Another Mass Shooting By Another Inexplicably Angry White Man
Note: This story originally appeared on my blog on October 3, 2015.
This is a photo of the Fox News Studio in Midtown Manhattan. Because I work near the building and because of the chaotic levels of foot traffic on other streets, I often have no choice but to pass it on a nearly daily basis. This also means that I can’t help but notice the so-big-you-can-see-it-from-space scrolling LED news feed on the side of the building.
This summer, multiple times a day, every day, for weeks, the folks down at Fox News felt the need to tell us that Juan Razo, a thirty-five-year-old “illegal”, committed a slew of sex crimes against women and girls after Federal border patrol ordered an Ohio sheriff to release him from custody.
Fox News isn’t the only news outlet that is guilty of sensationalizing this case; after all, “if it bleeds, it leads.” However, the fact that the Fox News scrolling LED sign, a sign seen by tens of thousand people daily, continuously broadcast that information smacks of racist fear-mongering. And, by continuously reminding us of the suspect’s (very Spanish sounding) name and undocumented status, Fox News dog-whistled to those who would conflate criminality with being a brown person from south of the border .
What I’m trying to figure out is why Fox isn’t covering news of mass shootings with a specifically racialized lens. According to the Washington Post, there have been two hundred ninety four mass shootings in the United States in 2015. And the vast majority of them were committed by young white men.
A brief run-down:
*Yesterday afternoon, a twenty-six-year-old man killed nine people and wounded many others in a religiously motivated attack on an Oregon community college.
*In July, another man, an aimless drifter walked into a movie theater in Lafayette, LA and started shooting, killing two people he’d never met.
*In June, Dylann Roof, a young man espousing white supremacist beliefs, walked into a church and killed nine parishioners.
And there’s no way anyone can ever forget the carnage of the Sandy Hook slayings or the Colorado theater shooting or Columbine or the massacre of five little Amish girls in 2006 or George Sodini’s murder of three women in an exercise class in Pennsylvania.
What’s interesting is that this is not a recent phenomenon. In 1966, Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower on the Austin campus of the University of Texas and began shooting, eventually killing sixteen people. Twenty-four-years ago this month, a man by the name of George Hennard crashed his vehicle into a Texas restaurant then opened fire on the patrons, killing twenty-three altogether. In 1982, Carl Robert Brown, a teacher with a history of mental health problems, shot eleven people in a welding shop, killing eight of them. And guess what? Whitman, Hennard, and Brown were all white men.
Yes, there are notable exceptions to the angry-white-guy-with-a-gun trope.(Vester Flanagan aka Bryce Williams, Aaron Alexis, and Seung-Hui Cho come to mind.) But the overwhelming number of white men involved in these incidents makes me wonder. While I know better than to assume that all, or even most, white men are capable of this type of bloodletting, I am beginning to think that societal biases in favor of white men may partially explain this phenomenon.
Think about it. Let’s say you live in a culture where people of your race and gender are consistently privileged over all others. That is, your culture consistently over-represents people of your race and gender in mass media, politics, academia, business, etc. And let’s say that your culture consistently tells you — in ways big and small — that you are somehow better than others because of your race and gender.
Now let’s just say that the lack of social success, good looks, financial stability, or good mental health prevent you from taking full advantage of that privilege. You would get mad, right? Especially, if the undeserved preferential treatment you’ve always received (or seen others receive) has led you to adopt the narcissistic belief that you are somehow entitled to the things you want.
Incidentally, the attitude of a mass murderer who wasn’t white bears this theory out. Elliot Rodger (nicknamed “the Virgin Killer”), a mixed-race man of Asian descent, murdered five people in May of 2014. Rodger, relatively fair-skinned, self-identified as white despite the fact that he felt set apart from “fully white” people. Rodger’s racialized sense of entitlement practically leaps off the pages of the manifesto he wrote to explain his motivations.
Angered by repeated social rejection and his inability to lose his virginity, Rodger expressed frustration that men of color were more sexually successful with white women than he. An online post he wrote reads in part:
Full Asian men are disgustingly ugly and white girls would never go for you…you even admit that you wish you were half-white. You’ll never be half-white [or] fulfill your dream of marrying a white woman…
He made more racist, white supremacist statements in his manifesto:
How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl?…I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.
His sense of entitlement was further highlighted when he went into detail about his plan to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck up, blond slut I see.” Rodger stated that he was angry that “they have all rejected me and looked down on me as an inferior [emphasis mine] man.”
Sounds like narcissistic rage to me. Add racism, misogyny, and easy access to guns (made possible by lax or non-existent gun control laws) into the mix and you have a mass shooting waiting to happen.
To make matters worse, our tendency to subconsciously assign good, or even heroic, attributes to white men makes it possible for dangerously unstable white men to slip beneath our collective radar. Rodger and many of his white counterparts waved tarpaulin-sized red flags in the weeks, months, and even years before their attacks. While Rodger’s parents made Herculean efforts to prevent the Isla Vista killings, most of the mass killers mentioned in this post were able to execute their plans without much resistance from family members and friends.
So, I am sad to say, that means that the latest mass-shooting, this time in Oregon, will not be the last one of an exceptionally violent year. Nor will it be the last one for quite some time.
And, unfortunately, Fox News will continue to warp their coverage of these very tragic bursts of violence all the while demonizing and condemning Hispanics. And I will continue to avert my eyes from that over-sized LED board whenever I walk by.
