Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Black people take secret -- and unwarranted -- comfort in the fact that mass killers tend to be white.
May 4, 1999 | Blacks have always known that white folks are crazy. Whenever news breaks of yet another bizarre massacre or hideous chain-
Blacks routinely characterize certain types of crime as white (and insane) just as whites characterize certain types as black (and animalistic). There was never much doubt among blacks that the Littleton killers were white and male. Someday, maybe, we'll all see that crime and craziness have no race. They do, however, have socioeconomic types. People can only commit crimes or go crazy in the ways that are available to them, logistically and psychologically.
First, let's look at crime and economics. How many blacks (or women, for that matter) were involved in the savings and loan debacle, a bazillion-dollar fiscal rape of America that our grandchildren will still be paying for? I will go out on a limb and guess: few. How many blacks were involved in stupid, intra-ghetto, macho-man gunplay over trivialities? Again, it's just a guess, but I'll go with it: lots.
It is willfully stupid and hateful to think this discrepancy is genetic. It's not that whites are nonviolent by nature, and accordingly choose to express their criminality in kinder, gentler ways, or that blacks are bell-curved at birth with the Willie Horton gene. As more blacks matriculate at the Wharton School, rest assured, more will also sticky-finger their way into Club Med prisons where they can ride around in those cute little golf carts and water peonies for punishment. There's a reason why stockbrokers and insurance agents commit few violent or property crimes and it isn't DNA. The only people who have to fear for their physical safety around a middle-class man (of any race) are his wife, children, mistress and business partners. He can commit crimes from the comfort of his home office and car phone; the illiterate criminal has little choice but to draw blood. More blacks are poor and poorly educated so more blacks commit crimes that don't require special training. Educate them and watch those embezzlement rates soar.
With senseless, non-economic violent crime, the issue is one of societal entitlement and what each strata of society sees as coming to it -- that's the "socio" half of the equation. The Littleton killers felt robbed. As white, middle-class males, they understood that they had a certain amount of societal deference coming to them -- but where was it? They took their comfort, nice neighborhood and (until their rampage) safe school for granted; those things weren't enough. That couldn't give them the sense of specialness they so clearly craved and felt entitled to. Angry white men in the making, they didn't feel powerful, they didn't feel respected. They felt insignificant, weak, unsure and angry.
They felt like teenagers, in other words, but they were so insulated by their atomized, suburban lives (and no doubt hands-off parenting), they didn't know it would pass. Because they were so incredibly immature, they didn't know that they were incredibly immature, that they could eventually learn to share their sense of entitlement to full citizenship. Being white and well-off, they just knew that attention must be paid and, being children, the only way they could imagine to get some was childish. The result was fiendishly adult, but the underlying impulse was an angry 8-year-old's (the plan to crash a plane into New York City is pure video game).
It's true: Being white, male and well-off doesn't mean what it used to. Most accept it. A few join the black-helicopter brigades and issue pathetic manifestos. Others rant and rave at city council meetings about minorities' special privileges. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their way onto the front pages, a place only disturbed children could consider one of glory. But they got their wish. Attention was paid.
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