Whom To Be Afraid Of

Trey Smith

As long as I can remember, society has been really clear whom most of us should be afraid of. For years, the quintessential potential bad guy was black. As the Latino population has increased, we're now told to be suspicious of any Latino we don't know personally -- he's most likely up to no good -- and, heck, you can't really trust the ones you know. And, of course, over the past two decades, the group we should be most terrified of is ANY male who looks like an Arab and/or Muslim because he just might be a terrorist.

But, as David Sirota points out, when it comes to mass murder, the overwhelming majority of the assailants are white!

Yesterday, during a cable news discussion of gun violence and the Newtown school shooting, I dared mention a taboo truism. During a conversation on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” I said that because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white men, there would likely be political opposition to initiatives that propose to use those facts to profile the demographic group to which these killers belong. I suggested that’s the case because as opposed to people of color or, say, Muslims, white men as a subgroup are in such a privileged position in our society that they are the one group that our political system avoids demographically profiling or analytically aggregating in any real way. Indeed, unlike other demographic, white guys as a group are never thought to be an acceptable topic for any kind of critical discussion whatsoever, even when there is ample reason to open up such a discussion.

I certainly would not want to be profiled, but fair is fair. Since black males driving nice cars in white neighborhoods or Arab-looking men taking photographs of important buildings tend to set off alarms with most police departments, maybe white males like me driving near shopping malls and educational institutions should get the same treatment.