School Shootings & White Denial |
meta story | ||
March 2001 |
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 bull**** 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 s 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.
Why? 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. Tim Wise is a Nashville-based writer and activist and can be reached at tjwise@mindspring.com.
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