Treating Toxic Male Fragility...and ending co-dependency

​[Warning: The following essay contains content that some readers may find, well, disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.]

I want to rap about white men for a moment if that’s cool. Not all of them; just a disturbing subset. Think of this way: Although the vast majority of mass murderers in the United States have been white men, we also know the vast majority white men aren’t mass murderers. Right? So chill and hang with me for a bit.

The dudes I’m thinking of are guys who, in certain settings, may wish to dap up a brotha like they’re “fam.” They may even roll with hip hop and flow easily with those warning-label lyrics – all of them – when rapping alone or in the safe company of friends who share roughly the same melanin content in their skin.

However, many are also the same dudes who have been and continue to be whipped up by demagogues like Donald Trump, the, um, 45th and now 47th President, as they struggle with a condition known as Toxic Male Fragility, or TMF.

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​While TMF symptoms have been present for at least several generations (more about that later), it reached near epidemic levels in the U.S. around the time of the kneeling protest started by now-former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and has persisted ever since. A quick recap: Seeking to call attention to racial inequality and police brutality against Black Americans, beginning in August 2016 (a presidential election year, by the way) and into the first Trump administration, Kaepernick waged a silent protest by kneeling the during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner before the start of NFL games. The protest was not widespread initially. But as it continued into the 2017 season, more than 200 other players would later join Kaepernick after Trump demanded team owners to fire players who protested.

Never mind that Kaepernick modified his method of protest from sitting during the song to kneeling at the suggestion of a supportive former Green Beret, with whom he’d spoken and whose opinion he valued greatly. That didn’t stop Trump, TMF-in-Chief, from seizing on the protest and transforming it into something else altogether.

Trump shows particular zeal in going after Black people of a certain stature, most notably in trying to challenge the citizenship of Barack Obama. In a twisted way, his unfunny and abhorrent antics call to mind Yogurt’s advice to Lone Starr in the Mel Brooks’ comedy Spaceballs. “Use the Schwartz!” Yogurt says. In a similar vein, whenever Trump, in his little mind, faces some adversity, an apparition of the diminutive Alexander H. Stephens appears on his shoulder to urge: “Use the racism!”

Kaepernick’s protest was initially pushed as an affront to the American flag. However, this symbolic argument didn’t gain much momentum, possibly because those who might have been offended had no issues with Robert Ritchie Jr., in his grungy Kid Rock persona, wearing a desecrated flag like a dashiki or admiring a buxom blonde babe in a revealing stars-and-stripes bikini. A current example of U.S. flag desecration by a “real patriot” on the Right is the stars-and-striped handkerchief that Pete Hegseth stuffs into the breast pocket of his ill-fitting suits that he wears to cover up his white Christian nationalist tattoos. (By the way, Pete, I know a terrific tailor here in town I could recommend, that is, if you were fam and not afflicted with TMF.)

So what did the TMF-in-Chief do next? Trump, a non-veteran whose daddy finagled draft deferments for alleged bone spurs during the Vietnam War and who has subsequently disparaged the service and sacrifice of those who’ve served and died, upped the stakes. Kaepernick’s actions as well as that of the other professional Black athletes who joined in was conflated as an assault on our veterans. But you see what the TMF-in-Chief did there, right? The subliminal message was clear: white men aren’t being accorded the respect and deference they so richly deserve in “making America great.” Moreover, cadres of TMF sufferers, many non-veterans themselves, became eager co-signers of the faux outrage.

Ever noticed how military veterans – the real, true warriors and not those who simply play one on Sundays – are almost always shown as white men? Archival footage of our greatest military triumphs in the twentieth century, be it in black-and-white or in living color, is rife with the gallantry of white dogfaces. It’s not criticism necessarily, just a fact, given the truly unequal way our society was structured when most of that History Channel-esque footage was shot.

Moreover, some of today’s white guys stricken with the same Toxic Male Fragility as the TMF-in-Chief may be the sons, grandsons, great-grandsons or relatives of the heroic men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and island-hopped across the Pacific through bloody battles on their way to Japanese mainland. And they tell themselves over and over: These guys – white men – paved the way and did the heavy-lifting in ensuring freedom, justice and the galactic funk for all in the U.S. How dare a bunch of coddled Black millionaires, who play a candy-ass brand of football on artificial turf, often inside climate-controlled stadiums, desecrate the honor of those men? Why, they wouldn’t know sacrifice if it hit ‘em upside the helmet. From there, it’s not much of a leap to start labeling them as “ingrates” while providing a convenient way to ignore the real issue.

The Vietnam War seems to hold a special place in their imaginations. In fact, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris each re-fought the war for us in their movies, and this time the outcome was clear: the good guys won. Yet even in the more realistic and fact-based movies, the overwhelming dominance of white men for TMF sufferers must A.) not be questioned, and B.) be revered, above all else.

Earlier this year, I became embroiled in one of those infamous Facebook discussions with a bunch of dudes I don’t know from Adam about the movie “When We Were Soldiers.” The film depicts the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley at Landing Zone X-ray where the first major clash between the U.S. and North Vietnamese forces took place in November 1965. The original post stated how it was the most realistic combat movie ever about the war, with nearly all commenters expressing strong support for the claim. I’ve seen the movie several times, and have largely enjoyed it. But, boy, did I strike the proverbial hornets’ nest by simply commenting that there were far more Black soldiers involved in the battle than were depicted in the movie. About 31% of the ground combat soldiers in Vietnam were Black in the early years of the war, with a casualty rate of 24-25%.

To be fair, there were a few comments of support for my post about the omission. Still, a swarm of hornets felt a need to point out how many white soldiers died in World Wars 1 and 2. Others chimed in with, well, it’s just a movie; “Hollywood messes up all historical facts in lots of movies” – which spoke to my point – and the tried-true fallback statement, “we don’t have to make every discussion about race.”

I sighed.

However, my favorite comment was made by the dude who wrote:
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“Since you are bringing color in it in a movie and talking about facts HOW MANY BLACKS FOUGHT IN THE CIVIL WAR TO HELP FREE THE SLAVES NONE ZERO ALMOST 400,000 WHITE MEN JOIN THE UNION AND FOUGHT AND DIED TO FREE THE SLAVES MORE FACTS SINCE YOU BROUGHT COLOR INTO TRUE WAR FACTS” [sic]

When I replied that about 200,000 Black men fought in the Civil War, and then inquired about why he was so “triggered by the fact the role of Black soldiers was excluded,” the dude shifted to complaining about the Black WNBA player Angel Reese and how Caitlin Clark, who’s white, is so much better.

Well, I still had some free time to kill and couldn’t let that pass. So I replied: “[Name], we’re talking about the need to respect and reflect the contributions of those who served and sacrificed in the military. Your hang ups about Black professional athletes is unrelated to the topic. However, I do encourage you to get some help for dealing with your racial insecurities. Peace out.” That concluded our back-and-forth.

I included portions of the Facebook debate to illustrate the currency of TMF. Secretly, I suspect the afflicted look at themselves in the mirror each morning and continue to wonder if they’re made of the same stuff as the old man or the old man’s old man. And while presumably grateful for those who serve currently, the foreign engagements of today’s professional military somehow seem to pale in comparison to the epic battles fought by yesterday’s citizen soldiers who put their lives on hold to defeat the threat of worldwide fascism. Not only that, in the words of some, “we don’t win at all anymore; we don’t win anything.”

A few years ago, a neighbor who I’d met on our subdivision’s Facebook page came by to pick up an older model treadmill the wife and I were unloading. Upon the arrival of him and his wife, I noticed a Combat Infantryman Badge (CIB) penned on the left-front of his ball cap.

“I see you have a CIB on your hat,” I said, glancing at the wartime medal. “Yeah, my father earned one of those in World War 2.”

(Background: The CIB is awarded to a U.S. Army infantryman assigned to an infantry unit engaged in active ground combat with an enemy force. The recipient must have been personally present and under hostile fire while serving in the assigned unit.)

The pudgy neighbor with a dad-bod build appeared caught off guard by my remarks. Was he surprised about my father’s military service, which involved direct combat against Nazi soldiers? Or was it a surprise that I even knew what a CIB is? Perhaps he was embarrassed, realizing that I probably knew the decoration is most certainly not worn on a hat but on the left chest of an Army uniform. I don’t recall the neighbor saying where he had served to earn the decoration. Iraq or Afghanistan maybe? Those conflicts would fit his age-range. Or was it a case of stolen valor?

So, how did this happen? I mean how did the children and grandchildren of the generation that defeated two world powers and fascism, choose to elect a draft dodger as president, come to reward the “debate culture” of talking over people where the whole point isn’t to listen, learn and respond but to only have your say as loud and aggressively as you wanna be!, and where some crackling dude can take smarmy pride in being called a “Nazi” on a nationally televised cable network show?

I’m inclined to blame it on the ‘60s, man. That was the beginning, it seems, of the slide of the white male psyche into bear-market territory. I recall hearing the lament of a Vietnam vet who, in the early days of the war, thought American servicemen would be greeted with flowers, smiling women and kisses upon liberating hamlets much like their fathers were in France, Belgium Luxembourg and Italy, as shown in those black-and-white WW2 newsreels.

There was also the Civil Rights movement, sexual revolution and women’s lib, “peace with honor” in Vietnam, the Arab Oil embargo and the Iranian hostage crisis. Once joined in a threesome with the hold-over, true believers of “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and the Christian Right, the affliction metastasized.

Hey, dudes, I get it. It’s not easy being a man, living in the long shadow of the Greatest Generation. I, too, have questioned myself from time to time.

Could I, like my father and the men of his generation and grandfather’s generation, have marched off to Europe and Asia to fight for a country that, at the time, had zero fucks to give about me, and people like me? Could I have sat stoically at a lunch counter while a raving, snarling white mob talked shit, punched, kicked and spat on me? Would I have had the courage to run away from enslavement to God knows where, perhaps abandoning my family in the process? Could I have survived the Middle Passage?

Nevertheless, I’m prescribing 1,619 milligrams of the following antidote: In our ongoing quest to build a more perfect Union, rather than focusing on who contributed the most in order to claim and hold the top spot for all times, perhaps a better approach is to learn from the codes of conduct established by our forefathers – all of fathers, that is – during their times of crisis. Whether it was during armed conflict, peaceful resistance, or other challenges, respecting the true diversity that has made our country the envy of much of the world is essential, regardless of what the TMF-in-Chief and his minions may say.

In doing so, that’s when you really appreciate the power of our American story, which is: It’s not all about you, dude! It’s about us all.

That means white men are not and will not be the hero of all the chapters; nor are they the ever-present villains. Only an unscrupulous peddler of a poisonous elixir for those battling Toxic Male Fragility would try to convince you to believe otherwise. So, please, remain chilled.

In closing, I was born for such a time as this to help raise awareness and offer a cure. Yes, help is available for the white men afflicted with TMF, and for the women who love them.

©October 2025, Bob Campbell