Why were they obsessed with jocks and blacks? Could it be that with only 15 out of 1800 students as black, they needed an additional target that could more easily be imagined to be a threat worthy of their attention? Could it be that athletics to them represented the field in which blacks excelled? Hitler was obsessed with athletic success but this was before the embarrassment Jesse Owens visited upon him and his barbaric racial utopia. Maybe they wanted to destroy the very field of endeavor in which blacks most visibly assert their standing in society. Again, why were they obsessed with jocks? Has anyone even offered a guess?
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rakesh, they weren't obsessed with blacks. they were obsessed with jocks. and since, as you pointed out, very very few of the students at the school were black, it is very unlikely that klebold and harris equated "jock" with "black." the term "jock" is not necessarily equal to the term athlete. a "jock" is a member of a clique, frequently the top clique in the school, the football team and the cheerleaders, the most "popular" kids. this clique and whatever it represented to klebold and harris is what they hated.
you continued:
What I think is important to explain is the possible media reluctance to recognize that socially sanctioned racist ideas *may* have been centrally important to the descent of these two thugs into horrifying barbarity. That if these kids had not been racists, they would not have became who they became. This presents a racist society with the disturbing dilemma of rooting out racism root and branch or taking the risk of allowing racist ideas to flourish, whatever the collateral damage.
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as i said to charles, focusing on possible racism in this case, where it is probably a minor issue at most, allows americans to continue in their complacent belief that they (and our society) are not racist, because it allows them to point at harris and klebold and say: those boys were racists, that's what racists do, i don't do that, i'm not a racist.
kirsten