[575] in peace2
thought food [School Shootings and White Denial]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bergner)
Mon Mar 12 12:39:54 2001
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 12:37:29 -0500 (EST)
From: Bergner <bergner@MIT.EDU>
To: <peace-list@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.30.0103121236140.7415-100000@ctpivory.lns.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT
This is a really good read.
-------- Original Message --------
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?
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> Tim Wise is a Nashville-based writer and activist and can be reached at
> tjwise@mindspring.com
>
>
