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> 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,
Funny, with school shootings, the media, especially after Columbine, said the problem was trench-coat clad, Doom-playing, and Goth. White teens with those traits were given no exemptions from the fear-mongering because of their race.
> And yet once again, we hear the FBI insist there is no "profile" of a
> school shooter.
Actually, I thought the FBI had released a profile not too long ago. I think it was last year. At any rate, at that time press and pundits didn't have a problem concocting a profile of their own: loners, freaks, etc.
> 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?
Not really, Jason Vest of the Village Voice, in an interview on CounterSpin, said there is a profile: that of the mass murderer. Littleton, he said, was a story of mass murder that the press categorized as a youth issue. Thus, they failed to address it in the context of what is known about mass murder and proceeded to trot out the demagogues of the culture wars, which had no trouble scapegoating the pop culture consumed by white teens. When covering Jonesborro, Vest claimed reporting he did on mass murder at the time was "cut or neglected" by his then employer U.S. News & World Report, a trend repeated throughout the industry.
Around the time of Columbine, Tim Wise had a sensible point: black teens killing each other was not viewed as something abnormal, whereas a white teen channeling Charles Whitman was inconceivable, thus something had to be "leading them astray," corrupting them. Enter Lt. Col. David Grossman and the evils of Doom. But with this piece Wise has lost me.
> Imagine if all these killers had been black: would we still hesitate
> to put a racial face on the perpetrators? Doubtful.
Agreed.
> Indeed, if any black child in America -- especially in the mostly
> whitesuburbs 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.
That's grossly misleading. After Columbine, I remember one story of a pair of teens who were joking in their school library about how Kleibold and Harris just didn't plan the thing properly and joked about how it should have been done. The campus cops come down on them, sneering at parental questions about free speech. In schools throughout the nation there was the banning of trenchcoats and even black armbands. There were more complaints from teens to the ACLU in the six weeks after Columbine than in the six years prior, particularly on freaks, white or otherwise.
> 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.
And how is that done? What kind of "support system" would prevent a Littleton or a Santee?
> 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.
False sense of security perpetuated by media representations? That's ridiculous!! The media blow the threat of crime wildly out of proportion!! (Yes it's often racist, but the hyperbolic fear of crime is disgusting in its own right as well.) And for local television news media obsessing about crime is their raison d'etre. There was an Australian sit-com that was run on one of our local PBS stations for a while about tabloid television journalism. One of my favorite bits was in an episode where the anchor was fumbling about in the few seconds before the cameras were to start rolling fretting about what to say. He was begging his producer to feed him some words with which to pitch the lead crime story to the public. In response, the producer summed up the essence of tabloid tee-vee: "I don't care what you say, just scare the shit out of them."
The media coverage of incidents like Columbine and, here in Texas, Wedgewood had numerous suburbanites convinced that their neighbors and their kid's peers were infiltrated with lunatics waiting to crack. (Wedgewood was a local church where a psychotic white man burst in, denounced the fellowship, opened fire, killed about a dozen or so folks, and then offed himself.) Here in Ft. Worth, I used to work with a reporter at the local Knight-Ridder rag. We went into white suburbia to do a story about a cranky white man antagonizing his neighbors. It was pretty silly really. The guy was pissed at the city for not letting him turn his backyard into an auto-garage, since it would exceed the size permitted by city ordinances. He blamed the neighborhood association, painted his fence with a variety of horrid teal colors, refused to mow his lawn, and threatened to do more to make his home an eyesore, promising to drive down property values. The majority of his neighbors we spoke with were afraid to go on record criticizing him for fear of another Wedgewood. It was as if they whole neighborhood was unconsciously acting out a self-parody of paranoid suburbia, like that flick _The 'Burbs_.
Heck, when Wedgewood occurred, the press interviews the night it happened had person after person saying that the killing spree didn't surprise them. They explicitly referred to the national media's Columbine fanaticism as proof of how common place these killings are. That Tim Wise can say, seriously and without qualification, that the media ignore white "dysfunction" is absurd. The level of hysteria over the extreme cases of white on mostly white violence in recent years has been overwhelming.
> 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
Then why the incessant Columbine coverage? Was that all just one big fluke?
> Santee's whiteness is so taken for granted by its residents that the
> Mayor, in that 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.
What do the killings of Santee have to do with racism? A white kid in a largely white town kills other whites. What am I missing here?
-- Shane
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