>I once spent the better part of a day trying to think of an aspect of
>American social life that wasn't touched by race, and couldn't come up with
>one. The identity of a place like Littleton is bound up with white
>suburbanization. It's no surprise the killers' murderous fantasies were so
>racialized - racialized images of sex and violence are in every American
>head. (We make our fantasies but not with elements of our own choosing.) So
>it makes sense to me to say there were racial components to the massacre,
>but I don't see how you could make it the centerpiece.
Let me first quote Du Bois via Roedigger: "It is bad enough to have the consequences of [racist] thought fall upon colored people the world over; but in the end it was even worse when one considers what this attitude did to the [white] worker. His aim and ideal was distorted . . . He began to want, not comfort for all men but power over other men . . . He did not love humanity and he hated n-words."
I agree with all you have written above, especially that racism alone cannot be the centerpiece of an explanation to the massacre, just as I think that one cannot hope to explain the massacre fully without dealing with race. Having said that, I find it somewhat problematic that you consider racism only a preexisting channel through which separate and prior grievances were expressed.
mark
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