In his book, Old White Man Writing, Seattle resident Joshua Gidding attempts to come to terms with his privilege. Gidding grapples with the rapidly changing cultural norms in 21^st-century America while examining his own racial biases and prejudices.

As Manhattan Book Review notes: “Old White Man Writing is an introspective deep dive into an eventful life crammed with wonderful highs and seemingly bottomless lows. Gidding’s anecdotes evince an analytical mind often at war with itself in making the right decision or saying the right thing. “

 

The book, released April 1, is published by Mascot Books — based in Herndon, Virginia — and is available on Amazon.

Here is an excerpt, as it appears in the book:

I am writing this book knowing it will probably be dismissed out of hand by the young editors’ readers to whose publishing houses I will be submitting it. So, who, then, am

I writing it for? Well, it’s beginning to look like it’s for none other than myself, which is to say, basically, for no one.

(Remember that old Beatles song?) And what does that mean, to be writing for no one? And isn’t this claim more than a little disingenuous? Do I really believe I am writing for no one? Well, no, not completely. I have hopes that someday — more likely after my death than before, but not very likely even then — I will have readers. It is a frail and distant hope, but a hope nonetheless.

A hope little more substantial, perhaps, than throwing a penny into the fountain. Almost nothing, but not quite. Gestures. But gestures merit some attention, too. They are not exactly nothing. Gestures are a kind of degraded or inchoate action. An action that stops short — way short — of commitment. But still. Gestures are indicative of a wish (closer to a velleity, perhaps), or a hope. The hope that my writing may, after all is said and written, be received and heard by someone other than just

myself. Call my hope, then, the penny-in-the-fountain kind. A disposition of the soul, tending toward the forestallment of despair. A gesture that keeps me from despairing. (More of despair anon.) That keeps me writing — writing in the face of despair. (My writing is also a way of avoiding despair, the despair brought on by my failed efforts to have it published.

And so. we go round the merry-go-round!) I am writing in the face of my better knowledge that current market conditions are trending against me and my kind, not only now

but into the foreseeable future. Maybe my writing amounts to a kind of wager that there may be those in the future—the harvesters of the pennies in the fountain, so to speak — who may find something for themselves in what I have to say.

I realize also that the title I have chosen for this confession — Old White Man Writing — is problematic. It could be an instant turn-off, both in all of its separate parts and taken as a

whole. It does not strike a sympathetic note at the outset. Or maybe it does, depending on where your sympathies lie. Or maybe, even, the phrase appeals both to your sympathies and your antipathies. If so, then you are my ideal reader. And it is at you, Ideal Reader—sympathetic/antipathetic reader, who is both attracted and repulsed by the notion of an Old White Man Writing — that I am aiming. I do not really expect to find you, but I have my hopes. They, the literary powers that be, have not taken those away.

And what of those hopes, those pennies in the fountain? What exactly are the hopes of an Old White Man Writing? What could he possibly have to hope for at this late stage of the game? That there might be someone listening? Someone who cares, or might care, about his situation? Someone who is not so turned off by the problematic identity of the writer — “Old White Man”—that they automatically dismiss him and his writing out of hand? Or misidentify him as reactionary? A resentful Republican complaining about the changing of the guard, the passing away of the literary ancient régime?

Because actually, Old White Man Writing, as already indicated, is none of those things. He is a liberal Democrat, who shares, if he cannot fully embrace, some progressive positions: a sympathy for Democratic socialism (and a respect for Bernie, although he could not back him for president; he voted for Hillary and then Biden); support for, and maybe even an embrace of, demographic change in the USA, which is historically and biologically inevitable, and even to be wished for (because white people are kind of a drag, aren’t they?); and speaking of history, an acceptance of the course of history, and a belief that its arc bends toward justice (though with some tragic kinks along the way); an abiding respect for science, scholarship, academics (the field, not so much the people — though he is an academic himself, and it is perhaps because of this very fact that he does not so much respect the people in the field), and learning in general. These are some of the salient values of Old White Man Writing.

So now that I have trotted out his liberal credentials—the beliefs that will permit me, I hope, to use the phrase “Old White Man Writing” in a way that will not be taken invidiously — let us return to the other hopes in which Old White Man Writing continues to write. The hopes, the pennies in the fountain, that allow him to write and that constitute the grounds of his writing, if not exactly the matter of it. Or maybe they are the matter of it; maybe hope itself is the very essence of his writing.

Because to write the kind of stuff Old White Man Writing writes is to hope to be listened to, perhaps even to be heard. This kind of writing, you could say, is a sign of hope, or at least a signaling of it. Scribo, ergo spero. I write, therefore I hope. I hope you can hear me. See me. Please see the dried-out old white dust bunny in the corner.