In the seconds after the El Paso, Texas massacre was announced, how many Trump haters secretly rejoiced: Yes! Gun-loving Texans got a taste of their own politics! In a Walmart, no less!
Then, reality: Oh, that’s a border town. A lot of Hispanics live there, especially immigrants who are here illegally. And Walmart – yes, it’s the Saks of blue-collar Repugs – but it’s also a place where a lot of poor and working-class people shop.
Thankfully, the shooter was a white man. Even before his manifesto was discovered, the news media quickly gave him that safe, one-word descriptor: white.
America has its own warring sects. Unlike the Middle East with its political and religious upheavals, the U.S. — and especially its media — are fixated on racial and ethnic differences. The go-to bogeyman is always white.
The media blame President Donald Trump for riling up white guys with rhetoric against illegal immigrants and people from “shit-hole” countries.
For all the blame leveled at Trump, it’s easy to imagine even more violence had Hillary Clinton become president. Her rhetoric would have been hateful but in a different way. Every time she segregated whites from “people of color,” every time she intoned against “white privilege,” she would have made the deplorables feel even more deplorable.
Had Hillary been president, her response following the recent shootings in El Paso, Dayton, Ohio and Gilroy, Calif., would have sounded as rote as Trump’s: “In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.”
Those are meaningless words in a country where some people are given license to hate, where popular culture has made hate and violence entertaining, where the news media readily place people in racial and ethnic boxes and assign them histories that may not match their personal lives.
What if you are a white man with no future, yet you’re constantly being condemned for all the privilege you have – how do you reconcile that? Do you accept that you’re a loser? Do you work harder to find a future? Do you give in to resentment and anger and pick up a gun and shoot people?
Are America’s white, male deplorables becoming the 21st Century’s niggers?
After a white man in Las Vegas killed 58 people and wounded another 422 at a country music festival, a CBS vice president named Hayley Geftman-Gold was caught on Facebook saying she had no sympathy for the victims because, as country music fans, they were probably “Republican gun toters.”
Her remarks roused little attention from the media.
Mass shooters who aren’t white are accorded a degree of acceptance for their anger. Three years ago, a black man named Micah Xavier Johnson opened fire on a group of police officers in Dallas, Texas, killing five and injuring nine, plus two civilians. Johnson was angry over police shootings and wanted to kill white people.
Reporters didn’t ask if Roseburg, Ore., shooter Chris Harper Mercer (who was biracial) hated whites when he killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, or ask why his black mother took him to shooting ranges even though he was disturbed. (Like the El Paso killer, Mercer also left a manifesto behind; in his, he complained about not having a girlfriend.)
Barack Obama was president during those shootings. He wasted no time using them for political advantage and calling for more gun laws. With the recent shootings, he emerged and advised Americans to not let racist views become normalized.
Where has Obama been? Racist views are so normalized that phrases like “white privilege” and “persons of color” and “people who look like me” are accepted and repeated without challenge by the media. Explain white privilege to a hillbilly in Appalachia. Explain why white is not a color. Explain how it is that people who share a skin color are presumed to all look alike?
This week alone in Portland, Ore., one radio show on Oregon Public Broadcasting in the span of a couple of days featured:
– A story of “Portland Women in Tech” complaining casually that diversity initiatives were not meeting the expectations of “people of color and transgender employees.”
– A story on the second African-American Footwear Forum in Portland this weekend. Radio host Dave Miller asked his black guests: “Just how white is leadership, not just at Addidas but at other companies?”
– A story about Sheldon High School in Eugene that has a totem pole representing Native American students from 60 different tribes. It sounds like a worthy, historic symbol, but radio host Miller had to note that non-Native Americans with a “history of genocide” participated in the project.
Miller, a white Harvard grad, was perhaps assuaging his own guilty privilege by bringing genocide into the conversation. It is generally believed that Native Americans migrated here from Asia via a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Did they supplant another culture? Some Native Americans believe their tribes evolved here.
What is generally known is that by the time white Europeans landed, Native Americans numbered roughly under a million. They were divided into tribes with their own languages, in some cases warring against each other, even enslaving one another. Had they been united, they might have run off the Europeans before the foreigners’ diseases took hold and wiped out the natives, who had no racial immunity. Instead, history took a different turn, and the white man “won.”
For how long?
White Europeans have dominated the globe in recent centuries. But they did not invent slavery or war, and they have never had a monopoly on brutality or inhumanity. If they are superior, it is in the writing of the first constitution and creating a country that people of many races and ethnicities have sought refuge.
What will replace European domination, and how violent will the transition be?
High-capacity guns in the hands of angry men are a problem, but it could be much worse. Look at what sectarian violence in the Middle East has accomplished with explosives.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
As often as these guys kill themselves, I’m surprised we haven’t had some suicide bombings. I wish these angry men would shoot themselves in the head and be done with it. There’s nothing dishonorable about suicide for oneself. Leave others out of it.
Suicide is a touchy subject. There’s outrage now about Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide. Some of his victims are upset they will not get their day in court to publicly rage against him and rally for higher monetary restitution.
However, he did save the cost of prosecuting him and, if convicted, imprisoning him.
I’m with you about these angry men killing themselves — and only themselves — if they are that miserable. I’ve always liked that one-liner by Robin Williams: “And as the one guy at the suicide hotline said, ‘Life isn’t for everybody.’”
The rate of suicide among white men is revealing, though. Every time I hear another media report about the high rate of suicide among gays and transgenders I wonder why there isn’t an acknowledgment that white men who are heterosexual also kill themselves.
The NRA has never been as powerful as the media. Go easy on Dave Miller. He has to appease his progressive overlords, and he’s a straight white male in public radio.
You might be right. A couple of days ago, The New York Times very publicly demoted a white, male editor for poor judgment regarding race. It says something that the paper published a story about what would normally be treated privately like a personnel matter:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/business/media/times-editor-weisman-demoted.html
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