Standing in line at the California Science Center
the day of the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary school, my students
wondered aloud about the race of the shooter.
“More than likely he was white,” they agreed. As the only people of
color waiting to be admitted to the exhibit, their open question about race
elicited visible unease from a group of elderly white women across the line
from us.
According to a Mother
Jones timeline of mass shootings from the 1980s to the present, the
majority of American mass murderers have been white males. The most infamous young killers—the Columbine
High shooters, Jared Loughner, James Holmes, and now Adam Lanza—share a common
cultural theme and national narrative. “Deranged” loners who came from lower to
upper middle class nuclear families, their murder sprees forever shattered
white suburbia’s veneer of normalcy. Over
the past decade, the post-mass murder mantra has been grindingly familiar—“this
couldn’t/shouldn’t/wouldn’t happen HERE, in our idyllic (white) suburban
community.” Catastrophic violence is implicitly
marked as the province of the other, the inner city, the cesspit jungle where poor
children (of color), according to GOP sage Newt Gingrich, have no work ethic
and thus no “habit of I do this and
you give me cash, unless it is illegal.”
And yet, methodically plotted acts of epic violence committed
by young white males with mini arsenals aping video game assassins are
increasingly the hallmark of “HERE”. So
no doubt the elderly white women’s unease came from a sense of deep existential
displacement. When you’ve been suckled
on Ozzie and Harriet, its “hard” to
have your whiteness referenced as a source of violence; especially by people of
color.
As the unraced universal subject, white people are simply
unaccustomed to being explicitly identified as white. For many, the tired colorblind party line of
white privilege means that just talking about race is racist. Universal means normal, and even the most heinous
white criminals (Gacy, Bundy, Dahmer, and the list goes on) are humanized by a
back story of psychoanalysis, cable TV biopics, books, and pop culture
reportage. The wages of whiteness means
not having to know the classic people of color ritual—i.e., that when big crime
news breaks its pro forma for many African Americans and Latinos to find out the
race of the perpetrator and then those of the victims. If the perpetrator is white there is a
collective sigh of relief that Middle America won’t have another dark savage,
immigrant or Muslim community to demonize. If the victims are of color, there is a short window
before the media’s attention fades (ala the August massacre of six at a Sikh
temple in Wisconsin) and shifts to more important matters like Lindsey Lohan or
missing white girls.
Black and brown children learn very early on that
perceptions of race and criminality are intimately connected. In high school when my friends and I found ourselves
at the business end of Inglewood PD officers’ rifles because someone in our car
“looked” like a burglary suspect, it was a rite of passage initiation. The killing of African American teenager Trayvon
Martin was a lightening rod because American youth of color saw the failure to
bring his killer to justice as symptomatic of the devaluation of their lives. Guilty until proven innocent, youth of color
never have the privilege of being universally perceived as the “nice” boy (as
Lanza has been described) or girl next door that wouldn’t hurt a fly.
According to a 2010 Blair-Rockefeller survey, many whites in
post-racial America believe that blacks and Latinos are more lazy,
unintelligent, and untrustworthy than either whites or Asians. If white Middle
America views people of color as not having “white” values and “white” aptitude
levels, then it’s no mystery why mainstream media pathologize people of color
as naturally criminal and violent. Black
criminality can be boiled down to a rancid stew of shiftlessness, absentee
fatherhood, and irresponsible motherhood.
Latino criminality stems from too much babymaking and gangbanging. But like the moribund immigrant urban jungle
of 19th social reformer Jacob
Riis’ nightmares, it’s the “inner city” that’s the guilty co-defendant.
Nonetheless, mass murder in an urban context is rare
and mass shootings in schools of color are virtually unheard of. Homicide is a leading cause of death for young
African American men. But contrary to
the rap stereotype of Glock-toting men of color, an overwhelming majority of
people of color are pro-gun control,
while the majority of the white electorate is not. The high school assailants in the Littleton,
Colorado, the Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Santee, California shootings were steeped
in a NRA besotted gun culture that fetishizes readily available firearms as the
ultimate medium for violent white masculinity.
However, these youth were instantly transformed into
symbols of troubled, tragically “misunderstood” teens. National conversations about the perils of
bullying dominated the airwaves. It was accepted
that these tragic figures were “our boys,” our recklessly wasted youth. It was conventional wisdom that preventive mental
health resources could have minimized their inner turmoil. As the bloggers Three Sonorans note in their piece,
“White Privilege and Mass Murder in America,” “whenever white men commit mass
murders it is just a freak isolated incident, but when we look at other crime
statistics for minorities the reason given is that it is something innate to
their culture, to their family. It is those
people.”
With Columbine there was tacit understanding that
these boys’ acts were symptomatic of a potentially imperiled national heritage. Conversely, any time violence erupts in a black
or Latino context it’s a racial indictment, an indictment of a community, not a reflection on the rogue
acts of lost boys from salt of the earth homes.
As my students and I left the Science center, bracing
for more news about the scope of the attack, it was clear that the tragedy
would dominate the news for weeks to come.
The senseless slaughter of children from the “perfect” town may finally prompt
serious bipartisan legislation to curb the barbaric gun lobby. But it will not
prompt analysis of the violent masculinity at the heart of whiteness. And if any of these nice white boy shooters had
been black the national sentiment would have echoed the biting comment made by
my student Jamion: “Send those niggers back to Africa.”
