Britt Bennett, in the NYT:
You could argue, of course, that there are no ghosts of the Confederacy, because the Confederacy is not yet dead. The stars and bars live on, proudly emblazoned on T-shirts and license plates; the pre-eminent symbol of slavery, the flag itself, still flies above South Carolinaâs Capitol.
âŚ
This is the privilege of whiteness: While a terrorist may be white, his violence is never based in his whiteness. A white terrorist has unique, complicated motives that we will never comprehend. He can be a disturbed loner or a monster. He is either mentally ill or pure evil. The white terrorist exists solely as a dyad of extremes: Either he is humanized to the point of sympathy or he is so monstrous that he almost becomes mythological. Either way, he is never indicative of anything larger about whiteness, nor is he ever a garden-variety racist. He represents nothing but himself. A white terrorist is anything that frames him as an anomaly and separates him from the long, storied history of white terrorism.
Iâm always struck by this hesitance not only to name white terrorism but to name whiteness itself during acts of racial violence.
Meanwhile, itâs being reported that Roofâs room-mate has a confederate flag shirt and knew that Roof wanted to start a civil war.
A culture that venerates and celebrates the losing side in Americaâs deadliest war is a culture that continues to indoctrinate radicalized hatred into white youth.
Back to Britt
In Americaâs contemporary imagination, terrorism is foreign and brown. Those terrorists do not have complex motivations. We do not urge one another to reserve judgment until we search through their Facebook histories or interview their friends. We do not trot out psychologists to analyze their mental states. We know immediately why they kill. But a white terrorist is an enigma. A white terrorist has no history, no context, no origin. He is forever unknowable. His very existence is unspeakable. We see him, but we pretend we cannot. He is a ghost floating in the night.
Yep. This is part of it, truly. Iâd be interested in the democratization of the means of production of mass culture, and how the more underground white power movement has embraced those as mobilizing forces. But yeah, itâs in mainstream white culture, too in the south.
Thanks for posting that!
From the NYT piece
Since I may not have come off as clearly as iâd like the last day or so, let me say I am not hesitant to name white terrorism and whiteness itself. I could even happily put it at the top of the list of the many many things I believe to be very deeply wrong about the whole situation. When other people name it i tend to say yes, andâŚ
Anyone who is hesitant to name that guys place in his culture as part of his acts⌠would be trying to mislead you, and pretty clearly. But what that place is is yet to be really clarified deeply to any of us. We know other things about him now from outside of the white power aspects of his psyche, also, and those are real too.
It does seem to upset some people when white terrorism and whiteness are then moved on from, as one does when considering all sides of a complex issue.
I wish the answer were as simple as going to one of their white power meetings and finding a way to silence them⌠without that long tail coming back to silence me or you someday.
Thanks, I think Bennettâs piece is a good start on discussing whatâs at the core of this killing. We can examine the ease with which he got a gun and we can examine his mental and emotional problems and we can examine just how bad his parents were or whether he got bullied at school, but white people prefer to do those things instead of looking at the core problem.
Itâs too easy, and it could very well be wrong, to say that if he hadnât run into white supremacist ideology, he would have found some other reason to kill, some other way of acting out. White supremacists often want to kill, and they often want to start a race war (witness the durable popularity of The Turner Diaries). Killings in the name of race were already a problem, and one that could well become a bigger one; this especially horrific example is a chance to focus on that problem. Weâve been examining the others already (though again, not the fact, for starters, that almost all of our mass killers are white guys â whatâs up with the whiteness there, white guys?) And part of the problem that might keep us from yet again conducting a more thorough examination of whiteness is the reluctance of white people to see Roofâs killings as a white problem.
Writing about another article in the NY Times about lynching that never describes the terrorists of those days as âwhite,â Bennett wrote, âThe race of the victims is relevant, but somehow the race of the killers is incidental. If weâre willing to admit that race is a reason blacks were lynched, why are we unwilling to admit that race is a reason whites lynched them?â Iâd go even further â why are white people so reluctant to admit and think about how being white is a reason that Roof did what he did? After all, a lot of the opinions and feelings expressed in his manifesto resemble things felt and thought, but rarely said, by a lot of white people I know. Mainstream white American culture encourages us in so many ways to think of black people as inferior, as fundamentally different. We in the U.S. live in a de facto white supremacist culture. Overtly white supremacist organizations werenât the only source for Roofâs racism, and itâs way past time for white people in general to start talking and thinking about that.
I canât like this enough!
Fantastic clarity there, @milliefink milliefink. Reading that comment made me think of whether people are using the term âtoxic whiteness,â and on a quick google thereâs actually a non-terrible thread on Reddit where folks discuss the idea.
Certainly, thereâs seems to me to be an economic aspect: where a young man who repeated 9th grade and failed to complete high school wonders what heâs going to do for a living. Part of what seems to animate folks like him is a fear that others are stealing their opportunities.
Thanks in return, toxic whiteness does seem like a good companion or parallel to the notion of toxic masculinity.
Itâs not like white male violence in response to fantasized threats to their privileges hasnât been discussed before â a lot. Whatâs frustrating of course is how the discussion never goes mainstream, and how what little there is always fades away. Even when movies get made about it. And Hollywood has been making movies about white guys who think people like them are under siege for a long time.
I think some find these characters as heroic, and thatâs how they are read, no matter what the intent of the director/writer actually is. Itâs like the embrace of Walter White as an antihero, not as someone who becomes a violent sociopath that puts his family (who heâs trying to protect) in real danger by his actions.
Dylann Roof needs to be compared to [Adam] Lanza
I think a better comparison is Tim McVeigh (of the Oklahoma City bombing).
Adam Lanza was a high-functioning autistic. He left behind no rationale and actually went to great lengths to destroying all evidence of his possible motive.
Dylann Roof and Tim McVeigh are (were) outspoken racists and leave behind a trail of racist ideology.
THE hatred. There you go ;). I have hate and fury a plenty. I like those emotions. Yes, they are effective.
I guess Iâm just thinking that FOX News is much more a symptom than a cause. (Of course it is a cycle of propaganda that preys on the fearful, seemingly primarily elderly fear.) Yes, calling them out is great.
Iâm just furious and exauhsted and not knowing where to even start or what to do. Being a part of protests, holding a sign that says #BlackLivesMatter, or going to other gatherings of like-minded people is pleasant, but just feels fruitless. Who am I convincing?
Riots and looting and violent civil unrest seem to be appropriate responses. Not prayer or vigils or talk of healing and reconciliation.
Watching that cop car get fucking trashed and burned in Ferguson was my national news highlight of 2014, for sure.
Do not put flags into Port-a-Potties, even shredded flags! If they donât clog the truckâs hose (which they definitely will,) theyâll screw things up at the sewage treatment plant.
Awwww, youâre no fun!
In the unlikely event this plan was carried out a fine old-fashioned privy could be employed, with the resulting pit being filled in and a proper memorial placed over the site.
Looks like heâs flying half mastâŚ
FOX News is a hate crime against reason.
They have been eating their own horse shit so long that they canât even report news. Theyâve spent years telling everyone the lie that racism is over. Theyâve spent years telling everyone the lie that Christians are under attack in America when really they are the protected majority. So of course they cannot help but spin a lie about this tragedy because if they didnât it would contradict their previous liesâŚthis is why most of learn at an early age that these kind of lies never turn out good and only result in having to double down on stupid.
What saddens me is that people fall for their bullshit.
this stuck with me from a little while agoâŚ
Because treason is defined as rendering aid and comfort to the enemy. IIRC, thatâs been interpreted to mean material aid and comfort â expressing sympathy for their cause wouldnât qualify. In any case, the Confederacy doesnât exist any more, so even if flying a flag were considered aid & comfort, there isnât any enemy left to give that aid & comfort to.
Nothing. Blue == ânon-whiteâ voters. (So of course itâs always going to be the mirror image of the orange line, unless a stastically significant âdecline to stateâ contingent shows up.)
(ETA: Come to think of it, it would still be a mirror image, but the percentage of orange + blue wouldnât add up to 100.)
Iâm just furious and exauhsted and not knowing where to even start or what to do. Being a part of protests, holding a sign that says #BlackLivesMatter, or going to other gatherings of like-minded people is pleasant, but just feels fruitless. Who am I convincing?
It can be hard to know how to contribute more actively as a white person, but itâs actually not all that hard to find good advice from people who already are contributing. Thereâs lots of ways, such as:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/12-things-white-people-can-do-now-because-ferguson
Huckabee is piling on:
Itâs heartbreaking because of where it happened, and apparently only sin explains racismâŚ
And letâs not forget the dregs of reddit:
I have to admit to stealing it from elsewhere, but somewhere obscure and lost to the memory banks, circa 2003, during a certain invasion.
