A White Man Talking to All of Us: Post Adam Lanza and Sandy Hook, America Needs to Talk About the Dysfunctions of White Masculinity

A few more days to go.

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The relationship between white masculinity and mass shootings is a national crisis, a public health emergency, and a threat to the common good. However, because the conversation is fundamentally about questions of identity, it is critically important that white men give voice and sound off on the issue.

I am very mindful of avoiding the trap where Whiteness, because of its social power, somehow always manages to recenter itself--even in conversations which are critical of Whiteness as a social construct.

Consequently, I want to allow space for white men to speak honestly and candidly about Adam Lanza and the possibility that a crisis in White Masculinity has lead to the many incidents of mass murder via the gun that the United States (and other countries) have been subjected to in recent decades.

Like clockwork, one of our guest essayists, the indispensable Werner Herzog's Bear has a great piece on this very subject that is worth reading. Mr. Bear's website Notes from the Ironbound deserves a much larger audience. He tells it like it is; he does not hold back; and is one of the few folks who are willing to talk plainly about these issues of white masculinity as they relate directly to matters of social justice, citizenship, and the Common Good in the United States.

I think that Werner is really hitting on an important point in his essay "It's Time to Talk About the Dysfunctions of White Masculinity" when he suggests that many white men "are socialized to be the masters of their fate and able to use violence to maintain control over their lives. These same men lack the tools to handle adversity, and are often left to their individual resources, even if they are mentally disturbed." 

His observation sounds like something my grandmother told me, a woman who was a maid in the Jim and Jane Crow South and later on in New Haven, Connecticut. Never discount the wisdom of the elders: despite all of their privileges and how society coddles them, many white folks have piss poor coping skills.

Is Mr. Bear onto something here?

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Whenever a horrible event like the massacre in Newtown takes place, we try to find ways to explain it. This is often a futile exercise, because many people merely superimpose their larger beefs with society onto these events, rather than examining them with any real analytical and factual framework. Hence, we have people like Louie Gohmert saying the teacher should have had her own assault weapon, or Mike Huckabee lamenting the loss of God in public schools. 

 We should be very careful of monocausal explanations that oversimplify things. There are a lot of factors at play in the Newtown massacre, from the perpetrator's mental state to the availability of semi-automatic weapons. However, I would like to echo others out there in the blogosphere who want to examine the role of white masculinity in all of this.

Of course, there have been other mass shootings in other countries, and the worst such shooting in this country was perpetrated by a Korean student. That being said, this country has witnessed the lion's share of mass shootings, and disproportionate seventy percent of the shooters have been white men. I hardly think the connection is coincidental. Ever since the Aurora tragedy this summer, I have been contemplating this issue, trying to connect the dots to explain the connection between white masculinity and mass shootings. I finally feel like I have some speculations worth sharing.

Masculinity more generally in this society is defined to a great extent by violence and control, and violence used as a means of maintaining control. I have long been amazed and appalled by how many public figures in this country who have abused their wives and girlfriends have been allowed to stay on the pedestal. That sad fact is to me evidence that masculine control through violence is implicitly accepted as legitimate in America. Action movies predominate at the box office, and the orchestrated violence of the NFL is America's most popular sport.

Furthermore, white men in this country are taught that they are the masters of their own destiny, and are usually not confronted with the same limitations of possibility that men of color are. When white men fail, an experience our society gives them few resources to confront, they often lash out at those they hold responsible, or turn inward and commit suicide. Most mass shooters seem to want to do both, as Adam Lanza did. 

The completely atomized nature of white middle class society contributes as well. Shooters are usually described as "loners," men disconnected from others and hence unable to empathize with the human beings they kill. We are an increasingly individualized society, which means that those mentally unstable, frustrated white men with access to deadly weapons are so rarely stopped before they kill. 

 They sit on the margins, alone, without any kind of cohesive social structure to bring them in. Adam Lanza had stopped going to school and interacted with few outside his home, Eric Harris was able to plan his rampage in a home where his parents took evidently little interest in his doings, James Holmes had been expelled from his university and lived alone in a city far from home. While atomization is occurring in all groups of American society today, in middle class, white culture it has probably been the most egregious and damaging.

We have a situation where white men are socialized to be the masters of their fate and able to use violence to maintain control over their lives. These same men lack the tools to handle adversity, and are often left to their individual resources, even if they are mentally disturbed. When some of the most mentally unstable of these men experience soul-shattering setbacks and are given access to semi-automatic weapons, we can only expect the worst. 

 We need to educate young men (especially white men) to not see violence as the answer to their problems, or to phantasize violent solutions. We need to equip them with the tools to withstand failure, and to keep the more troubled of their number from slipping through the cracks. Last, we need to talk seriously and openly about the nature of American white masculinity, and stop pretending that it isn't problematic.