Ill Doctrine: Can We Really 'Keep Politics Out of It?'

Thinking about how to process the Colorado shooting, and whether politics can play a part without poisoning it.

The Privilege to Murder?

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.  

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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.

Kevin Powell: Batman, Colorado, Guns, Terrorism

Batman, Colorado, Guns, Terrorism

by Kevin Powell | KevinPowell.net

A friend and I were going back and forth about the opening day midnight showings of the new Batman film, "The Dark Knight Rises." Both of us are huge Batman fans dating back to our childhoods, and we were feeling the rush of excitement tied to what promises to be one of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters in history. Ultimately, I just did not have the stamina to sit in the theater at that hour.

When I awoke this morning I glanced at my iPhone and dug my palms into my eyes to clear them because I was stunned to see tweets and text messages about mass murders at a theater in Aurora, Colorado. The gruesome news of at least a dozen dead and possibly as many as 50 injured was simply shocking to absorb. That could have been any of us at any theater in America....

Indeed they were, be it the three-month-old baby who miraculously survived, first, the tossed tear gas then the shootings and wild stampede as bodies scampered for their lives. Or the bodies of various sizes and ages that were riddled with bullets from the guns of 24-year-old James Holmes, the one suspect now in custody. Apparently this young man, who only recently described himself as "quiet and easy-going" in an apartment rental application, was anything but: He had at least four guns-an "AK type" rifle, a shotgun and two handguns, plus some form of explosives were found in his home after he gave up, without resistance, in the theater parking lot.

In the coming days we will learn more about James Holmes, who was a student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine until just last month. What we do know is that this has instantly brought back uncomfortable flashbacks of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, of other mass murders in American history. We will hear the debates, on repeat, between gun control advocates and the powerful guns rights mouthpieces. We will decry how easy it is to get tear-gas canisters, and the dead, God bless their souls, will be eulogized for days and weeks. And then the headlines and back-stories, except for the families of the murdered and the wounded, will fade away.

What will often not be said, or not heard very loudly is that America, our America, is a nation dominated and driven by violence, a violence so cancerous that it is spread every single day of our waking lives. Including in films like "The Dark Knight Rises." Including in our reality television shows, our video games, our pro football player bounties, our out-of-control stats around domestic violence, and even in the verbal tear gas tossed to and fro by innumerable talking heads on radio and TV. Including how we are constantly being led into one war after another that never seems to have a conclusion. All of this for the sake of profit, fame, and ratings, or ego, competition, and pathetic notions of power. With little regard for how we the people are inhaling the belief that the only solution for conflict or beef, for feelings of loneliness or isolation or fear or, yes, hatred and powerlessness, is to pick up a gun and aim it at another human being with no regard for the consequences.

We also will not hear that this was an act of terrorism, but what else is it when someone who clearly had an agenda or is emotionally disturbed-or both-think it his basic right and freedom to unleash tear gas and bullets into a theater packed with innocent human beings? The point of a terrorist, be it overseas or domestically, is to bring profound fear to the lives of others, to paralyze them emotionally, spiritually, and socially.

I do not know about you but I certainly I am now thinking twice about going to see the Batman film after this. And I wonder how soon the day will come when Americans will have to walk through metal detectors just to watch a movie?

Perhaps the day is here, as I have duly noted that in my city New York police commissioner Ray Kelly made this statement about the police presence at screenings of the latest Batman feature:

"As a precaution against copycats and to raise the comfort levels among movie patrons in the wake of the horrendous shooting in Colorado, the New York City Police Department is providing coverage at theaters where the 'The Dark Knight Rises' is playing in the five boroughs."

Finally, I for one definitely want to see gun control in our America, a tighter, stricter, more enforced brand of gun control. Be it the ghettos of urban America or a movie theater or high school in suburban America, enough is simply enough. Guns and bullets do not discriminate. They kill us equally.

Yet all the gun control in the world will mean nada, as I have said before, if we as Americans do not come together and have a national conversation about the root causes of violence, where it comes from, what fosters it, what each of us does in our own ways to spread it, allowing it to fester, to paraphrase the great poet Langston Hughes, until, yet again, it explodes?

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Kevin Powell, writer, activist, public speaker, is the author or editor of 11 books, including "Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and The Ghost of Dr. King: Blogs and Essays" (www.lulu.com). Email him at kevin@kevinpowell.net or follow him on Twitter @kevin_powell