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Although I'm wildly confused by the framing of the question, I'm going to take a stab at it anyway.

I see the mediocre white man as an aspirational goal. Obviously we're not talking about the white guy with the shitty job who struggles to make ends meet when we talk about mediocrity, we're talking about the guy who's a tax attorney making $350k in Texas for doing one of the only jobs that's currently 100% replaceable by AI. The guy who thinks he's super smart and deserving even though he's only a hair or two above average. That guy gets to breeze through life with every comfort imaginable and never question his position, he's got it made.

When you look at those weird Ivy League university presidents and shit that are still often mediocre white men but also frequently men and women of color, the position of the mediocre minority is significantly more precarious than that of the white man. If they screw up or suck publicly at something they are subject to intense scrutiny. They're clearly not very good at their job, did they fuck this up because they're a token diversity hire? The white guy, on the other hand, gets quickly reprimanded and forgotten about. It's very clear which mediocre person that the average onlooker would want to be.

Think about someone like Kamala Harris, a picture of diverse mediocrity. She has been rewarded over and over for no discernable reason and should be widely revered by mediocre women and people of unclear ethnic background as someone to aspire to be in the same way mediocre white men see Elon. While there are clearly lots of women who look up to her, the intense and lasting scrutiny she suffers for her failures keep her from reaching that mediocre white man threshold. Then consider the higher bar to clear that already exists as a non-default person and it just seems like a way less fun place to be rewarded for your mediocrity.

The mediocre white guy is like being told you get to have as much cake as you want. It's great and if you eat too much of it like a dumbass your main consequence is a tummy ache. It's not the best but you get to go right back to eating cake when it passes. The mediocre non-white person is like being told you can have as much as you want of the same exact cake as the white guy got, but this one has a very low dose of laxative baked into it. You still get to eat cake whenever you want and even get to eat more than just about anyone else, but if you fuck up and go over the limit you're now shitting yourself in front of everyone at your work. Up to that point both experiences are objectively the same, but the threat of greater consequences taints the entire experience in a way that a tummy ache doesn't. People want to have their cake and not shit themselves too.