I was doing some surfing/reading -- and found this opinion to be highly interesting/enlightening to say the least... I apologize for the length & vulgarity -- but it's pretty good stuff.
Quote:
School Shootings and White Denial
Tim Wise, AlterNet
March 6, 2001
Viewed on March 7, 2001
I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: white
people need to pull our heads out of our collective a%%.
Two more white children are dead and thirteen are injured, and
another "nice" community is scratching its blonde head, utterly
perplexed at how a school shooting the likes of the one yesterday in Santee,
California could happen. After all, as the Mayor of the town said in an
interview with CNN: "We're a solid town, a good town, with good kids, a good
church-going town.an All-American town." Yeah, well maybe that's the
problem.
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, and if we can just move far enough away
from "those people" in the cities we'll be safe. If we can just find an
"all-American" town, life will be better, because "things like this just
don't happen here."
Well bullsh*t on that.
In case you hadn't noticed, "here" is about the only place these kinds of
things do happen. Oh sure, there is plenty of violence in urban communities
and schools. But mass murder; wholesale
slaughter; take-a-gun-and-see-how-many-you can-kill kinda
craziness seems made for those safe places: the white suburbs or rural
communities.
And yet once again, we hear the FBI insist there is no "profile"
of a school shooter. 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?
Imagine if all these killers had been black: would we still hesitate to put
a racial face on the perpetrators? Doubtful.
Indeed, if any black child in America -- especially in the mostly
white suburbs 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 a** 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. How many kids have to die before we rethink that
nonsense? How many dazed and confused parents, Mayors and Sheriffs do we
have to listen to, describing how "normal" and safe their community is, and
how they just can't understand what went wrong?
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 Wall-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.
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. We ignore the
warning signs, because in our minds the warning signs don't live in our
neighborhood, but across town, in that place where we lock our car doors on
the rare occasion we have to drive there. That false sense of security --
the result of racist and classist stereotypes -- then gets people killed.
And still we act amazed.
But listen up my fellow white Americans: your children are no
better, no nicer, no more moral, no more decent than anyone else.
Dysfunction is all around you, whether you choose to recognize it or not.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, and Department
of Health and Human Services, it is your children, and not those of the
urban ghetto, who are most likely to use drugs. That's right: white high
school students are seven times more likely than blacks to have used
cocaine; eight times more likely to have smoked crack; ten times more likely
to have used LSD and seven times more likely to have used heroin. In fact,
there are more white high school students who have used crystal
methamphetamine (the most addictive drug on the streets) than there are
black students who smoke cigarettes.
What's more, white youth ages 12-17 are more likely to sell
drugs: 34% more likely, in fact than their black counterparts. And it is
white youth who are twice as likely to binge drink, and nearly twice as
likely as blacks to drive drunk. And white males are twice as likely to
bring a weapon to school as are black males.
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 .
A few years ago, U.S. News ran a story entitled: "A Shocking
look at blacks and crime." Yet never have they or any other news outlet
discussed the "shocking" whiteness of these shoot-em-ups.
Indeed, every time media commentators discuss the similarities in these
crimes they mention that the shooters were boys, they were loners, they got
picked on, but never do they seem to notice a certain highly visible melanin
deficiency. Color-blind, I guess.
White-blind is more like it, as I figure these folks would spot
color mighty damn quick were some of it to stroll into their
community.
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.
I'd like to think that after this one, people would wake up.
Take note. Rethink their stereotypes of who the dangerous ones are. But deep
down, I know better. The folks hitting the snooze button on this
none-too-subtle alarm are my own people, after all, and I know
their blindness like the back of my hand.
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"No matter how worthy, admirable or fiercely desired the goal may be, it takes commitment and action to make it a reality."
[This message has been edited by novella000 (edited March 09, 2001).]
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