When I was little I wished I was black.

Which, I know, makes me sound totally misguided, if not a little stupid. But hear me out.

N.W.A

If you’re about my age (30), you’ve grown up in a culture dominated by hip hop and black urban culture. Our generation’s defining music has been rap. Our defining sports icon is Michael Jordan. The funniest man on the planet when I was little was Eddie Murphy, and the defining television comedy was, for me at least, In Living Color. Our defining family was the Cosbys, who weren’t very ‘hip hop’ at all, per se, but they had a powerful positive black identity, which is, from my perspective, the soul of hip hop.

Sure, to be black was to be cool, but that’s not why I wanted to be black.

I just didn’t want to be the villain in the cultural narrative unfolding around me: The Man. Starting with N.W.A. and Do The Right Thing, and up to a few years ago (when mainstream hip hop gave up any cause other than banging and balling), the most common antagonist in my generation’s zeitgeist has been The Man. If you were to hear someone say the sentence ‘The Man is holding me down’ today, it might sound satirical, but there was a good decade there where it served as a reasonable statement of one’s socioeconomic vantage point, and the systemically-enforced inertia one felt. Which was completely legit. For the vast majority of America’s history it has been institutionally racist, sexist, and has discriminated based on class. The Man was shorthand for this history, this oppression. As someone who has never associated himself with the ruling class, I’ve always hated The Man too.

Hold that thought for a moment while we deconstruct just who The Man is for a second. From my side, The Man has three defining characteristics:

A white man, probably plotting evil and what not.

1. He uses the powers he was born into to oppress those not of his race, gender, and/or class.

2. He is white.

3. He is a man.

And now we get to why I wanted to be black. I inherently possess two of the three traits of the greatest supervillain of my generation. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be black specifically. I would have happily taken Latino, Native American, Asian… anything, really, but white. Black just seemed as far away as you could get from what I was.

All of this left me in a tough spot. I hated The Man for the world he created. But to hate The Man meant hating myself, too, because my sex and my race are two things which I cannot change.

At least for me, I think this stereotype and this self-hate has actually been useful in my life. Unlike the old baseless stereotypes of black people being savages or women being weaker, I can acknowledge that the supervillain of The Man is, to broadly generalize, historically spot on. White men have been at the source of a large percentage of the modern world’s evils. If power corrupts absolutely, and white men have been in power (at least in this country) since the very beginning, it’s not insane to think there might be something corrupt in the white man’s heart. The concept of The Man has been a useful touchstone for me in the way it made me more reflective and conscious of whatever power I might have.

It’s almost like an addiction: the first step is admitting there is a problem.

White men do need to acknowledge that there have been serious flaws in the power system of our culture. We do need to be actively conscious of issues of social justice because, as the historic oppressors, we do not have access to the well of collective memory of our society’s victims. Power has a way of muting empathy, so as white men, we need to listen even closer for the sounds of discrimination.

***

Thank you, Mr. President, for destroying The Man.

Being associated with The Man has been sad, enlightening, helpful, and confusing. Yeah I’m white, but I’m also Jewish; my great-grandparents came to this country to find safety from the death squads of the Russian pogroms. Yeah I’m white, but I also grew up lower-middle class and dealt with my share of evictions, cold showers, and food stamps as a kid. Yeah I’m a man, but I’m also a vegetarian (sooo unmanly, some would say), a sensitive writer, and kind of a coward when it comes to fighting; and, let’s be honest here, I might be straight, but I’m not exactly the straightest arrow in the bunch.

But all that is, by now, almost beside the point. We live in a vastly different world than the one I grew up in. While hip hop dominated the zeitgeist of my youth, I’d argue that there is no zeitgeist now. The world is too flat; culture is disseminated through an infinitely broader portal than in the days when the television dial only went up to twenty and there was no Internet.

And then there’s Obama and the sea change he brought. When he (as a black man) won the election last year, he didn’t just inspire a generation of minorities to dream bigger. Somewhat ironically, by becoming the man himself, he killed The Man.

Which, as a white man, I’ve got to tell you, is a freaking relief. Now I get to be just another white dude living in a country with a black president. With The Man gone, I don’t have to wish to be anything else again.