[CTRL] School Shootings and White Denial

[William Shannon]

http://www.alternet.org/story.html%3FStoryID%3D10560&IDLink=10361




School Shootings and White Denial
Tim Wise
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? I'll tell you what went wrong and
it's not TV, rap music, video games or a lack of prayer in school. What went
wrong is that white Americans decided to ignore dysfunction and violence when
it only affected other communities, and thereby blinded themselves to the
inevitable creeping of chaos which never remains isolated too long. What
affects the urban "ghetto" today will be coming to a Wal-Mart near you
tomorrow, and unless you address the emptiness, pain, isolation and lack of
hope felt by children of color and the poor, then don't be shocked when the
support systems aren't there for your kids either. What went wrong is that we
allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by media
representations of crime and violence that portray both as the province of
those who are anything but white like us. We ignore the warning signs,
because in our minds the warning signs don't live in our neighborhood, but
across town, in that place where we lock our car doors on the rare occasion
we have to drive there. That false sense of security -- the result of racist
and classist stereotypes -- then gets people killed. And still we act amazed.
But listen up my fellow white Americans: your children are no better, no
nicer, no more moral, no more decent than anyone else. Dysfunction is all
around you, whether you choose to recognize it or not. According to the
Centers for Disease Control, and Department of Health and Human Services, it
is your children, and not those of the urban ghetto, who are most likely to
use drugs. That's right: white high school students are seven times more
likely than blacks to have used cocaine; eight times more likely to have
smoked crack; ten times more likely to have used LSD and seven times more
likely to have used heroin. In fact, there are more white high school
students who have used crystal methamphetamine (the most addictive drug on
the streets) than there are black students who smoke cigarettes. What's more,
white youth ages 12-17 are more likely to sell drugs: 34% more likely, in
fact than their black counterparts. And it is white youth who are twice as
likely to binge drink, and nearly twice as likely as blacks to drive drunk.
And white males are twice as likely to bring a weapon to school as are black
males. And yet I would bet a valued body part that there aren't 100 white
people in Santee, California, or most any other "nice" community who have
ever heard a single one of the statistics above. Even though they were
collected by government agencies using these folks' tax money for the
purpose. Because the media doesn't report on white dysfunction A few years
ago, U.S. News ran a story entitled: "A Shocking look at blacks and crime."
Yet never have they or any other news outlet discussed the "shocking"
whiteness of these shoot-em-ups. Indeed, every time media commentators
discuss the similarities in these crimes they mention that the shooters were
boys, they were loners, they got picked on, but never do they seem to notice
a certain highly visible melanin deficiency. Color-blind, I guess.
White-blind is more like it, as I figure these folks would spot color mighty
damn quick were some of it to stroll into their community. Santee's whiteness
is so taken for granted by its residents that the Mayor, in that CNN
interview, thought nothing of saying on the one hand that the town was 82
percent white, but on the other hand that "this is America." Well that isn't
America, and it especially isn't California, where whites are only half of
the population. This is a town that is removed from America, and yet its
Mayor thinks they are the normal ones -- so much so that when asked about
racial diversity, he replied that there weren't many of different
"ethni-tis-tities." Not a word. Not even close. I'd like to think that after
this one, people would wake up. Take note. Rethink their stereotypes of who
the dangerous ones are. But deep down, I know better. The folks hitting the
snooze button on this none-too-subtle alarm are my own people, after all, and
I know their blindness like the back of my hand.