I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: We 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 blonde head, utterly perplexed at how a school shooting like of the one 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-America” town, life will be better, because “things like this just don’t happen here.”
Well, bullshit on that. In case you haven’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 kind of 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), decide 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 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. 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 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.< 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 -- 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's. 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 ages 12 to 17 are more likely to sell drugs: 34 percent more likely 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 the statistics 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 titled: “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 different “ethni-tis-tities.” 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.
Tim Wise is a Nashville-based writer and activist.
