I thought you all would enjoy this article and maybe have some comments. It was sent to me by J Phil Reed, a white man who is a member of the clergy of the Catholic Church. He and my husband went to college together. Phil served for 15 years as a missionary in Africa, and he really feels at home when he is there. (even though he's got the complexion of a fish's belly, LOL)
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 here 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 Wall-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 classiest 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
[email protected] <mailto: [email protected]> <
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