On April 20, 1999, I was barely a month into my 16th year, a sophomore in high school full of angst, unrequited love, joy, and maybe a little anger. For years one of my favorite songs was Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” the grunge anthem to teen angst and anger, but more so an ode to sadness and regret; a requiem to normalized violence and the role we play in others’ self harm. The titular Jeremy, a high school student in Seattle, bullied and ridiculed by his classmates, took his own life with a handgun while standing in front of his classmates.
On April 20, 1999, as I left my suburban school and arrived at my part-time job in a small upscale grocery store, I couldn’t begin to understand the news that trickled in about a school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. I knew nothing about the town specifically, but if I didn’t understand white, suburban, cisgendered boys who wore trench coats to stand out, who weren’t part of the cool crowd, who were called fag, who spent more time in front of TVs and movie screens than sitting across from girls, who loved to bowl, then did I understand anything at all? I have spent years since trying to understand, informally, casually, almost as a sort of sordid hobby. The narratives passed along by the mass media, so readily accepted by masses of confused and scared parents, teachers, and pundits—challenged, in part by Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine—never sat well with me. For the next ten years or so I tried to lose myself in art, to make sense of the world and to understand myself. The number of mass shootings that occurred in that time period in public places like schools, movie theaters, churches, is astounding. But really it shouldn’t be. It’s our reality.
On February 14th, 2018 I was six weeks shy of my 35th birthday, and so little has changed. Notably, toxic masculinity—herein largely referred to using the academic framework of hegemonic masculinity—has become part of the general lexicon on men and masculinity, and accepted as a foundational element of rape culture. [Briefly, rape culture is a set of beliefs and patterns of behavior that encourage a sense of men’s entitlement to the bodies of others (namely women or feminine people) and sexual aggression, with or without another person’s consent; and a popular culture in which violence is depicted as sexy and sexuality as violent.]
There have been numerous articles and discussions in academic spaces, mass media, and online spaces talking about where toxic masculinity and the violence of men comes from, including loneliness, lack of physical touch and intimacy, lack of heterosexual homosocial friendships, etc. But gaps remain. Did these realities form in a vacuum? Is it just how things are? What forces or systems instigate and perpetuate this reality? It is these gaps I seek to fill, and to look at the very unique manifestation of the violence of young white men.
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Rape Culture and the Gender Straitjacket[1]
“There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad” (hooks, 2004, p. 14).
Gendering is a process of dehumanization: “Being a woman, or being a man, requires effort, attention, the suppression of some parts of your personality and the exaggeration of others” (Penny, 2014, p. 12). When gender-fulfillment dictates one’s behaviors it is fair to see gender as, “a straitjacket for the human soul. Gender works us all over, makes enemies of the people we’re supposed to love […]” (p. 13). Boys are taught and then forced to suppress their emotions, particularly any that require them to be vulnerable or sensitive. A caring, empathic nature is crushed in preference of more competitive and aggressive behaviors; “to indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings” (hooks, 2004, p. 22). Rape culture evolves within this reality and sex becomes one of men’s only focuses; when men are not encouraged to express their emotions in healthy, productive ways, the only option to them is a release of their pain through sexual encounters (hooks, 2004).
Because of this reality, when a woman is raped, for example on a college campus, or by a group of athletes, it is so easily dismissed as merely boys being boys. Women have been relegated to a position in US American society as the appropriate and necessary outlet for male aggression and sexual release. In a rape culture, the feminine is something to be dominated; therefore, a man exerting power over a woman is simply fulfilling his societal role. Rape culture is not only perpetuated by social acquiescence and placid acceptance, but also actively taught from a young age via negligent responses to abusive behaviors.
Listening to the stories of young women’s experiences of sexual harassment in schools has led me to see that schools may in fact be training grounds for sexual violence: Girls learn that they are on their own, that the adults and others around them will not believe or help them when they report sexual harassment or assault. The harassers find that their conduct is treated with impunity, sometimes even glorified. And other students, who may be witnesses of and bystanders to the harassing behaviors, absorb the lesson that sexual harassment is a public performance which is normalized, expected, and tolerated. (Stein, 2005, p. 61)
Through these instances, men’s violence against women is tolerated and normalized, successfully minimizing and invisiblizing the emotional, mental, and physical experience of victims who are women, or feminine people.
While it is important to look at actual direct violence, and trends around it, rape culture involves far more aspects of society than just relationship and domestic violence, sexual violence between people in a shared social circle, and stranger-perpetrated violence. Violence has been normalized into the most fundamental elements of our culture, even down to the language we use. A key example is the ways in which US English has normalized violence in the ways our culture talks about women and girls. Even seemingly benign language has been normalized to oppress women and remove agency by invisiblizing and infantilizing both individual and groups of women. It has become commonplace to refer to groups of mixed-gender individuals as guys, or “guys and girls,” and to refer to an individual woman or a group of women, regardless of age, as girl/s;
[w]hen we call women “girls,” we’re using the force of language to make them smaller. We resist and deny their maturity, their adulthood, and their true power. When you call a woman a “girl,” you’re actually saying a lot of very serious things about gender politics and womanhood. (Rios, 2015, para. 14)
Within a patriarchal system, male, men, and masculine traits have been normalized as the baseline of normal; female, women, and feminine are, therefore, a deviation from the norm. Interactions between women and men, or girls and boys, are warped with imbalance from the outset: “Male acculturation (a better description would be males’ seasoning) is antifemale, antiwomanist, antifeminist, and antireason […] Most men have been taught to treat, respond, listen, and react to women from a male’s point of view” (Madhubuti, 2005, p. 175). Since boys are not socialized to experience empathy, they are not conditioned to understand or even appreciate a full range of emotions. Thus, it should not be surprising when boys react to the emotional experience of a feminine person in their life with an expression of anger, or passive aggression. Men and boys do not understand, or have the capacity for anything more. The manifestation of that anger may take on different forms of violence depending on the subject, whether it is the man’s mother, a sexual or intimate partner, an acquaintance, or a stranger. Boys are not socialized to experience or understand nuance in their emotions, or the emotions of others, so their reactions tend to fall on the extreme ends of an emotional spectrum; anger and violence on one end, silence and shutting down on the other.
With this understanding, the following, while tragic, is unsurprising: “A recent survey asked high school students what they were most afraid of. The girls answered that they were most afraid of being assaulted, raped, killed. The boys? They said they were afraid of ‘being laughed at’” (Kimmel, 2005, p. 147). Another way to put these results would be to say that high school girls are afraid of boys and men. In contrast, the fear of being laughed at could originate from a variety of causes: Fear of not being accepted by their peers, fear of being misunderstood by their peers or family, or fear of failure at school or in social settings. It can be assumed that the reaction to being laughed at would be anger, or alternatively a suppression of outward-facing emotions.
The constraints and expectations of toxic/hegemonic masculinity have created a straitjacket for cisgendered boys as they develop into adolescents and men; the result of the straitjacket is pain, aggression, and violence. That pain actually works to perpetuate the cycle of hegemonic masculinity: “A man’s pain may be deeply buried, barely a whisper in his heart, or it may flood from every pore […] Whatever it is, the pain inspires fear for it means not being a man […]” (Kaufman, 1999, pp. 65-66). Society is not constructed to accept, acknowledge, or work with men — only against them — in dealing with or healing their pain.
The emotional cost for an individual man results in very tangible physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual costs for the people in their lives, namely those people who are women and children, but also for society at large, strangers, acquaintances, peers, and spheres beyond.
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Only Yes Means Yes: Sex in a Transactional Culture
Men’s sexual entitlement is a product of masculine gender socialization that promotes selfishness, a lack of empathy, and a failure to value the distinction between intent and reception.
In order to begin considering what must change, it is essential to recognize that men’s sexual entitlement is a product of a culture that fosters rape ideology (Perry, 2008) derived from the socio-political and economic ideology of neoliberalism. Admitting that there is a problem larger than individual acts committed by individual people must be the first step. Studies between 1998 and 2004 found that, “20% of all female students experience a sexual assault during college […] and that roughly 30% of [college male] respondents stated they would commit rape if they were sure they had no chance of getting caught” (Argiero, et al., 2010). Other studies confirm that college-aged men show little regard for legal definitions or understandings of rape and sexual violence, and are more influenced by culturally accepted practices and behaviors when it comes to sexual encounters and intimate relationships. This reality is a direct product of a neoliberal capitalist framework that emphasizes competition, not collaboration, while assuming a finite amount of resources. Sex in the United States has become a commodity model of zero-sum: In order for one to win someone else must lose.
Rape culture thrives on this neoliberal social framework; rape culture shapes intimate encounters as negotiated transactions, not shared experiences; “[t]he negotiation is not a creative process but a bargaining process, where each side seeks and makes concessions. Each side wants to get something that the other does not want to give” (Macaulay Millar, 2008, p. 37). Consent does not truly exist in the commodity model, only concession. Over the last few years, a newly developing “Yes means yes” (Kimmel & Steinem, 2014) framework seeks to shift the commodity model to a performance model (Macaulay Millar, 2008), in which zero-sum negotiations are replaced by mutual experiences emphasizing pleasure and mutually built consent.
The failure of no means no ideology and policies on college campuses to appropriately foster and encourage a culture of consent has actually succeeded in promoting rape culture. While it is debatable to what extent consent culture can be legislated into effect, California’s Senate Bill 967 legal initiation of yes means yes is a useful example of course-correction. SB-967 seeks to address the failure of “no means no” policies to prevent rape and sexual violence by shifting the onus of responsibility off of women to say “no” and reaffirming the necessity of explicit ongoing affirmative consent. The bill, while its effectiveness is too early to measure, has great potential in influencing the discourse around consent and shared responsibility. Working to encourage active, affirmative, and ongoing consent would begin to prefigure a culture of empathy and shared values, while emphasizing pleasure for everyone engaged in a sexual encounter.
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From My Twisted World to #YesAllWomen
Rape culture is a social dynamic, a way of being and interacting, and must be understood as encompassing more than sexual violence (defined as forced, coerced, or tricked non-consensual sexual acts). It is referred to as rape culture because the mentality is pervasive and influential on all aspects of society. In terms of the socialization of men and boys, hegemonic masculinity, neoliberal capitalism, and patriarchy necessitate an elimination of empathy as well as a sense of entitlement to the time, bodies, sexuality, and lives of women, in addition to societal and cultural space—both physical and metaphorical. This dynamic comes into stark reality following the instances of mass violence that are almost exclusively committed by white teen boys or men in their twenties. In an examination of the violent tendency of boys, specifically highly publicized acts of violence such as the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, bell hooks (2004) observed,
[t]ragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and dominance teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent. (p. 43)
Fifteen years later, in May 2014, Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old male college student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, killed seven people, and injured 13 others in Isla Vista, California. An intended, but ultimately unfulfilled target of Rodger’s was the Alpha Phi sorority house. Prior to the attacks, Rodger uploaded the YouTube video detailing his intentions, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” followed by a 107,000-word manifesto, My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger (Hill, 2014). Because of the sheer quantity of Rodger’s self-reported data, including his sizeable social media presence, the reaction and analysis of the murders was very different from other recent incidents such as the 2012 Sandy Hook[2] massacre of elementary school children and teachers. The discourse was not about video games, bullying, or even gun control. For arguably the first time in the United States, the discussion focused on men’s presumed sexual entitlement, and that men are socialized to hate women.
Aggrieved entitlement inspires revenge against those who have wronged you; it is the compensation for humiliation. Humiliation is emasculation: humiliate someone and you take away his manhood. For many men, humiliation must be avenged, or you cease to be a man. (Kalish & Kimmel, 2010, p. 454).
It must be acknowledged that, “[r]apists are created, not born. While female sexual empowerment is an important factor in the struggle to end rape, it will not succeed without corresponding shifts in how boys are taught to experience sexuality and gender” (Perry, 2008, p. 198). Within the normalization of rape culture, boys are socialized into rapist mentality; although violence may not manifest physically or sexually, and statistically, most men and boys will not force sex upon another person, most men and boys will and have engaged in acts of violence against women via tacit or active participation in the myriad ways rape cultures manifests in socially acceptable ways including female objectification, degradation, or subordination. Additionally, the greatest violence perpetuated by the majority of men and boys in the United States is their silence in the face of such widespread, normalized, and mundane violence.
To prevent sensationalizing and exceptionalizing of Rodger’s attack, the Twitter campaign #YesAllWomen began. With this hashtag, women and feminine people were able to share their experiences of sexual harassment, violence, and degradation. The UK-based website and Twitter account @EverydaySexism compiles women’s daily experiences of misogyny and sexual harassment in order to highlight normalized abusive behavior and micro-aggressions in even the most mundane of situations. By not allowing sensational coverage to treat this act of violence as unique or in contrast with the rest of civil society, #YessAllWomen forced the conversation to focus on how Rodger acted in line with rape culture, taking it to the next logical phase in a society where men are conditioned to hate women, where dominance and violence are expected, tolerated, and encouraged. Even more recently the #MeToo campaign and social movement has worked to highlight just how commonplace dating and relationship violence has become, and how normalized sexual harassment and violence are in the workplace. #MeToo has particularly worked to undermine the sexist notions that women must be subjected to all sorts of violent or harassing behaviors in order to advance or not derail their careers. As a result, we have seen once all-powerful men topple like dominos in nearly every professional field.
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The Violence of Whiteness
Unspoken in much of the discourse around men’s violence against women, especially highly publicized instances of mass violence such as Columbine, Sandy Hook, and UC Santa Barbara, is a discourse of race. Generally speaking, in the United States, race is only a factor in a discussion when the person of interest is a person of color. Black and Brown men, Latinos, immigrants, Muslim men, indigenous men, etc. are identified by their race, ethnicity, or religious qualifiers that succeed in effectively portraying them as not-white. White has been constructed as the racial baseline in the United States from which all other identities are a deviation;
[w]hiteness is that which is not seen and not named. It is present everywhere but absent from discussion. It is the silent norm. The invisibility of whiteness is how it maintains its natural, neutral, and hidden position. This silence is central to the power of whiteness. (Suchet, 2007, p. 868)
A similar construction has been established for gender in which tradition in the US has intentionally synonymized gender as a pseudonym for women; as if boys, men, and those not identifying with the binary do not have gender identities of their own (Katz, 2013).
A deconstruction of neoliberalism, patriarchy, and rape culture must not only have at its center an intersectional analysis of oppressions, including race, but must actively and intentionally name whiteness as a racializing category, rejecting any assumption that white equals normal. Race, like gender, is socially constructed, and perceptions of who is considered or accepted as white has been subject to the context of time and place. Jewish and Irish are commonly referenced ethnic examples that were “made white” at strategic times in US history (Brodkin, 2011; DeVega, 2014). In both cases, Irish and Jewish people were made white in an effort to further race divides in the 20th century and curb advancements of the Civil Rights Movement. Whiteness was first constructed in 17th century colonial America out of a need to foment class divisions between Black slaves and white indentured servants and prevent labor-class solidarity that was against the interest of wealthy white landowners (Suchet, 2007).
In the United States, while domestic and sexual violence transcends all culture divides and economic brackets, there is a uniqueness to white middle-class interpersonal violence; it often extends into the public sphere. Despite the public-nature of acts of mass violence, the fact that perpetrators are white, middle-class, cis-men is obscured from the discourse. Because whiteness and maleness are both considered neutral in the United States, the baseline for being, when a white man commits an act of violence, his race and gender is not seen as relevant to the story; it is hardly noteworthy: “[…] ideas about whiteness and maleness are not only our unquestioned norms, but are imbued with an innocence and authority that makes it almost impossible to critically talk about them in terms of a pattern of horrific events like Sandy Hook” (Chemaly, 2012). White men are not subjected to the analysis that men of color or Muslim men face, analysis that labels their violence a product of their culture. However, trends specific to white men must be recognized specifically as white male; “…while men from all backgrounds kill their spouses, affluent white men are disproportionately represented in the ranks of our most infamous mass murderers. In other words, the less privileged you are, the less likely you are to take your violence outside of your family and your community” (Schwyzer, 2012, para. 10).
Rape culture, as a foundational element of capitalist, patriarchal society, entitles white middle-class men not only unhindered access to public spaces, but also to the bodies of women. These acts of direct physical [gun] violence are a direct response to feelings of rejection based on a sense of socialized entitlement.
White men from upper middle-class backgrounds expect to be both welcomed and heard wherever they go. When that sense of entitlement gets frustrated…it is those same hyper-privileged men who are the most likely to react with violent, rage-filled indignation. For white male murderers from ‘nice’ families, the fact that they chose public spaces like schools, university campuses, or movie theaters as their targets suggests that they saw these places as legitimately theirs. (Schwyzer, 2012, para. 4)
Public acts of mass violence often follow private acts of extreme violence in the home, targeting family members, usually mothers, or roommates. In the United States, white men almost exclusively carry out this type of violence. The Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007, that left 32 people dead is a notable exception in that the murderer, 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, was an Asian-American man, a US resident born in South Korea (CNN, 2015). Additionally, Elliot Rodger, who murdered seven people including three roommates, and injured 13 others in May of 2014, presented as white, but was of mixed-descent: his father is white European and his mother is ethnic Chinese Malaysian (Walsh, 2014). Asian men hold a unique position in Western culture, especially in terms of sexuality, having been feminized throughout the 19th and 20th centuries as part of a racist imperialist discourse (Tseng Putterman, 2015). This fact aligned with Rodger’s assumptions of white privilege and expressions of male entitlement must be taken into consideration when analyzing him.
There is, however, an important disconnect to discuss. There is an essentialist element to the discussion presented thus far, meaning that there is an assumption these realities exist for all who fall into the category of white, straight, man, and that patriarchy bestows privilege equally. Discussions of male domination, the privilege of a male-identity and masculine presentation, do not always align with the lived experiences of many men who, as does everyone, live within a matrix of privilege and oppression. Any number of factors to which a person identifies, including class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, ability, language or nation of origin, and so many more, may leave an individual man perceiving, feeling, believing, that they do not live a life of power and privilege. To be very clear, this by no means excuses their violence, or negates the reality of societal and structural power and privilege. But in order to encourage that individual responsibility be taken for the everyday violence of men, our discussions must include this complicating dynamic that exists in the lives of most men whose daily existence is an experience of failing in one way or another to live up to the hegemonic ideal.
Men enjoy social power, many forms of privilege, and a sense of often-unconscious entitlement by virtue of being male. But the way we have set up that world of power causes immense pain, isolation, and alienation not only for women, but also for men. This is not to equate men’s pain with the systemic and systematic forms of women’s oppression… This combination of power and pain is the hidden story in the lives of men (Kaufman, 1999, p. 59).
From 1992-2003, there were 23 mass-school shootings by boys or young men; “ […] only 1 of the random school shootings occurred in inner-city schools (it was committed by a Black student), whereas the remaining 22 have been committed by white students in suburban schools. Virtually all involved rifles, not handguns — a symbolic shift from urban to rural weaponry” (Kimmel & Mahler, 2003, p. 1443). Between 2003 and 2012 there have been at least 24 shootings in publics places, many in schools where the perpetrator targeted random peers or a broad demographic that the shooter felt wronged them, almost always women or girls. Following each of these events, the media, the families of victims, and the nation as a whole searches for answers, but often willfully overlooks the most salient details. [One of the most often overlooked, or willfully ignored predictors of mass-violence is a history of domestic violence and partner-abuse.]
All or most of the shooters had tales of being harassed —specifically, gay-baited — for inadequate gender performance; their tales are the tales of boys who did not measure up to the norms of hegemonic masculinity. Thus, in our view, these boys are not psychopathological deviants but rather overconformists to a particular normative construction of masculinity, a construction that defines violence as a legitimate response to a perceived humiliation. (Kimmel & Mahler, 2003, p. 1440)
When trying to understand these acts of violence and destruction, too often access to guns, faulty parenting, mental health issues, interest in video games or specific genres of music, and other superficial factors are highlighted and discussed ad nauseam. “This search for causal variables is also misguided because it ignores a crucial component of all the shootings. These childhood variables would apply equally to boys and to girls. Thus, they offer little purchase with which to answer the question of why it is that only boys open fire on their classmates” (Kimmel & Mahler, 2003, p. 1442). Only following the UC-Santa Barbara murders by Rodger did the discourse hit on one of the many systemic causes of mass, random, white-male violence: Men are socialized by society at large to feel entitled to the attention and bodies of women, and at the same time to hate them for it. But this is only one element of a societal problem.
In contrast to the intentionally negative rhetoric and discourse that surrounds violence perpetrated by a Black man (A product of his culture), or a Muslim man (It’s a violent, uncivilized, un-Western religion/culture), white men are never perceived as part of a larger group (King, 2017). Their violence is seen in opposition to the perceived normalcy of the normative culture (Just a bad apple). And it is here that I argue that normative white culture is a culture of systemic violence.
White male violence is both a product of socialized entitlement and a reaction to it. Neoliberalism and its partner patriarchy require the anger of emotionally repressed boys in order to wage imperialist wars (hooks, 2004). When white middle-class straight cis-boys are raised to believe that they can have it all, yet fail to have much of anything exceptional in an economy with an increasingly shrinking middle-class, with a higher-education system requiring decades of debt-servitude, with women more and more learning they don’t require a man to be complete, happy or successful, where the pillars of racist oppression are being challenged on fronts as diverse as minimum wage labor, to the drug war and the mass incarceration of non-white men and women, where is the place for white boys if not at the top of the food chain as they have been socialized to believe?
As James Gilligan says in his book Violence (1996), violence has its origins in “the fear of shame and ridicule, and the overbearing need to prevent others from laughing at oneself by making them weep instead” (p. 77). Shame, inadequacy, vulnerability — all threaten the self; violence, meanwhile, is restorative, compensatory. (Kimmel & Mahler, 2003, p. 1452)
Because white men have been socialized to believe that the public sphere is their entitled right, it is only logical that when boys who have been hurt and broken feel they have something to prove, a bone to pick, or an agenda to fulfill, too often they choose to act out their pain in public, epically, and proudly, in stark contrast to the shame and vulnerability they experienced and internalized throughout their daily lives.
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A History of Violence
On the evening of June 17, 2015, an act of white terrorism struck in Charleston, South Carolina, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old middle-class, white, cis-man spent an hour at prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church before uttering the racist and sexist words: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country” (Angyal, 2015). Roof then opened fire, killing six Black women, and three Black men (Levine, 2015). Because of these words, an uncovered racist manifesto, photos of Roof wearing both the Confederate flag and also “the flags of apartheid-era South Africa, and white minority rule Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)” (Marszal & Foster, 2015, para. 13), the targeted church, and of course the race of the victims, it was nearly impossible for mass-media discourse to ignore the clearly racist—and underlying sexist—motivation for the murders.
The focus of the discourse following the shooting should be credited in large part to the Black Lives Matter movement that formed and has been agitating for racial justice following the murders—and lack of indictments for the murderers who are police officers—of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, and countless other Black men and women murdered by police officers in the United States. While the discussion focused the discourse on the need for a race conversation in the United States, and questioning how in 2015 the Confederate flag could still be flying above the state capital in South Carolina, many bloggers, journalists, and activists ensured that Roof’s racist rhetoric was also deconstructed into its sexist parts, highlighting the role that sexism has always played in racist anti-Black men rhetoric in the United States.
An article in the Washington Post discussed the role of benevolent sexism (Wade, 2015) in which women are attributed with seemingly positive traits and characteristics that actually serve to subordinate them to men. Comparing Roof to the historical white mob that would beat, lynch, and murder Black men accused of raping white women, Wade explained how benevolent sexism both perpetuated the domination of women by white men while scapegoating Black men, furthering their domination as well;
[…] women may be described as good with people, but this is believed to make them perform poorly in competitive arenas like work, sports or politics. Better that they leave that to the men. Women are wonderful with children, they say, but this is used to suggest that women should take primary responsibility for unpaid, undervalued domestic work. Better that they let men support them. And the one that Roof used to rationalize his racist act was: women are beautiful, but their grace makes them fragile. Better that they stand back and let men defend them. This argument is hundreds of years old, of course. (Wade, 2015, paras. 5-8)
Roof’s brief remarks prior to opening fire also portray a xenophobic sense of entitlement to “our country,” as if white settlers had not colonized the United States through hundreds of years of Native American genocide. The history of the United States is a history of white men’s violence. The narrative may change with the context of time and place, but violence is always at the heart of US American culture. Roof has allowed for us to bring out of the darkness and to name the history of violent white supremacy that has not gone away, but merely taken on different forms.
Roof’s comments also align with historical utilization of a mythical need to protect the purity of white women as a justification for segregation, violence, and economic isolation of the Black community (Jaffe, 2015). This narrative is both racist and sexist at the same time, and targeting different demographics. Constructing white femininity as in need of protection infantilizes white women, relegating their position to the domestic sphere and under the protection—read: control—of white men. The myth further succeeds in cloaking white men as the primary source of violence in the United States. The racist and sexist rhetoric of Roof is an example of othering, in which an enemy from without is identified that allows white men to distance themselves from the enemy within: Their failure to meet the standards of success set by hegemonic masculinity.
Neoliberalism developed from a history of colonialism domestically and imperialism abroad. With violence at the core, supported by oppressive racist, sexist, classist, and ableist systems, boys growing up in the United States, born with all the potential to be fully realized, emotionally intelligent internally and empathetic externally, are instead socialized and encouraged by society to become Dylann Roofs.
If the reaction to the Charleston massacre is to be realized as something beyond a singular moment of redemptive mourning, then neither the intersectional dynamics of racism and patriarchy which produced this hateful crime, nor the inept rhetorical politics that sustain the separation of feminism from antiracism, can be allowed to continue. (Crenshaw, 2015, para. 7)
The time for compartmentalizing struggles is far over. All of our struggles are connected, and an intersectional analysis allows us to see that ghettoizing various struggles is on par with pitting one against another, creating a makeshift hierarchy of oppression in which everyone loses and the system of white supremacist hetero-patriarchy perpetuates itself.
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April 1999 to March 2018
In the days after the massacre at Columbine High School, there were a number of alleged copycat events planned or threatened. I forget the exact date, but I remember it was for a Thursday that a bomb threat was called into my school, Glenbrook South High School. We all knew about it, and the veracity of the threat was debated. Many of us did not think it was very credible, or likely. Not here, we believed. I am sure the community of Littleton, Colorado probably thought the same thing before April 20. And I’m sure 19 years later, on February 13, 2018, the community of Parkland, Florida thought the same. Many students stayed home on “Bomb Day.” I went to school. I didn’t want to live in fear, and I didn’t want to give even a hint of respect to the person who called in the threat. It wasn’t funny to me, or even just an excuse for a day off, and I refused to sacrifice my education in acquiescence to fear.
The kids of Stoneman Douglas High School who since Valentine’s Day 2018 have been organizing walkouts, rallies, marches, and gone toe to toe with their elected officials, and shills of the NRA are amazing and inspiring. They are putting their education on the line not out of fear, but because it is a powerful bargaining chip. They are demanding gun reform for the safety of their communities, for the safety of kids like them all over the country, in order to see a future better than the present they inherited. It is been a beautiful and radical sight to see. I cannot wait for the headlines from crotchety Baby Boomers writing in dying media venues that read: “Generation Z is Killing The Gun Industry.”
Gun reform, de-arming a nation built on blood and violence will be no easy feat. But it is the only way forward. Laws and regulations are a step in the right direction. But to change the violent culture of the USA, we have to be willing to look deeply at the roots of our violence, and take ownership where necessary of the ways in which we contribute, implicitly or explicitly, to our collective history, and our share present, of violence. These kids are the future, and their work, while amazing, should not have been their burden to bear. We gave them this world broken, and we owe it to them, and each other, to carry our share of the weight in fixing it.
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Edited by Alejandro Varela, Alexandria Ward, and Carrie Morrisroe
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[1] This editorial is an excerpt of my thesis, written between January and July 2015 while pursuing an MA in Gender and Peace Building from the University for Peace. In the middle of my writing, the racist and sexist murder of nine Black women and men in a Charleston, South Carolina church occurred. I have updated it following the shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 14 girls and boys and three men dead. Much of this was written as a direct precursor to another editorial that I adapted from my thesis for The Bridges We Burn, “An End To Allies.”
[2] On December 14th, 2012 in Newton, Connecticut, 20 year-old Adam Lanza, a white man in militarized clothing, used a rifle to murder his mother Nancy in her home. Some time later he used one of three legally purchased guns taken from his mother’s home to literally shoot his way into the locked building of Sandy Hook Elementary School. Lanza entered two classrooms killing 20 children aged six and seven, and six staff members, before taking his own life. Of the victims, six were women, 12 were girls, and 8 were boys (CNN Library, 2014).
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