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U.S. Gun Culture between Paranoia and Neoliberalism

Reading the February 17th Christian Science Monitor story Gun control: Future hangs on misunderstood majority of gun owners, I found an interesting quote: “In 2008, America quietly became a majority pro-gun country, according to Gallup. Scholars like Ms. Carlson [Jennifer Carlson, PhD candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley, incoming assistant professor at the University of Toronto in 2013] contend that majority is part of a new, emergent social contract in which the balance of power and social responsibility has slipped noticeably toward the citizen.”

I’m not convinced about the balance of power shifting toward the citizen (I’ve argued that it’s a shift from the state to capital. Also, social “contract” is problematic when generally contracts require the knowledge and consent of the contracted parties), but there is definitely a shift of responsibility toward the citizen (and I don’t just mean the socialization of risk despite the privatization of reward).

This is a logic that has been identified by many scholars as neoliberal, and it’s based on the assumption of the calculating, entrepreneurial and self-promoting individual with no help from the state who succeeds or fails on his (usually his) own merits.

This raised a question for me: In thinking about guns, how can we parse the distance between “it’s your job to take care of yourself; the government isn’t going to do it” and “the government won’t protect you; in fact, it’s going to tyrannize you”? Where on the spectrum does the neoliberal dogma of self-sufficiency and not relying on the state shade into paranoia over state power?

On the face of it, the tyrannical government argument for gun access seems patently absurd. It seems obvious that no matter what kind of arsenal a civilian has, the actual military will be better armed and better trained. Nobody’s arguing to give civilians fighter jets and tanks and drones and nukes. Well, nobody credible. I’m sure someone is.

There are ironies aplenty here: the same conservative political genre that advocates unrestricted guns for citizens also includes those who want to always beef up the military and never cut a dime from it even if it means pitching the poor into misery (or especially if it does, to get them to “stop being freeloaders and work”). This, then, is completely contrary to the alleged goal of preventing tyranny.

Additionally, I saw a great quip in the comments section of a news story ages ago, maybe after the Aurora, CO shooting, but I can’t find it now. Something like, “I for one am more afraid of the guy who has warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detention, and drone surveillance than the one who wants to restrict guns.” That is, the fear about guns in particular and not these other things seems odd, and again these “antiterrorism” measures are often supported by pro-gun folks.

The space between self-responsibility and paranoia turns up seemingly at every turn. Elsewhere, the article says that “Race complicates the debate, starting with research showing that the Madisonian roots of the Second Amendment sprang from racial fears, or at least from fears of slave revolts. It’s a small historical leap from there to gun-purchasing inspired by fear of crime in black urban cores, and on to the first White House push for gun control in two decades being led by the first black president.”

As described in The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery, the early push to have the second amendment and gun rights was a fear by slave owners that the federal government both could not serve the role then being played by state slave patrols and might refuse to do so because of anti-slavery sentiment in the north. The government won’t protect us, and might actually do things that harm us, so we need guns.

With respect to the “fear of crime in black urban cores” factor, “protect yourself” gets expressed more like “the police can’t stop the crime,” and paranoia is something like “black people are always-already criminals and the state gives them welfare money rather than stopping them” (I’m finding it hard to even pin down what that particular crazed view is, but it’s something like that).

Again and again, this pair of things: Morris Fiorina, professor of political science at Stanford, is quoted in the piece as saying:  “Part of it is I think this sense that authorities can’t protect you.”

And then, “the Pew survey on personal rights and freedoms found that the share of Americans who feel ‘threatened’ by the government has gone from 38 percent in 1995 to 53 percent today” and “Obama’s election and reelection both spawned frantic runs on guns and ammunition,” and if that’s not a fear of government (and black folks) I don’t know what is.

The point here is that I really don’t think the self-sufficiency idea and the gun-loving are coincidental:

“There is this sense that America is locking and loading because of Obama being elected … and threats Obama may or may not pose,” says Carlson, at the University of Toronto. “That may be true, but this transformation where Americans are turning to guns started in the 1970s, and as quickly as these shootings happen, gun culture has not transformed so quickly.”

The other thing that started in the 1970s (albeit the late 70s) was the shift that made neoliberalism the dominant political ideology in the U.S. That was the start date on the move of the  mainstream away from Keynesian ideas that the state needs to manage the market carefully to make sure it’s working; the ideology of completely free, unregulated markets (except of course when regulations like intellectual property law protect their interests, then they want more-more-more!) has held sway ever since. (Contrary to Tea Party hysterics, Obama’s not a huge shift away from this.)

Fearing the government will actively hurt you, then, is possibly just an intensified form of fearing that the government will make a mess of things if you let it run them. And both of these ideas have been intimately involved with gun culture in the U.S. since its inception. That’s really interesting. And really scary for those with an investment in reducing gun violence.

If this is in our national DNA, there’s no getting rid of it. And I don’t know what the way forward is then. Evolution, I guess: waiting for demographic change to run its course and those folks to die off or be outnumbered.

I still think that the culture that glorifies violence and says that’s how one ought to be manly has a lot to do with why people engage in violence (as discussed in my post Discouraging Victim Mentality or Blaming Recipients of Violence?). But the fact that Americans have guns with which to enact this idea of power (which other cultures that have the same ideas about violence don’t, at least not at the same rates) may well be an intractable problem.

Discouraging Victim Mentality or Blaming Recipients of Violence?

Where is the line between discouraging a helpless victim mentality and blaming the recipient of violence? How can we open up space to rethink violence?

There were a couple of inspirations on this question. One came after an NFL player killed Kasandra Perkins,  who was his girlfriend, and then himself.

(I know his name, but people who kill other people deserve to be forgotten, not remembered, because at least some of the time they’re interested in glory. We should remember the names of those who experience violence. We should learn from these events how to prevent future violence. But the people who do it don’t merit memory. Let’s keep that in mind next time there’s a mass shooting. Because there will be a next time. /rant Also, Morgan Freeman agrees with me.)

After Perkins was killed, feminist activist organization UltraViolet (from whom I somehow or other receive email calls to action despite my ambivalent relationship to feminism and the fact that sometimes they hail their audience in ways that exclude me) sent an email on December 7 that said:

Yesterday during a discussion about domestic violence, Fox News host and former George W. Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino actually said on the air that women should “make better decisions” to avoid being beaten or killed by their abusers. Yep, that’s right. She didn’t say anything about the abusers who terrorize their girlfriends, wives, children, and partners. Instead, she blamed survivors of domestic violence for the crimes committed against them.

The email linked to a petition  that called on Perino to “publicly apologize to survivors of abuse for saying that their own decisions caused the crimes committed against them, and make a donation to a domestic violence shelter to show she understands that survivors are never to blame.”

Then, a few days later, second hand and probably over Twitter though I can’t recall now, came a complaint from blog Feministe, And just when you thought the Good Men Project couldn’t get any worse…   which included frustration at the latter blog’s idea that  the “rapist is really a decent guy and maybe if the victim hadn’t done x, y or z this wouldn’t have happened.”

To be unequivocal, I never think that someone who is the recipient of violence is at fault. They weren’t asking for it, “no” always means “no,” everyone has a right to walk around anywhere at any time of day or night without experiencing violence. I don’t think that “their own decisions caused the crimes committed against them.”

But I also don’t think people should wait around hoping other people will stop enacting violence on them. I think that given the prevalence of people taking actions on the spectrum between boorish and awful, it’s a good idea to be prepared for the possibility. This is perhaps an impossibly fine distinction to make, and maybe it’s not practical, but I think it’s worth considering, at least.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, at least since I was a member of a very self-defense-heavy martial arts system.  One thing that the instructors at this school suggested was thinking in terms of “It could happen to me. It could happen today. I know what to do, and I’m going to do it.” It’s cheesy, to be sure, but it does say that people aren’t powerless. Given the business they were in, perhaps it’s not surprising that their emphasis was on what one can do to protect oneself from violence, but I think it’s a pretty useful intellectual shift.

A person who commits a despicable act of violence and domination is at fault for that, but something about the way we talk about violence makes the story about the person who committed the violence, and see above about glory.

Or, at least, that’s the consequence of the way we talk about violence enacted by male/masculine/masculinized people against female/feminine/feminized people. It becomes particularly clear that victimization is only one option for how to make sense of this when one considers that the violences experienced by adult, heterosexual, able-bodied men are not explained as victimization in the same way. There are other options already in use.

The way we talk about violence against feminized humans suggests that there’s nothing those people can do other than hope the law helps after they’ve already experienced violence. That’s also why don’t like the word “victim” and I won’t use it, because it constructs a relational identity around the violence in a way that I think is a terrible idea. Victim mentality, that is, is helplessness. It’s hopelessness. It hampers our ability to live without fear.

Ultimately, all of those things act to put all the power with the person who commits the violence, and getting all the power, or belief that they have all the power, is why people commit the violence in the first place. It participates in the same logic, and it’s not the only way to think about it.

To some extent I’m echoing Sharon Marcus’s “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention” (to which I cannot find a link) here, though I like to think I’m adding to her important argument. Even if I’m not, however, the piece was published over 20 years ago—maybe longer if its appearance in Feminists Theorize the Political wasn’t the first–and we’re still using the same rhetoric of victimization and inevitability, so it’s worth pointing out again.

Should people have to walk around in alert mode, checking their six, not walking blindly around corners, keeping their hands free and their vision and hearing unobstructed? No, absolutely not. I want a world where that isn’t the case. But we have a world where it is the case. We have a world where manliness is often measured in violence done and experienced.

We have a world where men (especially in the U.S. context white, heterosexual men) feel their accustomed dominance disappearing and feel like people are committing violence on them. I saw this firsthand when I was following the Sandy Hook shooting on Twitter, since it had faster (though unverified) information than the news proper. One particularly paranoid guy (who I won’t give the signal boost of naming) blamed the “war on men” and “she-ria law” (no joke) for inspiring men to fight back violently. At first I thought he was trolling, but he was serious and that was some scary stuff. And, while this might seem different, the idea that men commit violence because they believe they have control is actually the same logic as doing it because they have lost control—it’s the idea that violence is a way to assert control, which is the divine right of men.

So this is the world we have to be prepared for. We have a world in which there’s a certain number or concentration of human predators, and–like the lions on the Serengeti in the nature documentaries who take the old gazelle, the sick gazelle, the baby gazelle–they want easy targets.  So the sane response to the insane system is to try not to be taken for the weak one in the herd. It’s a question of managing the condition of predators  having a victim optics without ourselves subscribing to victim identity. And, if someone mistakes you for easy prey, you are not doomed to whatever they want to do to you. You can put up a fight.

This is of course not to say that it’s easy. Clearly it’s no such thing. Fear is powerful, even paralyzing. Abuse is disempowering, even dehumanizing, particularly when it is routinized. Sometimes the choice is be raped or die. Sometimes it’s kill or be killed. I could never tell someone how to decide those things. Sometimes you’re unconscious.  Sometimes you’ve got six-to-one odds and they don’t care what kind of gazelle you are.

But to know that you have a choice on how to respond when violence comes to you, even though we can all agree that violence ought never to come? To know that it’s not inevitable, that a person who attempts violence on you is a bad person or a person doing a bad thing, and not exercising some universal right? That feels like a better way to live.

 

Everything You Know about Politics and Activism is (about to be) Wrong

The critique that the current generation is politically apathetic is well-worn. Indeed, it has been recycled for several generations at this point and maybe is always cast at each generation by the last.

It’s certainly true that civic involvement in the form in which we’ve traditionally known it is down—people aren’t voting or going to political organization meetings or canvassing nearly as much as they did in yesteryear. But there’s also a huge wave of consumer activism through means like voting with dollars and petitions pressuring companies to go green or treat their workers better or stop supporting human rights violations by world governments.

(Which, incidentally—though this kind of action has obviously increased dramatically with the Internet, it’s not terribly different from We are the World  or Do they know it’s Christmas?  “buy a single for unfortunate people” activism in the 1980s.)

Taking these newer forms of action seriously as activism is partially the topic of the recent special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova of the University of Southern California. Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova, in a piece from that issue titled Fandom meets activism: Rethinking civic and political participation,  argue that they want “social movement scholars to explore the fertile but understudied terrain of fan and fanlike forms of civic and political participation” (1.2).

In the related essay Learning Through Practice: Participatory Culture Civics,  (tied to the special issue because both are rooted in the Civic Paths project housed at the University of Southern California), Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Sangita Shresthova frame the issue as that young people “are conducting politics through a new language and through a different set of practices than more traditional organizations. (p. 48)

This comment gestures toward the point I want to make in this post: It’s not just that young people are doing things that are new and different, as the Civic Paths-involved folks argue, but a bigger change: as power has shifted from the state to transnational capital, activism has actually responded to that, which means that everything we think we know about activism is about to be wrong.

Kligler-Vilenchik and Shresthova describe “the ‘slacktivism’ critique, which claims that social action online is easy to do, and thus banal” (46), and this is an argument that has some merit, as I’ve discussed before.  But I think that a substantial portion of why people with traditional definitions of politics are so offended is that these actions and investments are directed less and less at electoral or legislative goals and more pointed at or directed through the materials of corporations.

 However, the complaint about not doing politics right is unwarranted; as I’ve argued drawing on Saskia Sassen,  the nation overall is a less relevant political category than it formerly was. Kligler-Vilenchik and Shresthova note that the fannish activists they interviewed “rarely linked their concerns to governmental solutions and often expressed feelings of alienation from ‘politics as usual’” (32-3). The idea of governmental solutions or regular politics directed at the nation, that is, has become less relevant to the contemporary distribution of power.

The other traditional kind of politics is local, but that has declined as well. Indeed, though  Ashley Hinck, in her Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom’s integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance, contends that “fandom scholars cannot talk about fandom’s public engagement as being anchored to the local in Dewey’s sense” (4.5) what she misses is that neither is anyone else’s public only spatially local. As Sassen notes in the pieces discussed in the above-linked blog post, the world is not completely dis-located or globalized, but localities are articulated to each other in very different ways than ever before.

How people make sense of the world, then, is not oriented the same frames of reference it used to be. As Henry Jenkins put it in his piece, “Cultural acupuncture”: Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance,  “the forums for expressing political concerns, and the policies and infrastructures shaping our capacities to do so, are controlled by private interests. Our political struggles often take place through languages and contexts heavily shaped by commercial culture” (1.6).

This suggests that we should take seriously the “significance of content worlds and storytelling (including transmedia storytelling) in the development of collective identity and the formation and mobilization of publics” (Brough and Shresthova 7.2). That is: who people are and what they care about are filtered through these largely commercial products—not nation, not locality.

Political concerns are inextricable from corporateness, I argue, because power is increasingly residing with capital and decreasingly with the state—not that the state can’t regulate industry if it has a mind to, but it hasn’t had much of a mind to lately. This means that some of Alex Jones’s arguments hold some water—“Bankers pull the strings on world governments to solidify their power”? Kind of. Transnational capital is a weight in governmental processes, to be sure.

“Companies are harming you and ducking responsibility”? Absolutely. It’s common knowledge now Big Tobacco knew about the dangers of their product long before the public caught on but hid the information. In the contemporary era there’s Big Corn (their “a calorie is a calorie” argument isn’t true when it’s fructose), Big Oil (fracking, tar sands), Big Coal (mountaintop removal), Big Gun . . . you name it, they do things that hurt people directly or indirectly and don’t pay for it. (And it may not be true yet that “President Barack Obama is using drones against Americans,” but it’s certainly possible for him or a later president to decide to do so given post-9/11 anti-terrorism cover for free rein).

Ultimately Jones is wrong to see these as governmental conspiracies to strip the God-given rights of free ‘Muricans, of course, but these results of decades of letting capital impact laws still matter. Thus, when Kligler-Vilenchik and Shresthova note that “scholars often worry that young people’s withdrawal from civic and political engagement is so significant that it endangers the healthy functioning of democracies” (p. 6), there’s actually a case to be made that the healthy functioning in of democracies has been imperiled long since as elections and representatives have been bought and paid for, and youth withdrawal from that system is a response to its fundamental brokenness.

This is why traditional definitions of what is political or activist are perhaps becoming wrong. We might want to question the system that is slowly eroding the power of the state, since no one else really can stand up to transnational capital, but given the state’s current weakness turning away from it is potentially a sane response to an insane system. Jenkins takes a stab at redefining what might count as political or activist, “describing as ‘civic’ those practices that are designed to improve the quality of life and strengthen social ties within a community, whether defined in geographically local or dispersed terms” (1.8), and that seems to be a reasonable baseline.

Getting people with a traditional definition of the political to take this seriously is an uphill battle, of course. Brough and Shresthova describe “false dichotomies of commercial versus political (or activist), and participation versus resistance” (7.2). Even when Harry Potter fans “engage in very traditional expressions of citizenship: petitioning, donating money, sending letters to government representatives, and so on,” these actions “are still met with skepticism by scholars of civic engagement because they are done in the name of Harry Potter, instead of solely in the name of duty to one’s country or ideological commitment to a political party” (Hinck 1.2).

Similarly, as Kligler-Vilenchik and coauthors Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and Chris Tokuhama contend in Experiencing fan activism: Understanding the power of fan activist organizations through members’ narratives,  “at least some of the critique around Kony 2012, we argue, can be read as a policing of the boundaries of social action, and what it should look and feel like. Many of these critiques claimed that social advocacy should be left to experts—to politicians, to ‘serious’ NGOs, to erudites” (7.5).

And indeed even these advocates of redefinition get caught up in old definitions at times, with Brough and Shresthova carefully distinguishing work for “the representation of racial or sexual minorities, or the promotion of social themes in program content”  from “real-world issues” (2.2-2.3), as if the former set of things are trivial and not important in the real world. Jenkins argues that the group he examines “is targeting young people who are engaged culturally, who may already be producing and sharing fan culture, and it helps them to extend their engagement into politics” (6.2) as if cultural engagement is not political.

Similarly, Jenkins and Shresthova, in their introduction to the special issue, Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism encourage moving “beyond abstract notions of cultural resistance to focus on specific sways that fan culture has affected debates around law and public policy” (1.9) narrowing what counts as important to law and policy.

(It may of course be strategic for this particular group of scholars to go with law and policy as what counts, given Civic Paths’ funding by traditional organizations that may not recognize alternative actions as valid. Given that they are already looking at fans, they perhaps could not then also say that what is political is more expansive. This is an unfortunate reality of specific-research grants, whether philanthropic or corporate.)

However, I am not saying that anything and everything is always political. (I mean, yes, it is always political in that it is always power-laden, but not in the meaning of political as aware and taking action). There are certainly limits, where the slacktivism critique is not unwarranted.

Brough and Shrestova warn that “we may risk diluting our notion of the political to a point that makes it difficult to debate the merits of different strategies and tactics of civic participation, and difficult to focus on their material (not just cultural) outcomes. Framing all acts of engagement with popular entertainment as political acts can have a depoliticizing effect and limit analytical and tactical advancements” (3.11), and I certainly don’t want to participate in that.

 I do think, however, that the changing power landscape of the contemporary world requires changing responses, that it has actually generated new kinds of responses, and that these responses should be taken seriously, because looking to the state for protection against multinational capital is not likely to be a viable strategy in the foreseeable future—and certainly not without working on the world as it is, corporate-dominated and all.

Techwashing the Israeli Defense Force

An interesting article came through my email recently, forwarded to my grad program’s student listserv by my colleague Ergin Bulut. It was a piece by Huw Lemmey published in The New Inquiry entitled “Devastation in Meatspace.”

The essay starts out talking about the optics of war generally and how armies visualize their activities for themselves and the citizenry. Lemmey remarked on the way that “the mediated aesthetics of war have always tread a fine line between the banal and heroic, always used to justify, rightly or wrongly, the slaughter of young and old while always failing to really convey the profound and fleeting moment when a state chooses to end a human life, again and again and again a thousand times over.”

This points to the latest iteration of an old technology of vision, which reminded me of Caren Kaplan’s November 2nd talk at the University of Illinois, “Desert Wars: Virilio and the Limits of ‘Genuine Knowledge,’” in which she elaborated how mapping and eventually aerial surveillance was used to make sense of Mesopotamia and eventually Iraq during successive European and then American desert wars there.

But Lemmey was doing something more expansive. He contended that the contemporary practices of visualization of Israeli military action are “an extension of the historical ‘propaganda war’: control of the networked space online. The IDF have run a comprehensive social media campaign from the first stages of the new assault, announcing the assassination of Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari on Twitter, followed up by YouTube footage of his targeted killing within minutes.”

This is not just letting people see, then, or telling them what it is that they’re seeing, but something quite new. I call attention here to the use of the phrase “social media campaign,” terminology far more familiar in the context of marketing than that of providing a citizenry with the information they need about their government’s military actions. That is, while the rapid-fire nature of digital media can clearly be used to hold governments accountable and get out information to people to make decisions, this is something else again.

The link to marketing is not coincidental but actually the fulcrum for the shift Lemmey identifies. As he contends, “the images posted on Instagram and the infographics released across platforms form the core of the IDF brand; with a coherent visual theme, and consistency with the brand narrative, they are reimagining an urban conflict and occupation on a new consumer scale.”

This is not just nation-branding in the sense that has long been practiced as an incitement to tourism, but both narrower in scope (the military as national subset) and broader in dissemination (out to everyone, everywhere, simultaneously).

Lemmey’s biggest claim is that “liking and sharing IDF visual material becomes no more controversial than sharing your favourite Nike campaign — not a matter of politics, let alone ethics, but just another part of the construction of your online persona.”

This is the point at which the technological break with what Lemmey describes in the title as “devastation in meatspace” is complete. This information has become data, branding, decorative, has come to operate within the orbit of other fun and exciting technological things. And, on the model of the well-attested and expansively critiqued Israeli pinkwashing, I’d like to call it techwashing.

Pinkwashing is the term used in queer critique for the practice by which Israel plays up its gay-friendliness in a way that attempts to establish them as modern or advanced or forward-thinking and distract from more repressive aspects of their state policy on the basis of other categories of difference like race, ethnicity, or religion.

(Incidentally, the word pinkwashing is also used to describe the attachment of breast cancer awareness pink ribbons or pink coloring to a product to get people to buy it, even at times products with carcinogens in them. This makes me think maybe the gay one should be called rainbow-washing. Also, gay-related pinkwashing also happens in other places than Israel, like South Africa.)

The IDF social media campaign is thus usefully understand as the making same move as pinkwashing in a different arena. Thus, “we’re so gay-friendly, never mind that we also systematically deny rights to and chronically immiserate whole populations!” becomes “We’re so tech-savvy, never mind that we’re using this technological capacity to systematically deny rights to and chronically immiserate whole populations!”

Techwashing, like pinkwashing, like greenwashing before it, is ultimately a form of whitewashing. This is, on one hand, a metaphor about paint—the idea that you can slap a covering layer over unpleasant things and make them look nice.

But on the other hand these things are whitewashing—certainly with techwashing and pinkwashing, and maybe with greenwashing too—because they are deeply racialized. I mean, I know that race does not work in Israel quite like it works in the US context that I’m familiar with, but clearly the same structure is in play even if its component parts are defined differently.

These forms of -washing require a particular form of willful colorblindness, a refusal to see the racially disparate access to gay-friendliness or to the technological “wow” factor. Even more damningly, it requires obscuring the ways in which these forms of “modernity” act as bait-and-switch on tangible, meatspace, life-and-death human rights violations.

And ethically, it’s incumbent on us not to let that sleight-of-hand go unremarked.

Anders Behring Breivik Has a Point

Yeah, you read that right. Got you to look at the post, didn’t it?

This is not (just) an attention-getting shock tactic (though a little more site traffic has rarely hurt anyone. I guess we’ll see whether I come to regret this). Anders Behring Breivik, on trial in Norway for killing 77 people with a bomb and a shooting spree because he wanted to “save” Norway from supposedly nefarious multiculturalism, does indeed have point. Just not the one he thinks he does.

As reported in a number of news outlets (my source here is an April 23 article in the New York Daily News) Breivik has declared questions about his sanity a “racist plot” to discredit him. The confessed mass killer correctly pointed out that the sanity of Islamic terrorists generally isn’t questioned, and wondered therefore why the issue was being raised in relation to his own behavior.

Breivik, of course, meant that this inquiry into his sanity was racist against him as a white person—more or less his attitude toward all things he dislikes. And he is wrong about that. But he’s not wrong that there’s a racist logic at work in that differential accusation of insanity.

Whiteness has historically been constructed as rational and controlled through constructing nonwhiteness as irrational and out of control (I know parenthetical citations and works cited are bad form in a blog, but the sources are too numerous to link, so here it comes, with apologies: Dyer 1997; Floyd 2009; Roediger 1991; Savran 1998).

Whiteness, then, is at once stabilized by the deployment of this constitutive Other (as I noted in a 2010 post  on Nietzsche,  a “good vs. bad” morality) and simultaneously holds that Other inferior for failing to live up to the standards set by the dominant ( a “good vs. evil” morality).

According to this structure, “of course” brown folks from the Muslim world would be violent and destructive, because they’re Other to the norm of control, at the same time that this alterity is also evidence of their “pathologized psyches” (Puar and Rai 2002, p. 117).

Moreover, whiteness is the unmarked category that masquerades as no category at all, as default, universal, invisible, nothing (Chambers 1997; Dyer 1997; Frankenberg 1993; Hill 1997a, 1997b; Kusz 2001, 2007; and Newitz and Wray 1997a), which means that white folks are understood as individuals. Nonwhite people, however, are frequently imagined to be explained by the category to which they belong.

Hence, the sanity of the Islamic terrorist isn’t questioned—we already “know” he’s insane because members of his group definitionally are (as is explained in considerably more depth in Puar and Rai 2002). But there is a presumption that a white Norwegian is rational and individual. His extreme violence requires an explanation. He must be insane to do such things.

This happens in much smaller ways all the time. I’ve been startled to notice in the last little while the ways that people’s bad behavior is excused under exactly these sort of racist premises. Being a jerk is a personality flaw, not the essence of somebody’s racial or ethnic category.

It is fundamentally racist to ascribe anybody’s behavior—good or bad—to their race.

Now, I’m not some sort of radical individualist (as I hope is clear from my posting history). We should absolutely examine and question the norms and options available to people on the basis of belonging to whatever category, because these do absolutely constrain behavior.

But we can’t let “Person A is a member of category B, which comes with XYZ baggage, which influenced the way they ultimately behaved” become “Person A did X because they are B.” Ever.

 

Works Cited

Chambers, Ross. 1997. “The Unexamined.” In Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill, 187–203. New York: New York Univ. Press.

Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London: Routledge.

Floyd, Kevin. 2009. The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Hill, Mike. 1997a. “Introduction: Vipers in Shangri-la Whiteness, Writing, and Other Ordinary Terrors.” In Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill, 1–18. New York: New York Univ. Press.

Hill, Mike. 1997b. “Can Whiteness Speak?: Institutional Antinomies, Ontological Disasters, and Three Hollywood Films.” In White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, 155–73. New York: Routledge.

Kusz, Kyle W. 2001. “‘I Want to Be the Minority’: The Politics of Youthful White Masculinities in Sport and Popular Culture in 1990s America.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 25 (4): 390–416.

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