way they are. I sympathize with them.

The answer to the question why women and minorities get away with things white male cannot get away with is simple. It is the same reason why black males can say nigga, call themselves nigga, call you nigga, but you are not allowed to say nigga. It is a wonderful correcting world, after all. Even at that, black males are not under any illusion that white men do call them nigga outside their hearing distance and in the privacy of their own homes.

Seriously, if we listen into what white males think, feel and say when they are alone or in their private all-white country clubs, we’d reactivate the war of the sexes, the war of the races and the war of the worlds. That white males are not allowed to say some things in the open does not mean that they do not say them behind close doors.

While white males have a lot to lose for saying certain things, women and people of color have nothing to lose for saying some things- besides their chains. That is why Attorney General, Eric Holder could call America a country of cowards when it comes to race and nothing happened to him.

White males should just suck it up and keep quiet. It took them thousands of years to see that women and people of color are humans. They are condemned to a thousand years of puffing and huffing while society reverses the damages the white male did all those years.

It may seem unfair to those who were not born when the original crime was committed. Well, sometimes in life, the sins of the fathers are placed on the sons and the grandsons.

All of a sudden, white males want justice to be blind. They want judges to have no empathy. When justice was giving backing to the subjugation of women and people of color, some white males did not see anything wrong with it.

The truth is that justice has never been blind. I doubt if we want it to be blind either. Justice sees through the experiences of those in whose hands it is to deliver it. And that is why we need people on the bench who understand how ordinary people live and how the whole world works.

Well, I have said enough. I have kissed my nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court goodbye. But hey, we have to all pay a price if we want to advance the cause of the truth.

For more on my views on the trouble with white males, please urge a white male near you to offer me a decent advance for the book.

Thank you.