School Shootings and Denial

I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: White people need to pull our heads out of our collective *ss. Two more white children are dead and thirteen are injured in Santee, California, and another "nice" community is scratching its blonde head, utterly perplexed at how another school shooting 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. And days later, a teen girl shoots another student in a high school cafeteria in Williamsburg, Pennsylvania, the home of the Little League World Series.

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-American" town, life will be better, because "things like this just don't happen here." Well, bullsh*t on that. In case you hadn'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), decides 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 now 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.