Those Courageous Racists
Left-wing bigots pat themselves on the back..
By JAMES TARANTO
April 2, 2013
"White Men Have Much to Discuss About Mass Shootings" read the headline of a piece in the Washington Post's Outlook section Sunday. Having spent most of our adult life in the opinion journalism business, we are no stranger to the instinct for provocation. But really, Washington Post, this is embarrassing.
The authors, identical twin sisters called Charlotte and Harriet Childress, "are researchers and consultants on social and political issues," whatever that means, according to their Post shirttail bio. They have a book called "Clueless at the Top," which is not an autobiography but a meditation "on outdated hierarchies in American culture," whatever that means. Their website informs visitors that the twins "received close to a million dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation."
The NSF is a federal agency, so your tax dollars have subsidized the authors of what can only be described as a racist rant. Here's the opening:
[blockquoute]Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we'd have political debates demanding that African Americans be "held accountable." Then, if an atrocity such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings took place and African American male leaders held a news conference to offer solutions, their credibility would be questionable. The public would tell these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities.
But when the criminals and leaders are white men, race and gender become the elephant in the room.
Nearly all of the mass shootings in this country in recent years--not just Newtown, Aurora, Fort Hood, Tucson and Columbine--have been committed by white men and boys. Yet when the National Rifle Association (NRA), led by white men, held a news conference after the Newtown massacre to advise Americans on how to reduce gun violence, its leaders' opinions were widely discussed.[/blockquoute]
There is so much wrong with this, we could write a column about it. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what we are doing even as we type.
To begin with, while it's true that all but a few mass murderers have been men, the twins cherry-pick their examples and simply ignore nonwhite killers. They leave out Colin Ferguson, the black man who opened fire in a Long Island Rail Road train in 1993, killing 6 and wounding 19. "He had a number of problems in his life, and every problem he was involved in he attached some racial motivation to the person and institution he was dealing with, regardless of their race," detective Mel Kenny of the Nassau County Police told the New York Times.
The Times also reported that in response to the shooting, "several prominent black leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Herbert W. Daughtry, held a news conference on the steps of [New York] City Hall, urging that blacks in general not be blamed for the crime." Blacks in general were not blamed for the crime. Contrary to the Childress twins' speculation, "the public" did not "tell these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities."
As National Review Online's Robert VerBruggen notes, the twins also omit two nonwhite mass murderers of Asian heritage: Korean immigrant Cho Seung-Hui (32 dead, 17 wounded at Virginia Tech in 2007) and Laotian immigrant Chai Soua Vang (6 dead, 2 wounded at Meteor, Wis., in 2004). "Immigrants with mental health issues are not committing mass shootings in malls and movie theaters," the twins assert--a lie that is technically true, since Cho and Vang massacred their victims in other locations.
In addition, including the Fort Hood shooting is a stretch. The defendant in that case, Nidal Hasan, is white according to standard racial taxonomy. But he is also Arab-American, which makes him a nonwhite minority by the conventions of contemporary identity politics. The facts of the case suggest the motive was related to a nonracial aspect of his identity that also puts him in the minority: his religion, Islam.
Verbruggen cites a claim by lefty journalist David Sirota that "70 percent of mass shooters have been white men." Sirota regards that as a gross disproportion "in a country where only 30 percent of the population is white men." But as VerBruggen notes, the disparity is almost completely explained by sex: Men, for reasons that are surely biological, have a much greater propensity for physical violence than women do.
What's even weirder about the Childress twins' piece is that their counterfactual actually is not counterfactual at all if you broaden the scope beyond acts of mass murder to murder more generally or all violent crime. Blacks do in fact commit a large disproportion of violent crimes, and while the subject is not taboo in respectable public debate, it is delicate.
Example: A week before the twins' piece, the Post published a news article titled "Gun Deaths Shaped by Race in America." The Post's analysis found: "Whites are far more likely to shoot themselves, and African Americans are far more likely to be shot by someone else." No mention was made of the racial distribution of homicide perpetrators.
But the absolute strangest thing about the twins' racist rant is the self-satisfied tone. They think they're breaking a taboo, bravely challenging convention by scapegoating white men. Give us a break. Antiwhite and antimale bigotry couldn't be less courageous or more clichéd. It's been a constant feature of academic discourse for decades and of journalistic writing for years. It has been the dominant theme of political coverage since Barack Obama's re-election.
And it's not just the twins. Consider this outburst from Mark Karlin, editor of something called Buzzflash at Truthout:
[blockquoute]You won't find anyone willing to dare say it much in the media, but a good percentage of the white men who oppose gun control of any sort--and who back measures that would even allow alleged terrorists and straw purchases for drug dealers to buy guns--are just afraid that without their guns, their phallic power will be reduced to size.
You can feel at least temporarily reassured when a long-barreled assault weapon compensates for just another average manhood; it's an irresistable [sic] testosterone high to the beleaguered white male.
Call this Freudian psychobabble analysis, but when you add it into the mix of just angry white males who want their guns to show that they are still top dog on the political, social and marital hierarchy, you got [sic] a good percentage of the psychologically need gun owners [sic].[/blockquoute]
In this case, replace "white" with "black" and you'd actually have something no one remotely respectable would dare say, especially a white dude like Karlin. But a racist attack on white men is so boring it's not even offensive, although it probably should be.
And let's put Karlin on the couch for a moment. He begins by touting his own courage, then he goes on to describe his chosen scapegoats as cowards with tiny genitals. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but not this time. Karlin is doing exactly what he claims white male gun-owners do. That's the logical phallus-y at the center of his argument.
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