I do not mean to make light of anybody’s race or ethnicity nor will I ever subscribe to the view that one race or ethnicity is better (or worse) than another. Whether racist in origin or an “innocent” stereotype that wanders lonely and lost in a changing landscape, that type of crude and ignorant approach has no place in any of my writings. No race is “savage” or “uncivilized” or deserving of condescension and contempt.
Every group has a wide range of personality types and achievers; and yet one pattern does seem to stand out based on recent news and a common social phenomenon of the last few decades. This choice of mine may seem mean and unwarranted and perhaps it is, but I think it deserves a few words of commentary . . . even if ultimately the whole false premise should come crashing down upon the author’s head.
The month and year now is March 2021. In recent weeks two mass shootings occurred that commanded national attention: one in Atlanta, Georgia and the other in Boulder, Colorado. The first was committed by a white man and the second by a U.S. citizen born in Syria.[1] Other shootings in recent years have been attributed to white supremacists.
The big shocker came in April 0f 1999 at Columbine High School. There were mass shootings before then but this one riveted the nation’s attention like no other, in part because it happened in a school and the shooters themselves were so young. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both white and in the twelfth grade, killed twelve of their fellow students, one teacher, and then themselves. Another twenty-one persons were injured by gunfire. Bombs the two students had planted in different locations failed to detonate; the intended carnage was meant to be far worse.
In July 2012 James Eagan Holmes, a white man, planned his attack at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado during a midnight screening. He used tear gas grenades and had multiple firearms with him; he killed twelve and injured seventy more, fifty-eight from gunfire. Among his victims was Veronica Moser-Sullivan, age six. Holmes set a record for the most number of victims (82) which lasted for all of four years until the Orlando nightclub shooting.
Also in 2012, in the month of December, occurred the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newton, Connecticut. Adam Lanza, a white man, shot and killed twenty-six people, including twenty children, ages six and seven, and six adults. It became the deadliest shooting at an elementary or high school and yet only the fourth deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
In June 2016 a local man named Omar Mateen went on a rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; he killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-three more before he himself was killed by the police. It was the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman and the worst terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2001; he set a record for the number of victims that would last for a little over a year. He was a local man with sympathy for the Islamic State of Iraq.
In October 2017 Stephen Paddock, a white man, age 64, opened fire upon a crowd at a music festival, firing more than one thousand rounds of ammunition. He killed sixty people and wounded 411 (the total injuries were tallied at 867, counting the ensuing panic). He killed himself in his hotel room; his motive remains unclear.
In the last five years there have been at least twenty-nine shootings with four or more victims.
More recently, on March 16, 2021, twenty-one year old Robert Aaron Long, a white man, killed eight people at spas or massage parlors, six of the victims being Asian women. Six days later another mass shooting occurred at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, where ten people were killed, including a police officer named Eric Talley; the shooter was Ahmad Alissa, twenty-one, born in Syria and a naturalized U.S. citizen.
The list of mass shootings is quite a long one. There were seven mass shootings in 2017, eight in 2018, and five more in 2019. There were 578 mass shootings in 2020 as of Nov. 27. Mass shootings claimed 513 lives in 2020, compared to 417 the previous year. Of the ten worse mass shootings in the U.S., five took place within the last three years. Most were committed by white men although here and there a person of a different racial or ethnic background was involved.
That got me to thinking about stereotypes about “colored folk”, how throughout U.S. history black people and other minorities were frequently portrayed as dangerous, either in an imminent or a potential fashion. Why, the darker the skin color, the more danger! Racism survives in part by promulgating vicious stereotypes and malicious falsehoods, and yet the recent history of mass shootings illustrates this fallacy in a most curious fashion. White men are committing mass murder sprees but the “danger” comes from black people and other “colored minorities”.
Likewise for Native Americans who used to be called “half-naked savages”. During the centuries of warfare that deprived them of their lands and way of life, they were portrayed as sub-humans who could treacherously launch a surprise attack and murderous killing spree at any moment. Given the ordeal they were facing, no one should be surprised they fought back and tried to hold onto their freedom and independence with all of their strength.
Waves of European-Americans, mostly white men, armed with an ever-increasing sophisticated level of weaponry, proved too much for the nations and tribes–not to forget the germs the invaders brought with them that killed so many. In retrospect, we now have a refined ability to understand why black people and Native Americans fought so hard for their freedom. Not to put too fine a racial spin on the matter, but it was “the white man” who enslaved African-Americans, using the most extreme forms of brutal punishment to enforce their cruel labor regime.
It was “the white man” who killed Native Americans; it was “he” who deprived them of their land by deceit and force. Sometimes white soldiers destroyed Native American crops and their winter supplies; they burned villages to the ground; they ripped up orchards and slaughtered large herds of ponies and horses; they drove the magnificent buffalo herds to the edge of extinction in a mass orgy of animal killing (hoping to force the surrender of the Plains Indians who depended upon the buffalo for their existence).
Now I’m not saying all white people were perpetrators of these horrors or all white people were and are racist, because that would be a damn lie. Indeed, coming forward into our own day and time, despite the dark and bloody chapters in America’s past, our nation has managed to make quite substantial progress in the area of civil rights.
Are we perfect? Hardly! And we won’t be for a very long time if ever at all—but it’s the progress that has been made that deserves some mention and commendation. However, at the same time we have been forced to learn hard lessons about how reactionary racism is handed down through families and what extremes of horrible racist behavior still exist.
Non-white groups (“colored people”) continue to face discrimination and prejudice and unprovoked physical attacks. In the past, black Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos bore the brunt of the physical savagery. This year, it’s Asian-Americans who are facing a rising tide of hate crimes, loosely connected to the ill-founded perception that they are somehow connected to or responsible for the outbreak of the Corona Virus pandemic.
No intelligent moral human being would engage in such barbaric behavior as to cowardly attack a defenseless elderly man or woman out of spite or rancor, even if there were such a connection between the Chinese government and the virus escaping from a lab. The criminal violence is all the more appalling because that is a theory with little or no evidence to support it–and that still leaves the vast Pacific Ocean between Chinese people living in China and Asian-Americans living in America as Americans. These Asian elders are our fellow citizens, once we get past the blindness created by the violence of irrational and vulgar racial hatred.
It’s reminiscent of the evacuation and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. Because the Japanese fascist militarists attacked Pearl Harbor, people of Japanese ancestry living in the U.S. were seen by some as the enemy. Their civil rights were ignored and they became prisoners in makeshift camps without charge or trial. The younger generation of Japanese men eligible for military service joined the Army; the 442nd performed heroically and became the most decorated military American unit of the entire war.
Yet Japanese-Americans veterans still faced prejudice and danger on their return home, as did African-American servicemen returning from Europe—particularly those who returned to homes in towns in the South where virulent racism since the end of the Civil War had barely subsided at all. The Civil Rights Movement under Dr. King’s leadership was still in the future; in truth, it was to be partly rooted in the experiences and fight-back spirit of black G.I.’s who refused to accept the South’s endless racist violence associated with the enforcement of segregation and Jim Crow laws.
White men had been the lynchers of black people; white men committed horrible outrages against Native American tribes during decades of bloody conquest; and white men had exploited, intimidated and oppressed nearly all other non-white minorities as well. All through history white men have been behind some of the bloodiest wars featuring campaigns of conquest and extermination, of ruthless genocide and cultural annihilation: the German fascists who engineered the Holocaust against Jews, Slavs, Bolsheviks, and homosexuals, among others, were white men, too.
Now I understand that in our country today there are still some white people who may be dreaming of an America that, in their minds, once existed. Never mind that close historical inspection shows the folly of trying to keep alive a social regime or attitude whose time has come and gone. Those old platitudes no longer work: it’s a “white man’s country”, “colored people know their place”, “the South was a place of chivalry” and “the South will rise again” (the ‘Lost Cause’ was not yet lost), “Whites Only”, and all the rest.
The inaccurate and immoral corollaries that attend such racist thinking are too many to count. Suffice it to say that there are still white people alive today dreaming of a white man’s “utopia” which is part myth and part wishful thinking and which, in any event, can never be resurrected.
America is now a land of rich multi-ethnic diversity; it has never been a land set aside for only one race or ethnicity, even allowing for that period when white European-Americans were in the ascendancy and controlled so much of the nation’s economic and political life with their power and wealth.[2]
The America of today looks and feels vastly different from the America of two hundred or one hundred or even fifty years ago. Unfortunately, Skinheads, Nazis, and fascists are not the brightest when it comes to analyzing and accepting historical change; they are still with us.
Yes, despite all the material, intellectual, and moral progress the country has made over time, especially in recent decades, there are mean-spirited people clinging desperately to the last remnants of the most egregious and violent attitudes of bygone eras. Pundits tell us there are white people living in fear that “the colored folk” will become the majority and rule the land!
For those miseducated white people who choose to carry on their family’s tradition of hate and violence, perhaps they should feel a little fear and guilt for past misdeeds. Yet insofar as most white people are concerned, especially those good-hearted persons who believe in and work for democratic justice and equality, the extreme rhetoric of the ultra-right is anathema to their ears; it is recognized as a visible continuation of the old cycle of racist hatred and violence.
For most Americans, there isn’t anything to fear in a multi-racial and cultural diverse America; it’s a blessing to enjoy and celebrate! The purpose of a progressive movement for social change isn’t to get unbridled power into one’s own hands; it’s to seek justice for people who have been denied the most rudimentary forms of their lawful rights of citizenship and who have long faced the pernicious effects of discrimination and second-class citizenship because of their skin color.
It may sound counter-intuitive but minorities who have been denied opportunities aren’t focused primarily on payback; they seek a fair and equal chance to advance on their own merits and to be treated the same as everybody else. They are more interested in proving what they can do (given the same latitude of freedom others enjoy) than they are obsessed with the idea of getting even.
This boogey-man is another racist creation of their former oppressors worried about their loss of power and status as talented individuals from every race and ethnicity energetically contribute to the changing social and political landscape of America.
It’s one of the greatest gifts of the non-violent civil rights struggle for equality that marchers were seeking in a peaceful manner to obtain those rights promised to them at birth, rather than giving in to feelings of hatred or dreams of revenge. Those feelings may be understandable (given all that they endured) but vengeance never drove the spirit of the thousands of people who participated in or supported the civil rights movement.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t preach hatred; he preached love. And therein in lies a world of difference in the hopes, dreams, goals, and aspirations of millions of Americans fighting for and welcoming genuine progress in the moral and social fabric of the nation.
Thus, this brief review in my head of historical trends, past and present, brought before my imagination a strange contrasting situation, a thought that struck me as ironic one day, not long after the two mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder had occurred. I imagine one or both of those shooters came from families that incubated hatred in their souls . . . if not that, then perhaps they were “radicalized” by friends or online.
We know that some “lone wolves”, angry and alienated young men, have been drawn to websites featuring the unreasonable bigotry of white supremacy hate groups. Yes, we get it; a man who becomes a mass shooter inherited or fell victim to a racial fear that a crazy deranged person—probably “black” or “colored” in his mind—would do something uncivilized. The nation has no time for him; the nation is not remaining the same; relationships are constantly changing.
In his tortured mind the country was slipping away from him; the mythical America that he thinks once existed was losing any chance of being revived; people of dark skin color were threatening everything our nation represents. He saw an enemy approaching and soon this dangerous person with no control and no sense of proper American values would act in a barbaric manner while descending into a self-negating cycle of pity, anger, and outburst . . . .
Eventually that person would arm himself and threaten to kill others; he would discard American law and democratic precepts in favor of some wild primal urge to engage in immediate, savage, and utterly uncivilized murder and mayhem. He would become “sick”, both physically and emotionally; he would become unstable and, finally, insensitive to images of brutality and scenes of mass carnage, blood, maiming, and death. The black villain of “Birth of a Nation” still haunts the man’s unconscious mind as he worries about the approaching dark skin enemy . . . .
He fears the black man may attack and rob him or beat him up because he’s white;
He fears the Native American may try to win back his land and dispossess him from his home;
He fears the Japanese-American may seek revenge for Japan losing World War II or for the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities or for their illegal incarceration during the war;
He fears the Sikh from India because he looks like a Muslim from the Middle East and he fears the Muslim from the Middle East because he looks like the Sikh from India;
He fears people from Hawaii because their sun-bronzed skin makes them look like a colored minority, because Hawaii is not part of the continental United States, because the islands welcome a rich diversity of people from all over the world including Asians;
He fears the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese because he cannot tell them apart but suspects they endanger the auto industry, take American jobs, engage in biological warfare, and run massage parlors to torment him because of his sex addiction;
He fears people of color and children of bi-racial marriages and same-sex relationships because they all are offensive to biblical scripture and his personal understanding of the gospel;
He even fears other white people who are too liberal, too democratic, too open-minded, and too progressive to suit his taste . . . . The list is long and his many fears begin to erode and undermine his rational faculty, his moral center, his sanity, his appreciation of life . . . .
He fears that one or more persons from any of these dark-skin groups may be plotting to hurt him and deprive him of his rights as a white man and an American . . . . there is no telling what unspeakable acts of violence and murderous carnage may be brewing in their minds! . . . .
And then something snaps and he’s the one who goes out and does all the horrible and unspeakable actions he was so frightened others would commit . . . he’s the one who chooses unspeakable new acts of violence and murderous carnage . . . it is not them at all he has to fear, it is himself, for he has become his own worst enemy and a nightmare for the country and the people of America trying to live safe, happy, and productive lives at home and work . . . .
Until they turn on their TV’s and learn to their shock and horror another mass murder has occurred . . . . and as often as not it is this very same white man who is shooting and is doing all the killing . . . . he has come full circle, turning himself into his opposite, for he has become the very thing he once feared the most . . . .
Yes, a madman has once again opened fire somewhere in America and when the shooter looks down he sees the white skin of his own hands holding a weapon of death and destruction . . . . if he has any remorse left in him, he realizes (too late) he is the murderer, he is the one to fear . . . .
Some may say that the person harboring such fears is not playing with a full deck but I tend to disagree. I think recent history has shown us that such fears may be justified if we include one amending factor: the specter of an out-of-control bloodthirsty mass-murderer stalking our streets is very real if we are willing to recognize (and he is willing to concede) one simple fact . . . .
WHITE MAN, IT’S YOU!
[1] Syrians and Arabs have been considered “white” for the purpose of the census although there was an effort underway in 2020 to add a new category for “Middle Eastern or North African”.
[2] And with apologies to Native Americans who may rightly feel the land was special and intended for their occupancy and enjoyment by the Great Mystery. J/�c
