Esquire magazine sparked controversy for featuring on its cover, during Black History Month, a white male.
The manly man’s magazine, struggling to reinvent itself for the postmodern bro, titled its cover story “An American boy: What it’s like to grow up white, middle class, and male in the era of social media, school shootings, toxic masculinity, #MeToo, and a divided country.”
Twitter was not happy. But it was right, sort of. Esquire should’ve picked someone else to profile, but not because of identity politics — because the boy just doesn’t have much to tell us.
The article is stupidly boring, unless you’ve forgotten that there are people living in cities near Lake Michigan that aren’t Chicago. It’s a 6,000-word profile on a 17-year-old white boy from West Bend, Wis. And it’s only interesting if you’ve never met anyone like him. Most of us have.
Ryan Morgan is a high schooler who has a girlfriend, likes video games, splits time between his mom’s and dad’s houses, and wears ripped jeans and a checkered shirt over a white hoodie. On the magazine’s cover, he’s putting on tennis shoes over white socks.
Poor fashion choices aside, Morgan’s greatest crime is obliviousness. When Brooklyn-based author Jennifer Percy asks him about #MeToo, he replies, “I’ve heard of that. What does it mean again?”
The article’s aim is “to look at our divided country through the eyes of one kid,” according to Esquire Editor-in-Chief Jay Fielden. It’s not a unique move, but neither is it an offensive one. Two and a half years later, the West and East coasts are still trying to make sense of 2016.
“An American boy” is another piece in that inscrutable puzzle. If it helps some elites understand how a nondescript teen who loves both his girlfriend and turkey hunting can be an okay guy, it’s not a terrible step. But for those of us who knew not to create false dichotomies in the first place, it’s not all that helpful either.
