White-guy rage fuels shootings
White supremacy is at the heart of most mass shootings in the United States. News emerged Friday afternoon that the suspect in custody for killing at least 10 people at Santa Fe High School near Houston, Texas, is 17-yearold Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who had previously posted photos of Nazi regalia on his social media accounts, according to local TV station KHOU11.
This tragedy is only the latest mass shooting in the United States — the majority of which are connected to white supremacy.
“Most of the statistics on the demographics of mass shooters that I've seen show that roughly three-quarters of mass shooters are white males,” says Mike King, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Bridgewater State University. “There is clearly a durable pattern of these shooters being disproportionately white and male.”
In his essay “Aggrieved Whiteness: White Identity Politics and Modern American Racial Formation,” King (inset below) explores the subject of white identity politics and the process by which it is weaponized.
It is the violent culmination of this process that we repeatedly witnessed in Parkland, Charleston, Santa Barbara and now in Santa Fe.
That’s because white men and boys have been lured into thinking that people of color, and a society that tolerates them, are the cause of every real and perceived decline in their standards of living, as well as their prospects for the future.
By some measures, it is true that the plight of white men has become more difficult. Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology and gender studies at Stony Brook University, examined the sources and results of these difficulties in his 2013 book, “Angry White Men.”
Home ownership and wages adequate to support a family on a single income — the signifiers of success for white men, according to Kimmel — have been declining since 2004 and 1980, respectively. In turn, this has devastated the prospects white men hold for the future.
“What is the fastest-growing segment of the population that is committing suicide? Middleaged white men,” says Kimmel. “That’s taking that rage and despair and turning it inward. Mass shootings are expressing it outward.”
This real despair experienced by white men is seized upon by white supremacists, who inflate an artificial sense of white-male victimhood and direct the resulting rage at people of color and “politically correct” society. “The solution to real problems that face working people of all races - de-unionization, drug addiction, suicide, mass incarceration, family disintegration, foreclosure or loss of home equity, underemployment or delayed retirement, increasing costs of health care and education, the mounting impacts of environmental crisis, and a lack of real political power - these problems are not addressed,” emphasizes King.
Instead, white supremacists spin tales of invading foreigners and parasitic minorities destabilizing otherwise powerful white men and “their” nation.
Yet, as Kimmel points out: “It’s not immigrants who are responsible for climate change, it’s not LGBT people who outsource jobs, it's not feminist women who issue predatory loans. (White men) are rightfully angry, but they’re delivering their mail to