The US Media’s Schizophrenic Approach to Mass Shootings

[The memorial outside the Aurora Century Theater, where the shooting occurred. Image from Wikimedia Commons.] [The memorial outside the Aurora Century Theater, where the shooting occurred. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]

The US Media’s Schizophrenic Approach to Mass Shootings

By : Audrey Ann Lavallée-Bélanger

On 20 July, 2012, twelve people died and many were injured when James Holmes attacked a crowd of moviegoers at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. The coverage of the event by the American media distracted the audience from a necessary conversation about race in the United States. It is time to reflect on how being a white middle-class male may also be part of the equation.

Distractions

The first distracting trajectory was the conversation about gun control. Only months ahead of the US presidential elections, politicians across the spectrum expressed their opinions on issues of gun ownership. Gun rights cheerleaders, quite unconvincingly, went so far as to argue that the Aurora shooting could have been prevented had other people in the audience been armed. Those statements by right-wing politicians fueled various debates, none of which addressed the real issue at hand: who is using those guns, how and why? 

The second, and more dangerous distracting trajectory lies in the portrayal of James Holmes himself. Many alternative outlets were quick to suggest that, had the shooter been a Muslim, the media would have hinted at his faith for somewhat ingraining in him a culture of violence and terrorism rather than casting him in a positive light. 

Double standards

To be sure, the act perpetrated by James Holmes does not appear to be an act of terrorism, if terrorism implies the “systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective” (as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary). However, the 1995 Oklahoma city bombings, and more recently, the Norway killings by Anders Breivik, were terrorist acts committed by white people, though they were rarely qualified as such.

The conversation about terrorism, albeit misused in the case of James Holmes, raises interesting questions. Why do we hint at a person’s culture as having triggered their violent behavior while refusing to concede that white people could be socialized toward violence? The Aurora shooting reveals how the media, and by extension, the general public, make sense of events in highly racialized ways.

Assessing the impact of the media and its representations on the general public is empirically challenging. However, one can be certain that, had a Bangladeshi man ordered a fraction of the phenomenal quantity of explosives Holmes purchased, the FBI would have been knocking at his door in no time. Holmes, however, was able to buy dangerous substances through regular mail and quietly booby-trap his house with them without arousing suspicion. Neither the neighbors, nor the mailing personnel or the company sending the explosives to a residential home seemed alarmed by his purchases.

Unpacking white privilege

In a 1989 piece called "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," Peggy McIntosh wrote: "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." She provides a list of fifty advantages that white people have over people of other races in their everyday lives, advantages that seem equally ubiquitous today. Number twenty-one states: “I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.”

After a Korean student shot dead thirty-four students on the Virginia Tech campus in 2009, some in the Korean American community expressed their fear of a possible revenge as a result of the act. Korean groups offered their sympathy to victims` families. The internalization of an individual act by an entire community is something unknown to white people. To put it more bluntly, we have yet to see white groups apologizing for Holmes’ actions. Why would they? Sadly, not everybody in this country has the luxury of finding the connections between an individual act and his larger community to be irrelevant.

As underlined by Hugo Schwyzer, a professor of history and gender studies at Pasedena City College, the media plays an important role in connecting an individual’s behavior to a socio-cultural stereotype. In the case of Seung-Hei Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, “media attention focused on the likelihood that a Korean culture unwilling to acknowledge mental illness helped drive the young man to commit the worst mass murder in US history.”

Such negative socio-cultural stereotyping does not exist for whites. The description of Holmes in the news portrayed him at best as an outlier from his own racial group, and at worst as someone brilliant gone mad. Holmes, a former “smart” neuroscience PhD student was a “psychiatric patient,” described by friends as a “loner,” and a recent college dropout. Those attributes do not draw any negative connections between his culture and his act. Quite the contrary, the articles and headlines conveyed a sense of surprise at an unexpected act that could only be the result of mental illness. Portrayals of shooters who belong to minority communities are less apologetic, as if their crime was expected.

A white pathology?

Schwyzer goes further and suggests possible ways of using the racial lens to understand acts perpetrated by whites. Like others before him, he notes that most mass murders in the United States have been committed by white middle-class males. By suggesting that “every killer makes his pain another’s problem. But only those who have marinated in privilege can conclude that their private pain is the entire world’s problem with which to deal,” Schwyzer argues that being socialized as a white middle-class male cannot be separated from an individual’s experience and thus can trigger violent behaviors, too.

This argument, which needs to be appreciated for its attempt at breaking the so-called colorblind policy which holds the white race as its default, is not without its flaws. For one thing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to treat white men as an insulated group. One cannot ignore the fact that women and other minorities have enjoyed, to some extent, more socio-economic opportunities in recent decades. Does that mean that white men are more prone to becoming violent, or that the notion of privilege will be a phenomenon across gender and racial lines?

Also, many countries have historically favored some group over others, but mass shooting does not seem to be an outlet used to express anger over disenfranchisement. Michael Moore, in an incisive blog entry about the Aurora shooting (named "It`s the Guns – But We All Know, It`s Not Really the Guns") explains how the US is “responsible for over eighty percent of all the gun deaths in the twenty-three richest countries combined." So what is it about the US that allows for such public display of violence on the part of white men?

Scholarly articles on the correlation between white privilege and mass shootings are slowly emerging (although it has to be noted that scholars such as Peggy McIntosh will argue that the use of the word ”privilege” is problematic since whites did not earn their whiteness; they were born with it). In an article about the phenomenon of suicide by mass murder, Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel point out the fact that “only when white boys began to open fire in their schools did psychologists and journalists rush to diagnosis of mental illness.”

In addition to presenting James Holmes as an outlier of his group who could only have been afflicted by mental illness, the media understood how he conducted the act in a racialized way. CNN reporters were quick to point at how “cold” and “calculated” his action had been. In "A Perverse Kind of Sense: Urban Spaces, Ghetto Places and the Discourse of School Shootings," Abraham P. Deleon addresses those very biases that distinguish between white and black crime by noting that “whereas the white school shooter is calculating, intelligent and conniving, urban crime is constructed as random, wild and tied to `ghetto` issues such as gangs, reputation and revenge.”

In recent decades, some journalists have advocated for a “colorblind” policy when it comes to reporting crimes, unless a suspect’s description is essential for the investigation. This colorblind policy is a mere fantasy. We might not be as bold about making black and white distinctions in articles, but the understanding of violence is mediated in various outlets based on racialized understandings and socio-cultural stereotypes which recognize white as the norm. How else can we explain that all communities, except whites, internalize the behaviors of individuals of their groups and reflect on the impact that such actions will have on them?

[This article was originally published on openDemocracy.]

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American Elections Watch 1: Rick Santorum and The Dangers of Theocracy

One day after returning to the United States after a trip to Lebanon, I watched the latest Republican Presidential Primary Debate. Unsurprisingly, Iran loomed large in questions related to foreign policy. One by one (with the exception of Ron Paul) the candidates repeated President Obama`s demand that Iran not block access to the Strait of Hormuz and allow the shipping of oil across this strategic waterway. Watching them, I was reminded of Israel`s demand that Lebanon not exploit its own water resources in 2001-2002. Israel`s position was basically that Lebanon`s sovereign decisions over the management of Lebanese water resources was a cause for war. In an area where water is increasingly the most valuable resource, Israel could not risk the possibility that its water rich neighbor might disrupt Israel`s ability to access Lebanese water resources through acts of occupation, underground piping, or unmitigated (because the Lebanese government has been negligent in exploiting its own water resources) river flow. In 2012, the United States has adopted a similar attitude towards Iran, even though the legal question of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz is much more complicated and involves international maritime law in addition to Omani and Iranian claims of sovereignty. But still, US posturing towards Iran is reminiscent of Israeli posturing towards Lebanon. It goes something like this: while the US retains the right to impose sanctions on Iran and continuously threaten war over its alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon, Iran should not dare to assume that it can demand the removal of US warships from its shores and, more importantly, should not dream of retaliating in any way to punitive sanctions imposed on it. One can almost hear Team America`s animated crew breaking into song . . . “America . . . Fuck Yeah!”

During the debate in New Hampshire, Rick Santorum offered a concise answer as to why a nuclear Iran would not be tolerated and why the United States-the only state in the world that has actually used nuclear weapons, as it did when it dropped them on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki- should go to war over this issue. Comparing Iran to other nuclear countries that the United States has learned to “tolerate” and “live with” such as Pakistan and North Korea, Santorum offered this succinct nugget of wisdom: Iran is a theocracy. Coming from a man who has stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools, that President Obama is a secular fanatic, that the United States is witnessing a war on religion, and that God designed men and women in order to reproduce and thus marriage should be only procreative (and thus heterosexual and “fertile”), Santorum`s conflation of “theocracy” with “irrationality” seemed odd. But of course, that is not what he was saying. When Santorum said that Iran was a theocracy what he meant is that Iran is an Islamic theocracy, and thus its leaders are irrational, violent, and apparently (In Santorum`s eyes) martyrdom junkies. Because Iran is an Islamic theocracy, it cannot be “trusted” by the United States to have nuclear weapons. Apparently, settler colonial states such as Israel (whose claim to “liberal “secularism” is tenuous at best), totalitarian states such as North Korea, or unstable states such as Pakistan (which the United States regularly bombs via drones and that is currently falling apart because, as Santorum stated, it does not know how to behave without a “strong” America) do not cause the same radioactive anxiety. In Santorum`s opinion, a nuclear Iran would not view the cold war logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as a deterrent. Instead, the nation of Iran would rush to die under American or Israeli nuclear bombs because martyrdom is a religious (not national, Santorum was quick to state, perhaps realizing that martyrdom for nation is an ideal woven into the tapestry of American ideology) imperative. Santorum`s views on Iran can be seen one hour and two minutes into the debate.

When it comes to Islam, religion is scary, violent and irrational, says the American Presidential candidate who is largely running on his “faith based” convictions. This contradiction is not surprising, given that in the United States fundamentalist Christians regularly and without irony cite the danger that American muslims pose-fifth column style- to American secularism. After all, recently Christian fundamentalist groups succeeded in pressuring advertisers to abandon a reality show that (tediously) chronicled the lives of “American Muslims” living in Detroit. The great sin committed by these American Muslims was that they were too damn normal. Instead of plotting to inject sharia law into the United States Constitution, they were busy shopping at mid-western malls. Instead of marrying four women at a time and vacationing at Al-Qaeda training camps in (nuclear, but not troublingly so) Pakistan, these “American Muslims” were eating (halal) hotdogs and worrying about the mortgages on their homes and the rising costs of college tuition. Fundamentalist Christians watched this boring consumer driven normalcy with horror and deduced that it must be a plot to make Islam appear compatible with American secularism. The real aim of the show, these Christian fundamentalists (who Rick Santorum banks on for political and financial support) reasoned, was to make Islam appear “normal” and a viable religious option for American citizens. Thus the reality show “All American Muslim” was revealed to be a sinister attempt at Islamic proselytizing. This in a country where Christian proselytizing is almost unavoidable. From television to subways to doorbell rings to presidential debates to busses to street corners and dinner tables-there is always someone in America who wants to share the “good news” with a stranger. Faced with such a blatant, and common, double standard, we should continue to ask “If Muslim proselytizers threaten our secular paradise, why do Christian proselytizers not threaten our secular paradise?”

As the United States Presidential Elections kick into gear, we can expect the Middle East to take pride of place in questions pertaining to foreign policy. Already, Newt Gingrich who, if you forgot, has a PhD in history, has decided for all of us, once and for all, that the Palestinians alone in this world of nations are an invented people. Palestinians are not only a fraudulent people, Gingrich has taught us, they are terrorists as well. Candidates stumble over each other in a race to come up with more creative ways to pledge America`s undying support for Israel. Iran is the big baddie with much too much facial hair and weird hats. America is held hostage to Muslim and Arab oil, and must become “energy efficient” in order to free itself from the unsavory political relationships that come with such dependancy. Candidates will continue to argue over whether or not President Obama should have or should not have withdrawn US troops from Iraq, but no one will bring up the reality that the US occupation of Iraq is anything but over. But despite the interest that the Middle East will invite in the coming election cycle, there are a few questions that we can confidently assume will not be asked or addressed. Here are a few predictions. We welcome additional questions from readers.

Question: What is the difference between Christian Fundamentalism and Muslim Fundamentalism? Which is the greater “threat” to American secularism, and why?

Question: The United States` strongest Arab ally is Saudi Arabia, an Islamic theocracy and authoritarian monarchy which (falsely) cites Islamic law to prohibit women from driving cars, voting, but has recently (yay!) allowed women to sell underwear to other women. In addition, Saudi Arabia has been fanning the flames of sectarianism across the region, is the main center of financial and moral support for Al-Qaeda and is studying ways to “obtain” (the Saudi way, just buy it) a nuclear weapon-all as part and parcel of a not so cold war with Iran. Given these facts, how do you respond to critics that doubt the United States` stated goals of promoting democracy, human rights, women`s rights, and “moderate” (whatever that is) Islam?

Question: Israel has nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them in the past. True or false?

Question: How are Rick Santorum`s views on homosexuality (or the Christian right`s views more generally) different than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad`s or King Abdullah`s? Can you help us tease out the differences when all three have said that as long as homosexuals do not engage in homosexual sex, it`s all good?

Question: Is the special relationship between the United States and Israel more special because they are both settler colonies, or is something else going on?