Whiteness is Bulletproof

"One of the greatest advantages of being white in America (besides walking, driving and living anywhere you want without the threat of being stopped, harassed, cast out or noticed because you don’t belong) is that whiteness gets to exist in the singular tense.... 

Being white means you don’t have to automatically bear the weight of a skin color, a religion or an ethnicity. White people aren’t automatically assumed to be gangbangers, hood niggas or jihadists. They always get the benefit of the doubt; therefore, when white people do something heinous, the world begins a frantic, desperate search for a valid explanation of [that individuals singular] actions....

When whiteness shoots up a school, it must have been the violent video games. When whiteness opens fire in a movie theater, it must mean the person was off his medication. When whiteness goes ballistic on a college campus, they will discover how many days since the shooter saw his therapist, because it must be something that causes whiteness to explode.

It must be the cable news. It must be “affluenza.” It must be trouble at home. It must be political rhetoric. It must be gun laws. It must be the National Rifle Association. It must be the mental-health system. It must be a lack of attention. It must be the divorce. It must be his childhood. It must be bullying. Because whiteness is logical. Whiteness is never evil. 

Whiteness is never just plain crazy [for no reason]

Whiteness is bulletproof"

http://www.theroot.com/james-hodgkinson-proves-white-men-are-bulletproof-1796137659 

White people don't think of black and brown individuals taking singular action. They are pieces of a group acting out that group's pathology.

"That’s why it’s believable to white people that 17-year old Trayvon Martin would [attack someone sans provocation] who weighed 50 pounds more than he did and was carrying a gun.

It’s why virtually [no-white-body finds it damn near impossible to believe] that Michael Brown just willy-nilly decided to reach inside a squad car and grab a police officer’s gun. .. " 

http://www.theroot.com/james-hodgkinson-proves-white-men-are-bulletproof-1796137659 

I don't know what's wrong with me sometimes. 

I honestly thought I was going to find some main stream news information on the radicalization of James T Hodgkinson, a white man who was volunteer for Bernie Sanders once. But there's virtually nothing online about the twisted reasoning that led Hodgkinson to create a hit list full of republicans that were members of the ??House Freedom Caucus of the republican party.

Not only has the predominantly white press failed to be curious about his motivations --not nearly as curious as they've been about Omar Mateen, the Pulse Nightclub Shooter. There isn't even any decent speculation in mainstream news. White people in the press are simply aghast that Hodgkinson seemed "so normal"

...or 'so just like white me.' They want there to be some signal that a person is likely to just pop off and start shooting people. Me thinks the liberal white press is almost as comfortable with racial profiling as the right. They just like coming off as sympathetic to those they think of as coming from a broken culture.  

The "so normal" comments coming from the white media reveals an ugly truth in itself though. 

Hodgkinson had domestic violence problems. The only reason he didn't go to jail is because a foster daughter refused to testify. 

So white people saying he's "so normal" means domestic violence leaves a white man in the "normal" category, right?  

Is that white people have failed to connect those police officers who have domestic violence issues at home as the ones likely to fail to control violent tendencies on the street too?

Believe it or not, I was thinking the white dominated press was going to be curious enough to find out what Bill Euille, a black former mayor Alexandria found to talk about every day for a month before he tried to kill  Congressman Steve Scalise.
 
But the investigation into what made Hodgkinson tick have been superficial at best. 

James T Hodgkinson and Mayor Bill Euille

Hodgkinson's beliefs have been expressed as anti-Trump posts and once worked for Bernie Sanders and that's it. I mean, think of how much more we THINK we know about each Muslim terrorist as opposed to this white terrorist?

I mean, it has not been made exceptionally obvious that Hodgkinson was a bible thumping Christian, atheist or agnostic. Mainstream news haven't even taken a little bit of information over here and little bit of information over that made up layered theories about his "twisted" beliefs.

When one of your own has his cheese slide of the cracker, you label him as just one individual 

But what if one of the things burning inside Hodgkinson's unbalanced brain and heart had to do with being humiliated by other white people being so racist?

Not that I've heard anything like this about Hodgkinson. But I've met white people, especially young white people, that are humiliated to the point of wanting to be violent when they find out the parents, friends, and lovers they though of as "good people" harbor deep feelings of white supremacy. 

This very white behavior is lightly touched on in the movie GET OUT. Director Jordan Peele shows the white woman getting worked up and excited about some non-deadly white supremacy exhibited by a police officer.  Her outrage is muted by the black boyfriend's amusement.   

In real life this humiliated-outraged that white folks let erupt in the shadow of a newfound knowledge that white racism exists and exists nearby makes a lot of black folks itch. Black folks know that this almost violent anti-racism display means "I'm not like that. I'm one of the good white people."

There were multiple mainstream (white) reports on this man's problems that indicate that his business, his ability to make money, his world was falling apart.

In America that can tear a man psychologically asunder because he feels his fellow man looking down on him. 

Toxic masculinity and Hyper-masculinity in America and Europe say a man is nothing if he can't make money. People, including male people, search for something new to feel strongly about when the basics of life are falling apart.

Maybe he started feeling strongly about politics and working for Bernie Sanders as way to feel like he was contributing to something important.

Maybe he started feeling some kind of way about republicans who seem to hate poor people (a group he'd joined)

Maybe Euille  didn't have to be talking about anything in particular.  

Maybe Euille helping Hodgkinson when his own tribe wasn't might have --in a warped desperate mind-- inspired him to go after the most powerful anti-poor white racists he could think of....

Steve Scalise would have fit the bill

In 2002, Scalise gave a speech to the EURO a.k.a the European American Unity and Rights Organization. And if the name doesn't tell you that this is a premier white supremacist hate group of Louisiana, that should have been identified as such long before 2015 it's links to a certain person should. EURO was created by David Duke, a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.  

When this thrown up in Scalise's face sometime later, he said he didn't remember speaking at EURO and implied that he was confused about the nature of this club. His *I'm confused* claim sounds a lot like cops saying "I was afraid for my life" when they shoot an unarmed somebody that was black.

Last week I kept reading and reading and reading, thinking I would find some clue as to whether or not Hodgkinson un-hinge-ed-ness was linked to Scalise's  one-percenter and white supremacist tendencies. But now I understand that I'm not going to find a thing

Like the author of the article quoted said, white men belong to a demographic that is seen as a group of individuals without a group pathology. Therefore white run news agencies aren't going to look for a pattern or radicalization like they do when someone black or Muslim kills someone. 

Hodgkinson's domestic violence isn't part of a pattern either. In the patriarchal capitalistic society, his brush with the law over violence of the domestic variety is looked at with mild curiosity instead of a sign of someone with violent tendencies.*  

Hodgkinson, as an individual white man who's life was falling apart has been written down as a one-off in less than a week's time. There really aren't going to be any deep think pieces on Chrisitan violence, white violence, atheist violence or anything else.

James T Hodgkinson is one white man who did one bad thing, end of story.

Yeah, whiteness is bulletproof. But it's not the only thing that's bulletproof though. Maleness is too when it combines with enough money

...but not when it's not compromised race in the good ole U.S.A. 
If moneyed maleness weren't sociologically bulletproof as compared to everything else Martha Stewart never would have seen the inside of a jail cell and blackness would have taken Bill Cosby to jail directly to jail without passing go last week.



*Statistics say one in four or five or six women will be a victim of domestic violence at some point in their lives, depending on which study you read. I wonder what the number would be if the statistic focused on the perpetrators instead of the victims.

I wonder what the numbers would be if the statistic read one in six/seven/eight men will be domestically violent at some point in their lives. If we focused on the perpetrator end of things instead of the victim end of things, I wonder if that information could be linked to unprovoked violence by police officers? I wonder if then we'd move on to noticing that most police officers are white? After we re-figure out that domestic violence has no color, I wonder if we'd move on to figuring out that white police officers aren't born in bread boxes marked "police officers" but in white communities where other white people are born.

I wonder if that could bring the negatives of white culture into as much focus as the positives always are?