Subject: 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 what 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