-Caveat Lector-
School Shootings and White Denial
Tim Wise, AlterNet
March 6, 2001
I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: white people need to
pull our heads out of our collective ass.
Two more white children are dead and thirteen are injured, and another
"nice" community is scratching its blonde head, utterly perplexed at how a
school shooting the likes of the one yesterday in Santee, California could
happen. After all, as the Mayor of the town said in an interview with CNN:
"We're a solid town, a good town, with good kids, a good church-going
town…an All-American town." Yeah, well maybe that's the problem.
I said this after Columbine and no one listened so I'll say it again: white
people live in an utter state of self-delusion. We think danger is black,
brown and poor, and if we can just move far enough away from "those people"
in the cities we'll be safe. If we can just find an "all-American" town,
life will be better, because "things like this just don't happen here."
Well bullshit on that. In case you hadn't noticed, "here" is about the only
place these kinds of things do happen. Oh sure, there is plenty of violence
in urban communities and schools. But mass murder; wholesale slaughter;
take-a-gun-and-see-how-many-you can-kill kinda craziness seems made for
those safe places: the white suburbs or rural communities.
And yet once again, we hear the FBI insist there is no "profile" of a
school shooter. Come again? White boy after white boy after white boy, with
very few exceptions to that rule (and none in the mass shooting category),
decides to use their classmates for target practice, and yet there is no
profile? Imagine if all these killers had been black: would we still
hesitate to put a racial face on the perpetrators? Doubtful.
Indeed, if any black child in America -- especially in the mostly white
suburbs of Littleton, or Santee -- were to openly discuss their plans to
murder fellow students, as happened both at Columbine and now Santana High,
you can bet your ass that somebody would have turned them in, and the cops
would have beat a path to their doorstep. But when whites discuss their
murderous intentions, our stereotypes of what danger looks like cause us to
ignore it -- they're just "talking" and won't really do anything. How many
kids have to die before we rethink that nonsense? How many dazed and
confused parents, Mayors and Sheriffs do we have to listen to, describing
how "normal" and safe their community is, and how they just can't
understand what went wrong?
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=10560
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