 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||
by Tim Wise
11.01.98
In a 1984 interview, "ex"-Klansman, David Duke explained: "You know, you really can't talk about the crime problem unless you talk about the race problem...blacks are much closer to the jungle than European people..." Six years later, as Duke ran for the US Senate in Louisiana, a supporter told a local paper: "Once you get rid of all the niggers, you get rid of all the crime." Although one might wish to dismiss such racist invective as the ranting of extremists, it would be only four years later—in the fall of 1994—that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve would hit bookstores, becoming a bestseller within weeks.
No "extremists" these, Murray and Herrnstein were viewed as legitimate social scientists, despite the fact that their 552-page tome was little more than a heavily footnoted, academic-sounding "fuck you" to people of color, a recapitulation of the argument that has always informed racist movements—that there's something wrong with those people—they're criminogenic, lacking in brain capacity, and basically an overall genetic mess.
For those uncomfortable with Murray and Herrnstein's resurrection of so-called racial science, owing as it does to such glorious traditions as social Darwinism, eugenic sterilization, and the Third Reich, never fear, 1995 would bring yet another volume intended to keep the darkies in their place—this time dressed up in the language of cultural defect. And so we had Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism, which explains that the real problem with the black and brown folks is that their families, values, and behaviors are dysfunctional and culturally inferior. Their DNA is fine; unfortunately they've chosen to act irresponsibly, aided by welfare programs which have rewarded their pathology and prevented them from "acting white," which according to D'Souza, is the only sure route to success. Well, he should know.
So in the course of only a few short years, comments about the pathology of people of color generally, and African Americans in particular, have gone from the margins of political discourse to the center. Discussions of crime have become increasingly racialized and our dialogue on race has become increasingly criminalized, such that deviance is now seen by many as synonymous with melanin or black culture. Meanwhile whites—no matter how criminal or "deviant" our behaviors may be—are allowed the privilege of individualization. We're allowed to be "just bad persons," unlike non-whites who come to be seen collectively as "bad people."
Mainstream Media Complicity
ainstream media contributes to this process in a myriad of ways, from news clips showing black men being taken to jail, to the headline in my local paper concerning a newly—released study on "injurious behavior" among teenagers, which read: "White Teens More Likely Hurt Selves; Minorities More a Threat to Others." Oh really? Go tell that to the victims of the white kids who shot up their schools in Pearl, Mississippi, Paducah, Kentucky, Jonesboro, Arkansas, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Oregon. I'm sure they'll be glad to know that Kip Kinkel was only a threat to himself.
Or, for that matter, what about Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, or Jeffrey Dahmer? I guess white folks only become a danger to others once they're adults. Or more likely, their race remains invisible, seen as irrelevant to their actions, even while lawbreakers of color are made to represent their larger communities.
Consider that after the Oregon shooting, "experts" tried to figure out "what went wrong" with Master Kinkel, noting similarities between his killing spree and those of his predecessors—all the similarities except one. Kinkel, like the others, was a boy, it was noted. Kinkel, like the others, used a gun. Kinkel, like the others, talked often about violence. Hmmm...anything else, perhaps? While we can rest assured these kids would have been "raced" had they come from black "ghetto matriarchs" in the 'hood, it was as if no one could see the most obvious common characteristic among them: their white skin. This gives new meaning to the term "colorblind."
Of course this kind of vision defect is typical. After all, we hear a lot about "black crime," but nothing about "white crime" as such, only "white-collar crime," although usually the collar isn't the only thing that's white. We hear of "black-on-black" violence in American cities or African nations, but nothing of "white-on-white violence," even in Bosnia where the practice has become routine. In fact, I recently did a Yahoo internet search, finding only 217 entries for "white crime," (most all of them dealing with the pale collar variety), while finding 973 entries under "black crime"—interesting, considering that the majority of crimes are committed by the majority of the population, which in the U.S. is still Caucasian. Similarly, "black-on-black crime" netted 559 entries, compared to only 17 for "white-on-white crime."
Nowhere is the de-racing of white violence more blatant than in discussions of mass civil disturbances, or what less sanguine commentators might call riots. Consider a November, 1996 USA Today article concerning a recent study at Northeastern University, which found that race had played a role in only half of all riots since 1994. In other words, when people of color rebelled against police brutality in St. Petersburg, race (but apparently not racism) was implicated, but when mainly white rock concert attendees or sports fans rioted in stadiums, race was irrelevant. The white rioters certainly had a race, but it didn't matter. Thus, when riots erupted in the late '90s at Colorado University, Iowa State University, Penn State, the Universities of Wisconsin at Whitewater and Oshkosh, Southern Illinois University, the University of Delaware, Michigan State, Washington State, Plymouth State, the University of Akron and the University of New Hampshire—all of them white events, and over nothing so serious as police brutality, but rather crackdowns on underage drinking or the results of a football game—no one asked what it was about white people that makes them burn cars and smash windows for the sake of $1 tequila shots.
