>Andrew Ross makes a nice point in that Salon piece I mentioned earlier:
>
><quote>
>One reason for the disconnect, argues Andrew Ross, who chairs the American
>studies department at NYU, is how the media handles race. Ross notes that
>when white suburban kids go wrong, there's enormous pressure to find a
>psychological cause rather than a social explanation.
>
>"White suburban kids are assumed to have an individual psychic development
>that can be sidetracked into dysfunctional forms of expression, if there is
>some sufficiently powerful external stimulus -- a video game, a lurid Web
>site -- that can knock them off course." But when it comes to inner-city
>black kids, "the explanations are assumed to be socially determined from
>the get-go." By the media's lights, "Society explains their behavior in a
>way that strips them of their individuality and retains only their class
>and race attributes" -- which is why video games are never trotted out to
>explain homicide in inner-city schools.
>
>In the end, says Ross, the pattern is distinctly American: "Since the early
>days of the republic, it has also been an elementary rule of public life
>for grandstanding experts and gatekeepers to hold popular culture
>responsible."
></quote>
If I understand what Ross is saying, then I disagree with his analysis in important ways. What's going on is the same old same old: devalued groups are held at a great social distance. Thus individuals blur together, socially, and every member of the group becomes an avatar for all members of the group -- the still-heard 'X is a credit/discredit to his race' being exemplary (so exemplary that I'm sure I needn't even mention which race). The smaller the social gap between group members and Real Humans (CUMCWASPs), the more individuals begin to stand out, and individualised explanations are sought. Significantly, overly- rapacious behavior by a member of the ruling class is *never* seen as exemplary of all members of the ruling class; that failing is invariably ascribed to individual aberration -- and often only a momentary one, at that!
The 'social' explanations given for the behavior of criminal Black kids usually amounts to no more than 'it's terrible, but they're all so deprived, what can anyone do? Build more prisons is the only answer.'
In the case of suburban White kids, of course, it's usually not economic but rather 'only' deprivation of social worth. Those kids are further up Maslow's pyramid, and the amount of mayhem is correspondingly less, and correspondingly more socially visible when it does occur.
Nobody ever seems to feel that there might be a causal connection between deprivation and violence, or that any healthy society would recognise a responsibility to see that such deprivation doesn't occur.