COVERING UP RACISM

kayak3 kayak3 at bouldernews.infi.net
Mon May 3 09:44:09 PDT 1999


Charles Brown wrote:
>
> Brad,
>
> I think you must have joined the list after the larger discussion that preceded this post. Emma is being sarcastically critical of the statements I made (and perhaps Maggie Coleman and others) regarding the media coverup of the racism in the Littleton massacre. If you want some of the posts I'll send them to you, but now I'll try to give you a succinct summary:
>
> 1. I initially criticized the early coverage in the national and local media which had statements like "they hurled insults at Jews, blacks and Hispanics, but they REALLY hated the athletes". So, you should be able to see by this example alone, that attribution of racism to Harris and Klebold, is not at all wild speculation. Anybody known for hurling insults at Jews, blacks and Hispanics is racist.

Living in Colorado I was glued to the set listening to the eyewitness accounts as reported right after the incident. Only one of the boys hurled insults. In fact a diatribe from Harris taken of the internet quoted him as saying that he wanted to kill racists and that someone who would had someone because of the color of their skin deserved to die. So the early accounts were not that clear.


>
> 2. My problem with this is not that alienation from the high status groups in school such as athletes didn't cause their anger, BUT that hate of athletes is not as important a social problem in U.S. society as racism, and thus to do downplay the racism is typical big biz media coverup of racism.

Overall I agree that the media does downplay racism. I'm not sure that this is the case in this specific instance.

There were also many reports that one or both were Hitlerphiles with a Nazi fetish. The murder occurred on Hitler's birthday and there were reports that they were yelling "4/20" while doing the killing.


>
> So the accusation of them being racists is based on what has been reported at length in the media.
>
> Part of the criticism I am making of Emma and everyone else who doesn't see any racism in a Nazi fetish and racist name calling ( you maybe too from what you say below) is that the invisibility of racism to many whites today is one of the signal characteristics of racism 1999.

The definition of Nazism is so complicated with so many characteristics that it's hard to tell with characteristics of Nazism the boys really identified with. In fact Klebold is half Jewish and Harris ranted and raved about jocks being too obedient to authority, which is opposite of what the Nazis were about. The Nazis were very authoritarian.


>
> In other words, when you say "overreacting" , many black and brown people find most white people "undereacting" to widespread racism in America today, such that probably the widest form of racism today is the denial , coverup or underreaction to racism.

I would agree with you in general but every instance of violence has a different degree of racism as a motivating cause. My point was that we need to wait for the facts to come before we jump to conclustions about specific accurrences of violence. Otherwise we make ourselve vulnerable to those who would accuse us of being too reactionary.


>
> 3. As to the comparison with your experience as high school counterculturalist of the 60's/70's victimized by jocks, it is exactly the fact that you and others DIDN'T resort to mass murder that is all of the difference in the world between alienated and jock-oppressed high schoolers who have a Nazi fetish and those who don't.

It was the influence of Martin Luther King and Ghandi as pacifists who influenced myself and those in my emediate group. Others were more proned to violence. The key variable in my experience could be the greater access of guns that students now have. There were certainly other students proned to rage and as Mike Males and others have pointed out, statistics don't indicate that there is any more violence now in schools than there was in the 60's and 70's. It's just more lethal. Also, some my fellow students had a nazi fetish and ran around with swastikas on their notes books.

In other words, the hypothesis is that it is their fascist racist ideas that specifically caused the MASS MURDER aspect of their alienated response. Obviously this is becau
>
> What distinguished these alienated high schoolers from the 10's of millions of others similarly alienated is that they committed mass murder. It is not at all a leap to hypthesize that their Nazism, however much a revised version, caused the specific mass murder aspect to their "protest."

It may have been an influence but to what degree it's really hard to tell.


>
> There are a few other aspects to this argument if you care to hear them.

I wouldn't mind hearing them but I think some of the others, Doug included are tiring of the subject. You can send other arguments to my personal email below.


> >>> kayak3 <kayak3 at bouldernews.infi.net> 04/30/99 05:00PM >>>



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