Rockne Newell shot and killed three people yesterday and wounded several others during an attack on a municipal town board meeting in Pennsylvania.
A white man runs amok again. When will the white community have a serious conversation about the violence of its members? Where are the white Don Lemons and white media elites on Fox News and conservative talk radio showing leadership on the frightening trend that is white men committing acts of mass murder and violence in the United States?
White men are approximately 30 percent of the American public, but they account for 70 percent of mass shootings. The pathological mix that is gun culture and imperiled/aggrieved white masculinity is killing people--most of whom are white--yet, the white community looks the other way.
As my Right-wing friends are fond of saying, "what of personal responsibility?"
Of course, when white people commit politically motivated crimes there is no handwringing, introspection, or generalizations made about white folks in mass. As we saw in the aftermath of the Adam Lanza shooting spree, once more the freedom to be white is the freedom to be an individual and to have none of your negative actions reflect anything about the group to which you belong.
Rockne Newell is a terrorist. Instead of labeling him as such, there will be a national conversation about mental illness and how Rockne Newell is just one of the "crazies." The Right-wing media will try to cast Rockne Newell as an outlier or one of "those people", i.e. an Obama supporter. Thus, his gun mania murder madness will not reflect poorly on conservatives, the NRA, or the policies which they support that in turn make reasonable gun control laws impossible to enforce.
The other option when faced by white criminals who commit acts of mass violence is for white society to find a way to "otherize" them, transforming them into a type of person who is somehow not really "white" and "normal." For example, the silly efforts to kick the Boston Bombers out of the family of Whiteness because they are Muslim and from the Caucasus (the very definition of "white" in the pseudo-scientific race business).
Just as Bill O'Reilly and other white elites did in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin murder case, where they decided to publicly scold black folks and their "bad culture", we need some black and brown leaders to lecture and truth-tell about the plague of white crime and white domestic terrorism that is imperiling the United States.
Of course, black folks do not have the media platform or authority to lecture white people about the pathological aspects of their culture, or to discuss the reality that is "white crime", as to do so would be "reverse racism" and unkind to the feelings of White America.
White privilege is killing white people. Yet, they choose to stand mute and silent.
You can kill it. This the closest we'll come to proper commentary on this trend. Selective memory, near-sighted view of events & amnesia they suffer from in regards to history. This how ameriKKKlan got started. White males & guns murdering masses w/wreckless abandon. The 30/70 #'s is good knowledge for those bombarded w/the "They 12% of the pop. Yet they account for..." bs in media.
ReplyDeleteWell, how long until the obvious is not stated by the mass media about white crime? Don't hold your breath.
ReplyDeleteThere are undoubtedly white men who are aware of their supposed "exalted" position but reject the whole idea. I suspect, though, that there are more white women who treat people well no matter what those folks' racial and cultural heritage may be. We white women feel oppression, yes we do. Some people may not realize the disparity in how white privilege is often utilized by men vs. women.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have this problem in Ghana. BTW the geographical region is spelled Caucasus. Race in Germany was constructed in the 19th century to imagine that White people originated from the Caucasus. But, in Russia which has controlled the territory for the last couple of centuries, Caucasians, particularly Chechens have been defined as "chernie" or black for most of that time.
ReplyDeleteYes and no. White women are also invested in white privilege and white racism. That is one of the challenges of dealing with sexism--which women most certainly experience--but also how white women also are members of the racial in-group. Such realities have been much discussed in relationship to womanism/3rd world feminism and its critique of 1st and 2nd wave white feminism.
ReplyDeleteThat is a great example of how race is a social construction. Chechens are "black" to some Russians and experience stigma. But, they are fully "white" and have been since at least the 1930s/1940s in the U.S..
ReplyDeleteI think you miss a rather crucial point here, CDV, though in general your analysis holds water. Note the %-age of these white mass shooters with political motivations who lean left. Just about 0, isn't it? So suggesting that a politically-motivate mass shooting by a white man will elicit no outcry by the media only holds up as assured when we get someone on the left doing the killing and no hands are wrung.
ReplyDeleteFor my money, it won't happen. Left-wing political violence always pisses off the powerful, and hence is always decried. People in any way affiliated with left-wing violence (e.g., Bill Ayers) are reviled by the rightwing media and the blogosphere. I've read repeated comments that make him out to be Lucifer coupled with Stalin, even though there is zero evidence that he personally killed anyone or even participated in anyone's demise or injury. That he then put in 40+ years of non-violent work dedicated to promoting social justice in and through public education cuts no ice with such folks. They'd gladly see him taken out and shot. His comment that he regrets not having done enough to stop the war is misinterpreted to mean that he wishes he could have done more violence, when the goal of left-wing extremist groups of that era was to find a way to bring the reality of the horrible war in Vietnam home to the American people in order to get the average Joe to finally question "Why Are We In Vietnam?" Did the tactic of terrorist violence work? Very doubtful, as Ayers would admit. But was the motive just? The right wingers couldn't care less. Left-wing violence cannot and will not be tolerated or forgiven.
On the other hand, there's some empathy in the media and in the popular culture for right-wing terrorism (see, Tea Party, the). Haven't ever heard of anyone on Faux Snooze decrying the racist attacks and calls for violence against Barack Obama. Tea Party types, abortion opponents, and the like get a pass there.
So it's not JUST a question of race or politics, but rather of what sort of politics, in my view.
I think you are right in the sense that politics is central to framing esp. by the Right-wing noise machine.
ReplyDeleteIt is also part of how terrorism is framed too.
I am just making a basic claim about "white crime" and how if this crime was committed by some "Muslim" then it would be "terrorism" and on blast 24/7 on Fox and the media at large.
One small data point on how "we" white women utilize white privilege: http://www.gradientlair.com/post/54207960973/white-woman-derails-conversation-on-race
ReplyDeleteThere may be a disparity between how white women utilize privilege vs. white men, but that doesn't mean that they don't utilize it at all. "Treating people well" isn't synonymous with "being more civil/less inclined to violence."
Yes, America does have an evil spirit abroad in the land. It is indeed a paradox how a nation can be so politically stable and yet so internally violent. You can even graph the societal necrosis, with Google Book's Ngram viewer. This graph plots the occurrences of the phrase School Shooting in books and magazines over a century or so:
ReplyDeletehttp://bit.ly/UIKg08
Note the sudden arc. If you click on the books themselves, 100 years ago education journals were touting the benefits of having varsity rifle teams in high schools. Closer to our own day, there are books offering tips on surviving school massacres. Unreal... And except for the occasional John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, mass shooters are indeed mostly white.
ngram viewer? mighty cool! i learned something new. what other things have you uncovered in terms of patterns?
ReplyDeleteMostly the rise and fall of the popularity of certain everyday words, like toplofty, or the brief lives of election year buzzwords, or the rise and ebb of political issues--like Negro Problem!
ReplyDeleteWow.....you are just utterly delusional. When I am in a bad mood, I know I can always come here to get a good laugh at the utter stupidity and ignorance of your racist rambling. A white psychopath committed murder......and in the same day at least 10 "negroes" committed murder. What exactly is your point? Murder is ok as long as your a respectable negroe? I honestly don't know how anyone with an IQ above 50 could buy in to your contrived bullshit. Keep playing that race card.....tell me again who exactly owned you as a slave? Oh that's right....no one. Your sense of entitlement because of your skin color is laughable at best. And terrorist?? wtf are you talking about? Do you honestly even know what that is? By your definition, the prison system is filled with black terrorists. Keep on preaching the hatred and doing your best to ensure the racial divide grows. You are a pathetic little man and are truly part of the problem, not the solution.
ReplyDeleteThe good thing is that they are not killing many Blacks - which makes a nice change from the so-called Norm.
ReplyDeleteAfter u take out women, children & the elderly black men are less then 6% of the population. PER CAPITA who commits the most crime??
ReplyDeleteI would say that you are politically immature and your attacks on the media are proverbially speaking 'biting the hand that feeds you'. The mass media in the UK and the US are nothing more than a propaganda service for the left wing governments that are overseeing the mass imagration of Mexicans, Indians and Africans in record numbers. The numbers are so high that they are economically unviable and in the UK the housing market and schooling has reached crisis point, yet still nothing is done about imagration. White people in London are now a minority which are becoming smaller and smaller at an alarming and unhealthy rate. I suspect that far from being nieve you are a payrolled left wing rallying point to whip up support among disaffected black people in the US.
ReplyDeleteThe 'white' people you mention that have 'made a stand' usually do so in an attempt to bring attention to the government that is destroying the country for all of us.....regardless of color!