“The Greatest” is Often Suspiciously Pale and Male
Chalk it up to my own cultural blindness created by my own white male privilege, but it only recently started dawning on me that “The Greatest” in the arts is often applied to white men, even when there is an abundance of competition from women, Black artists, and other marginalized people. A few years back I stumbled on a YouTube clip of some excellent tenor saxophone playing by Michael Brecker, may he rest in peace, but the YT uploader had arrogantly titled it “The Greatest Tenor Sax Solo Ever.” Immediately, I recalled landmark solos by Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and on and on, all Black (admittedly all men, and that’s a problem). At the time, I saw it as an isolated incident, wrote a comment of mild objection to the superlative, and moved on. I checked back a couple weeks later and the uploader actually changed the title of the video, to “one of the greatest,” and I felt vindicated.
Now I see the pattern a lot more. Just this morning, on the anniversary of Neil Peart’s birth, I saw a few mentions of Peart being “the greatest drummer ever.” Also today, a friend posted a memorial to David Foster Wallace, who died on this date, 2012, with the tag, “unquestionably the greatest writer of our generation.” Of course, Black artists and women also get called “The Greatest” from time to time, but anecdotally it seems to me that it is a white male world of “greatness” and it’s usually white males who induct other white males into the “greatness” club.
In response to my friend who posted the superlative regarding DFW (who was, in my opinion, great), I posted: “There are a ton of women, and writers from other marginalized groups who have and still are writing incredible works. DFW is great. But I am always immediately skeptical of any white man being called the greatest, these days. Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Roberto Bolaño, Haruki Murakami, JM Coetzee, A.S. Byatt, Donna Tartt, Arundhati Roy, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Vikram Seth, Aravind Adiga, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Hosseini, Denis Johnson, Kiran Desai, Jose Saramago, Rachel Cusk, Orhan Pamuk, Anne Patchett are some of the writers I have read since 1990 and they are all on the level of DFW, in my estimation, and are as great.”
On another note, I have started using the phrase “pale males” on Facebook to get away from the bots that seem tuned to claim that factual references to males and white male supremacy constitute “hate speech,” a hilarious reality. I had someone take great offense at my use of “pale people” a few weeks back, and I was accused of being a “reverse racist.” It’s revealing to me that exploring themes in the context of white male supremacy is seen as offensive or itself racist. Of course, this defensiveness comes from a total lack of understanding of what racism even is, as well as deeply rooted insecurity around cultural genocide. We know that marginalized people are erased every day, or at least exist in the pale male shadow, and the discomfort of this knowledge leads to some heavy defensiveness and brittleness.
It’s also funny to me that objecting to “The Greatest” and mentioning that even the concept itself is a pale male competitive concept is seen as racist or misandrist, as if one can’t acknowledge the greatness of a musician such as Neil Peart but at the same time make note of “Greats” on the drums who are women, or Black, or otherwise simply not white males. Neil Peart was great at what he did. He was not Elvin Jones. Elvin Jones was great. One of the greatest. Suzy Ibarra is also one of the greats. Very few people even know who she is. Sometimes I agree that some of the pale males were indeed “great,” but other times I have aesthetic or other objections. It’s always interesting to discuss concepts of categories of artistic quality.
But every time a pale male anoints another pale male as “The Greatest,” entire already-marginalized legacies and valuable lineages of amazing artistry and brilliance get put in the shadows or outright erased. I went to a racist, essentially white male supremacist undergraduate institution that built its entire educational enterprise around the “Great Books of Western Civilization,” and of course this Canon was constructed by white men and is 99% male and 99.9% white. After I graduated, I made it a conscious project to seek out books by women and Black writers, or other marginalized people. I had to make it an actual project, because I discovered that to even get outside of the “white male arts industrial complex,” one has to do some actual intentional research. I could not passively consume whatever rose to the top of the promotional stream, because, so often, these were works by yet another white male. A great example of this is the execrably bad and even laughably stupid yet widely praised novel by Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending. I could go on at great length about why this is a typically lousy product of white male supremacy and how revealing it is that it won prizes and awards, but suffice it to say that it pales in comparison to at least a dozen books written around that time, by women or other marginalized people. Pun intended.
The “white male arts industrial complex” runs on white male critics, white male editors, white male record label owners, white males who control the cultural space. It’s a narcissistic hall of mirrors where the hagiography leans toward white males. It’s a big club, and not even all white males are in it. But absolutely a very few women, Black or other marginalized people are in it.
