The Privilege to Murder?
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
During a discussion about James Holmes and the Aurora, Colorado shooting, Touré asked,“how can someone so young be so depraved?” Citing a “festering rage from that stems from feeling marginalized and powerless,” a feeling “that leads to them to try to get back at the world, ” Touré feeds the public’s insatiable desire to understand Holmes and his alleged crimes. He goes to great lengths to explain why Holmes – a white male who grew up in San Diego, a white male who has been identified as “nice,” “easy-going,” “smart” and “quiet” within the media; a white male who we are now learning was nothing more than a very shy, well-mannered young man who was heavily involved in their local Presbyterian church” – allegedly committed this heinous crime.
The efforts to describe Holmes as “otherwise normal” who must have gone crazy, who must have lost it, who must have faced something to make him go into a movie theater and shoot 70 people, speaks to the ways that the (il)logics of race and gender operate in the context of America.
“The freedom to kill, maim, commit wanton acts of violence, and to be anti-social (as well as pathological) without having your actions reflect on your own racial group, is one of the ultimate, if not in fact most potent, examples of White Privilege in post civil rights era America,” writes Chauncey DeVega in “What James and the Colorado Movie Massacre Tell us about While (male) Privilege.” “Instead of a national conversation where we reflect on what has gone wrong with young white men in our society--a group which apparently possesses a high propensity for committing acts of mass violence – James Holmes will be framed as an outlier.” In fact the media narrative has gone to great lengths to him as “mentally unstable and as a loner,” and as a “good kid who happened to shoot up a movie theater” all speaks to the efforts to define him through an outlier narrative.
In “White Privilege and Mass Murders in America,” the blogger Three Sonorans, highlights how race runs through the center of the media discourse here:
You already know that if it was a Muslim that did the crime, the news would be speaking right now about the threat of “Muslim” terrorism.
This Batman shooting will never be referred to as “White” terrorism or “American” terrorism. Everyone knows that American and terrorism are exact opposites! ….
What if the shooter was not white? The Virginia Tech shooter was not white, and we all know thanks to the news that he was an immigrant from South Korea. They chose only the best pictures with a smiling face to let Americans know what that killer looked like.
Now just imagine if the mass shooter was a former Mexican American Studies student! You know that news would be all over that!
Likewise, “The Dark Knight, Terrorism, Big Gulps and White Privilege” points to the double standards and the ways that race continues to define the media coverage:
Regardless, this is a significant story, and the media has responded accordingly. Go ahead and do a Google news search. Myriad articles will pop up, titles all containing such words as “shooter” and “gunman.” Of course, if this guy was brown, I guaran-fucking-tee you he’d be a terrorist. But don’t worry. James Holmes is white, and it’s all good according to the Obama Administration, who “…do not believe at this point there was an apparent nexus to terrorism.” Whew, thank goodness! The last thing I need is to have to walk past more of these assholes:
In just a few short days, the media has gone to great lengths to explain what we are told over and over again is unexplainable (and impossible): a white criminal, a white murderer, a white “thug,” a white “pariah” and a “white terrorist.” That is, in the dominant white imagination, a white terrorist, a white thug, and a savage white man are all contradictions in terms. The national whisper is clear: “a dangerous middle-class suburban white criminal isn’t possible. How could this happen?” Whiteness is innocence, goodness, and normalcy within the national imagination.
Invoking the words of neighbors, people he met in a bar, and others who have little intimate knowledge about Holmes as a person, the media discourse has feasted on a public desire to EXPLAIN what happened and HOW it could happen with James Holmes.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to hear Elaine Brown speak at Washington State University. During her talk, she spoke about the case of Michael Lewis, a 13-year-old Black boy charged with murder in 1997, comparing the media narrative and public reaction in his case to that of Kip Kinkel, a 17-year-old Oregon teen who killed his parents and several classmates a year after Lewis. Brown’s appearance at Brown University was described as follows:
Brown used the tale of "Little B," Michael Lewis, a 13-year-old boy from Atlanta who was charged with murder in 1997 and tried as an adult, to illustrate the concept of "new age racism. . . .” Lewis was called a “thug” and “super-predator” and associated with a growing movement to identify the "black criminal" as the scapegoat for problems with black America today, Brown said. “The notion of the black criminal is part of the racist view we have begun to embrace and accept,” said Brown. “Children should not be tried as adults, and the United States is the only country which does this.” She contrasted Lewis' case with that of Kip Kinkel, a 17-year-old Oregon student who killed both of his parents and three classmates in 1998. Instead of typifying young white adolescents as “thugs” and “criminals,” community members tried to understand why he had committed the crime, hanging a sign in front of the school reading, “Why Kill?” He was just “a kid who went bad that day,” she said.
Whereas the media continues to ask “why James?” just like it asked, “Why Kip?”, “Why Dylan?”, and “Why Eric?”, the power of racial stereotypes, of a history of American racism, and of white racial framing never leads those questions to be asked for people of color.
Given the power of racial stereotypes, and given the persistence of racial prejudices, is this national determination to explain “why” or “how” is not all surprising. According to Michelle Alexander, “what it means to be criminal in our collective consciousness to what it means to be Black.” In other words, “the term Black criminal is nearly redundant . . . . To be a Black man is to be thought of as a criminal, and to be a Black criminal is to be despicable – a social pariah” (Alexander 2010, p. 193).
Vijay Prashad concurs, noting that, “the international Muslim terrorist and the domestic black criminal stand as alibis for revanchism. Race free criminals (read white) are free from extra detection or from pious fulminations of the political class” (Prashad 2003, p. 75). These entrenched stereotypes and the power of white racial framing leads to a desperate media and public trying to “make sense” of this tragedy in absence of an accepted narrative; it is through these narratives that Holmes and white male violence gets reimagine as aberration rather than indicative of a cultural or cultural failure.
Whereas black or brown and criminal are interchangeable, and whereas Muslim and terrorist are imagined as inseparable, a white person accused of shooting into a crowded movie theater, a white person who allegedly killed 12 and wounded 58 more, a white person who purportedly bought 6,000 rounds of ammunition, who planted bombs at his apartment necessitates explanation.
According to Riché Richardson, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, “It is so unsettling that the word “terrorist” continues to be associated by implication with who is perceived as ‘foreign.’ Words like ‘gunman’ obscure the larger implications of mass shootings. This kind of violence functions as a form of domestic terrorism.” Yes, “he was a good person, but . . . .” That sure isn’t the headline we see with alleged crimes involving blacks, Latinos, and Muslims. It’s more like “he was a bad person (thug/terrorist) who did bad things.” But in America, white is right, even when you shoot up an entire movie theater.
***
David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.
