Entitlement + anger = anomie and mass murder

Tim Wise wrote something the other day that seems relevant today in light of yet another mass shooting. His insight was this: White supremacy has long put a target on the backs of POC, but today White supremacy is killing White folk too. 

Every White person should have an expectation of success. This is what White supremacy teaches. They don't need to have much more than a high school diploma to have ready and almost automatic access to the middle class, but the logic of that is flawed; it always has been. And while the problems with that thinking have long been evident to those interested enough to look deeply; they don't seem to have been evident to White people. That lack of awareness is killing us all. 

Where I come from, you better have some serious skills, or a "papers" (a degree), if you want to see the inside of the middle class. But that ain't how y'all been doing it here. Here, a good paying job in a factory used to be sufficient to secure access to the middle class.  But that was before folk started voting for politicians who were happy to undermine the power of unions.  Today, after fifty plus years of declining union membership and years of weakening of union power, wages are stagnant, economic inequality is at an all time high and with it frustration. Add to all that, there is obvious evidence that those of us who are not considered supreme are rising. Everywhere you turn, BIPOC are on the move. We are finding ways to thrive despite all the hurdles put in our way. For those unwilling to take responsibility for their frustrations, the rising tide of BIPOC is easily identified as the cause of their distress. 

Rather than be honest about what's really going on around them - the consequences of union busting; the impact of corporate greed; the lack of economic and educational opportunities at home - entitled White men would rather blame BIPOC and White women. The under-skilled are easily replaced by the skilled and the skilled feel the hot breath of well-educated and trained POC on their necks. The result is that neither group is happy. A BIPOC's opportunity is a White man's hardship, or so they believe. Given this frame of reference, anger at the so-called political correctness that gives POC more equal access to opportunities is inevitable. Their rage is not at the fact that they can't call me a n*gger to my face, it's at the fact that they can't rely on me and others like me being automatically excluded just be-damn-cuz. Their rage is not at the fact that they have to, under the law, compete with me, it's at the fact that sometimes, I or others like me are better than they. 

At the same time that While supremacy was teaching White people one thing, it was teaching POC the exact opposite. While supremacy taught Whiteness that success was guaranteed, it taught us that it was not. We've learned to work twice as hard just in case that was what we needed to be considered acceptable. But our willingness to make that extra effort has meant that sometimes we cross the finish line ahead of White people, much to their chagrin. That chagrin, those White expectations of perpetually coming in first, built largely on 400+ years of blocking everyone else out, means that folk don't quite know how to respond to competition. But nature abhors a vacuum and into that emotional vacuum has flowed rage. 

Today's economic realities are complicated by several factors: political; social; demographic. It is no longer enough to expect a factory job to allow one to break into and hold a place in the middle class. With union rights severely eroded and corporate greed undermining wages there aren't that many good factory jobs out there any more. The world keeps changing but generations of unearned access and ill-gotten gains have taught far too many White people habits that do not fit our present realities. 

People like me, history's usual losers, know how precarious our economic gains are, so many of us are very busy going to school weeknights and all day Saturday just to stay afloat. Every weekend I go to a class at an area Community College. Saturday after Saturday, that joint is popping. Cars as far as the eye can see, grown men and women in classrooms for 3 plus hours on a Saturday morning. Why? Because we have long known that nothing comes to us freely or easily. We know that effort is required, that nothing is assured. While folks who look like me are in class struggling to improve our resumes, many others are nursing their rage at frustrated expectations with guns and Tiki torch marches screaming about blood and soil while rejecting job training because Don the Con says he'll bring coal back (from the dead) and resurrect Jim Crow.  

White supremacy is a great teacher, the question is: who's the better off for the tutelage? 

Those on the winning side of the color divide have not had to learn how to roll with unexpected punches. Those on the winning side have not had to build economic resilience, and so here we are, at a place where rage and anomie have set in. 

While some of us have had to learn to be resilient and grab opportunities as they come, American Whiteness has learned that whatever the challenge, violent acting out against "the other" is the answer.

Resilience isn't shooting at the 50 people next to you in church or the 400 at the outdoor concert or children and their teachers in the school, or the 9 who have prayed with your evil ass. That's not resilience. It is the opposite. It is proof positive that you have much to learn. 

The problem we face here - apart from the easy access to guns and cheap bullets, and the cheapening of life itself - is that Whiteness expects success for the merest show of effort, while the rest of us know that we could be as bright as a million watt bulb, success still isn't a given. Whiteness, after 400 years of having its path smoothed by public policy, has limited ability to deal with such realities. 

Until supremacy stops teaching that its people are guaranteed success, these shootings and the general brokenness of White America - as evidenced by shortened life spans - will continue unabated. The best I can do to help anybody is to call a thing a thing. And the current thing, is that the lie of White supremacy creates a rage that only death seems to quell and that is bad news for all of us.