Mass Shootings Aren’t About Racism
If you’re going to blame a single defining characteristic for mass murder, don’t make the same mistake as Hemal Jhaveri.
The last fortnight has seen the US rocked by two mass shootings and forced US citizens to take a long hard look at themselves. Despite the killers being the same age and a valid case to be made for ALL under 30-year-olds being dangerous, the case for a youth lockdown isn’t here.
Why not? The social narrative went two different and contradictory way instead. First, the murders in Atlanta caused huge outrage about how dangerous white men are.
An inevitable and predictable social justice kicking began.
Everybody piled on to offer their explanations about why white men are the root of all evil. It’s a very popular position to take and very lucrative for Medium authors with large followers. A somewhat Faustian agreement that sounds like ‘take my money, parrot my biases back to me.’
But that doesn’t make it right.
It’s easy to refute with a simple demonstration. In the wake of any terrorist attack, the same people call for calm. They remind us that terrorists from a given ethnic minority do not represent the views of all that ethnic minority. They’re right.
So why change your position when an event plays into your biases.
Do you believe in collective responsibility?
If you were ever kept back after class because some other kid was naughty you know exactly how it feels. Does it feel fair? No. Is it fair? It’s complicated. You can enforce change by group punishment. It does work. But works with the caveat, it must happen in a closed system.
The transgressor must be answerable to the group. Without direct accountability, you may as well not bother. The idea of collective responsibility works best in small groupings. It is particularly effective when collective responsibility increases the safety of all its members.
In the military for example.
It doesn’t work in a large open system. You can keep every 12-year-old in the state in detention if you want. But what’s the point? They’re baffled, pissed off and confused they’re implicated in something that they have no direct control over.
The same is true here, the concept of ‘white men’ is too amorphous. Which white men are you talking to? The President? Homeless people? Scandinavian tourists?
What are you doing when you take a heinous crime and subdivide perpetrators and victims into their immutable characteristics? You’re battling for narrative supremacy, not a better world. You’re looking for patterns that will ensure your world view wins.
That’s a YOU thing, not a helpful thing for the rest of the world.
The Whoopsie Tweet
Luckily for the human race, there’s always someone available to do a facepalm moment for the collective good. There was a second shooting in Boulder and Hemal Jhaveri — the ‘Race and Inclusion’ editor at a prominent newspaper tweeted.
“It’s always an angry white man. Always.”
Turns out she should’ve waited a little longer than the 0.3 seconds it took to fire off her tweet (since deleted). It wasn’t a white man in his early twenties, it turned out to be a brown man in his early twenties.
We still have yet to lock down the youth though. Just saying.
The Alt-Right went into overdrive and Hemal was fired. She’s come out swinging and her Medium story outlining her side of the story is at best a contradictory mess and at worst makes her look a little unhinged. You should never write when you’re angry, even if it feels goos.
Both defences she gives ‘Everyone is racist’ and ‘other people got away with far less heinous crimes’ are problematic. Neither offers an adequate defence for firing off a stupid racially biased tweet.
Doubly true if you’re the ‘Race and Inclusion’ editor.
You need to at least have the illusion of inclusivity to hold that role. Whatever Hemal Jhaveri privately thinks about white men is up to her. What she puts in the public sphere she is accountable for. No amount of whataboutism will change that.
Society has decided to use faux-outrage and cancellation as its modus operandi — she’s Robespierre in this analogy. A later victim of the glorious revolution she helped usher in.
I don’t think she should’ve been fired because I think cancel culture is an idiotic way to run society, but by now it doesn’t matter.
The dialogue has moved off the shootings and onto the plight of a relatively privileged journalist. Society cannot move forward, because there is nowhere to go at this point. Every action or inaction becomes supercharged.
Jhaveri has learned nothing, has done very little self-reflection. She has pulled focus from the real story and descended further into the batshit- ‘I’m the most oppressed’ narrative we all know and love.
Everyone involved is used as a tool to justify why every other group is to blame. This is going to be the news story of everything now. Both sides comprised of idiots determined to trip each other up at all costs.
The rest of us pray they don’t bring society tumbling down in their wake.
Mass shootings have nothing to do with race
When you make this argument, you have to make it across the board. If mass shooters are white, it’s incidental. If they’re black, it’s incidental. If they’re Asian, it’s incidental. I will always argue that position because it’s cogent, coherent and doesn’t change with the breeze.
But but but… it seems to be white guys all the time.
Correct. Well observed. It’s because… there are more white guys than brown guys in the USA. I’d hazard a guess using the same logic, the vast majority of mass killings in China are done by Asians. Not racism. Just maths.
Being white doesn’t make you more likely to go on a shooting spree. So what about motivation? Telling me that someone who shot up a building is ‘racially motivated’ might be true. I’m sure in some cases it is.
It’s like telling me that someone robbed a store ‘for financial reasons’. It doesn’t give me any more understanding of the situation. People who go on shooting sprees hate themselves, the universe and everything — pointing out the colour of the victims is somewhat redundant.
When a plane crashes, a team of people come and look at the wreckage. They take away the black box and they try to work backwards to see what went wrong. A very easy conclusion to draw is ‘the plane hit the ground at some speed and that’s what killed everyone’.
Yes. Excellent. Have a medal. Now, I wonder if you could you tell me why it hit the ground?
Mass shootings are correlated with something else
Sex. A much better indicator of what drives people to kill is whether they have a penis or not. Men are far more likely than women to commit acts of mass murder.
Uh oh. The Penguin is now joining team feminism. Except I’m already there. Men are more likely to kill people and more likely to kill themselves. That’s not up for dispute, what’s more interesting is what we choose to do with that information.
It’s very easy from this to conclude that men are evil. That’s the article being written in certain corners of Medium. If that were the case, we should be thanking men for their service when they top themselves.
You’d have to go to the niche fringes of this platform to find a viewpoint that nihilistic and callous. I’m sure it’s there though. Lots of notable writers and their readers on this platform believe that misandry and feminism are the same thing. I have no idea why.
There are biological reasons why men kill. These are related to lower levels of agreeableness inherent in their personalities. That doesn’t mean all men are likely to become killers, it means that killers are more likely to be men.
The distinction is important. The first is a belief held by misandrists, the latter an indisputable mathematical fact. One drawn from observation and based on biology and human psychology.
There are also social reasons why men might be killers. These are related to how we structure the world and how societies structure themselves.
It takes a long time and a lot of cognitive unrest to turn anyone into a nihilistic killing machine. By the time they become a murderer you’ve missed all the chances society had to create a different outcome. These two young men, one white, one brown fell through the cracks. Go back 2/3rds of their life and they’re seven.
If you ask seven-year-olds what they want to be when they grow up, they rarely say ‘unhappy to the point of nihilistic murder’.
What now?
The fact that men kill themselves and others with more frequency doesn’t make them evil any more than it makes them pitiable. We have to find out why and we have to stop it from happening.
We have to do that because it’s what a compassionate society does.
A compassionate society recognises that murderers are outliers. It also knows that repeated instances of murder need addressing. Aside from taking away the guns (a seeming political non-starter in the US, but effective everywhere else). Rising incidences suggest that something fundamentally distressing is happening to young men in society.
Labelling men, white or otherwise, as the root of all evil isn’t the panacea we think it is. Even if it feels good at the time. Young men are caught up in their own lives and heads in a way we haven’t seen for a long time. Perhaps wars do provide some sort of function for male aggression?
Whether that’s true or not, simplistic two-dimensional narratives around privilege during any individual’s mental health crisis are unhelpful.
In reality, human beings are awful to each other. The reasons for this are complex and multi-faceted. They cannot be explained by attaching the concept of ‘evil’ to any single characteristic like skin colour or sex. I would urge society to dig a little deeper beforehand. To focus effort on prevention rather than blame, proactive rather than reactive.
Anyone who tells you ‘it’s race hate’ has zero grasp of how fundamentally complicated a pluralistic society is. They’re also offering few insights about human psychology and nothing in the way of solution.
We’ve built a society that has failed to identify, intervene and stop these men before they kill. Young men are struggling with devastating consequences for everyone. We could make them the scapegoat. It’s tempting isn’t it?
The best way to stop murderers isn’t apportioning blame based on your own biases and world view.
Your job is to offer compassion and understanding to everyone you meet. All sexes, all races, all people and much as I hate to admit it, even Hemal Jhaveri (I’ll keep working on that). And Ms Jhaveri, if you really want to make the world a better place, your recent bout of unemployment affords you the ideal opportunity to become a social worker. The world currently has more than enough freelance ‘race and inclusion’ editors on social media.
You have all the right goals but all the wrong strategies.
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