Rockne Newell shot and killed three people yesterday and wounded several others during an attack on a municipal town board meeting in Pennsylvania.
A white man runs amok again. When will the white community have a serious conversation about the violence of its members? Where are the white Don Lemons and white media elites on Fox News and conservative talk radio showing leadership on the frightening trend that is white men committing acts of mass murder and violence in the United States?
White men are approximately 30 percent of the American public, but they account for 70 percent of mass shootings. The pathological mix that is gun culture and imperiled/aggrieved white masculinity is killing people--most of whom are white--yet, the white community looks the other way.
As my Right-wing friends are fond of saying, "what of personal responsibility?"
Of course, when white people commit politically motivated crimes there is no handwringing, introspection, or generalizations made about white folks in mass. As we saw in the aftermath of the Adam Lanza shooting spree, once more the freedom to be white is the freedom to be an individual and to have none of your negative actions reflect anything about the group to which you belong.
Rockne Newell is a terrorist. Instead of calling him as such, there will be a conversation about mental illness and how Rockne Newell is just one of the "crazies." The Right-wing media will try to cast Rockne Newell as an outlier or one of "those people", i.e. an Obama supporter. Thus, his gun mania murder madness will not reflect poorly on conservatives, the NRA, or the policies which they support that in turn make reasonable gun control laws impossible to enact.
The other option when faced by white criminals who commit acts of mass violence is for white society to find a way to "otherize" them, transforming them into a type of person who is somehow not really "white" and "normal." For example, the silly efforts to kick the Boston Bombers out of the family of Whiteness because they are Muslim and from the Caucases (the very definition of "white" in the pseudo-scientific race business).
Just as Bill O'Reilly and other white elites did in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin murder case, where they decided to publicly scold black folks and their "bad culture", we need some black and brown leaders to lecture and truth-tell about the plague of white crime and white domestic terrorism that is imperiling the United States.
Of course, black folks do not have the media platform or authority to lecture white people about the pathological aspects of their culture, or to discuss the reality that is "white crime", as to do so would be "reverse racism" and unkind to the feelings of White America.
White privilege is killing white people. Yet, they choose to stand mute and silent.