White wash

After Columbine, the recent school shooting in Santee, California, and the many others in between, one constant emerges: These horrific acts of violence occur overwhelmingly in ‘safe,’ mostly white suburbs and rural communities.

By Tim Wise

I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: white people need to pull our heads out of our collective ass.

Two more white children are dead and 13 are injured, and another “nice” community is scratching its blond head, utterly perplexed by how a school shooting like the recent one in Santee, California could happen. After all, as the town mayor told 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 a state of utter self-delusion. We think danger is black, brown, and poor, that if we just move far enough away from “those people” in the cities we’ll be safe. We still believe that when we settle in an “all-American” town, life will be better because “things like that just don’t happen here.”

Well, bullshit. 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 craziness, always seems to come from self-proclaimed “safe” places: white suburbs and rural communities.

And yet once again, we hear the FBI insist that there is no “profile” of a school shooter. Come again? White boy after white boy after white boy, with very few exceptions (and none in the mass-shooting category), decides to use his classmates for target practice, and there is no profile? Imagine if all these killers had been black: would we still be hesitating to put a racial face on the perpetrators? I doubt it.

Indeed, if any black child in America — especially in the mostly white suburbs of Littleton or Santee — were openly to discuss plans to murder fellow students, as happened at both Columbine and Santana High, you can bet your ass that somebody would have turned the kid in, and the cops would have beaten a path to his doorstep. But when whites discuss their murderous intentions, our stereotypes of what danger looks like cause us to ignore them — they’re just “talking,” they won’t really do such a thing. 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, 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 the absence of prayer in school. What went wrong is that white Americans decided to ignore dysfunction and violence when it affected other communities, and blinded themselves to the chaos creeping into their own lives. Chaos, you see, never remains isolated for very 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, 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 always 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 while driving through — that is, if we have to be there at all. That false sense of security — the result of racist and classist stereotypes — 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 the 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, 10 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 aged 12 to 17 are more likely to sell drugs — 34 percent more likely, in fact, than their black counterparts. It is white youth who are twice as likely to binge drink, and nearly twice as likely as blacks to drive drunk. And get this: white males are twice as likely to bring a weapon to school as 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 these statistics — even though they were collected by government agencies supported by these folks’ tax money.

Why? Because the media don’t report on white dysfunction. A few years ago, U.S. News and World Report ran a story headlined a shocking look at blacks and crime. Yet never has that magazine or any other news outlet discussed the “shocking” whiteness of these school shoot-’em-ups. Indeed, every time media commentators discuss the similarities of these crimes, they mention that the shooters were boys, that they were loners, that they got picked on. But they never 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 town. Santee’s whiteness is so taken for granted by its residents that its mayor, in an interview with CNN, thought nothing of observing that the community was 82 percent white and that, after all, “this is America.” Well, that isn’t America, and it especially isn’t California, where whites are only half of the population. If anything, this Santee is on the margins of America, yet its mayor thinks it’s at the center — so much so that when asked about racial diversity, he replied that the town didn’t have many different “ethni-tis-tities.” Not a word. Not even close.

I’d like to think that after this one, people will 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.

Tim Wise is a Nashville-based writer and activist. He can be reached at tjwise@mindspring.com. This story originally ran on alternet.org.