Farahmandpur is a doctoral student and McLaren is a professor at
the Graduate School of Education and Information.
By Ramin Farahmandpur and Peter
McLaren
School violence has tragically become a national epidemic and an
inescapable reality for most Americans. Televised images of school
shootings show scores of frightened students being escorted off
school grounds by SWAT teams while hysterical parents frantically
search for their loved ones among hundreds of traumatized high
school students.
Meanwhile, Americans are searching for answers to the recent
senseless shootings in the predominantly white suburban communities
of San Diego where violence and crime have rarely been recognized
as problems in the white community.
However, the two recent school shootings in the San Diego
suburbs have shattered the prevailing myths that link violence and
crime to poor working-class minority youths from urban
communities.
Sadly, white suburban America is finding it difficult to accept
that violence and crime are, in fact, a “white issue.”
As Tim Wise reports in a recent article: “We think danger is
black, brown and poor, and if we can just move far enough away from
“˜those people’ in the cities we’ll be safe. If we
can just find an “˜all-American’ town, life will be
better, because “˜things like this just don’t happen
here.'” (http://www.minoritiesjb.com/Article_Detail.asp?Article_ID=3606).
In the wake of the recent school shootings, white America
continues to suffer from the symptoms associated with “white
denial.” Supported and maintained by white institutions and
the corporate media, “white denial” is both a form of
motivated amnesia that suppresses the historical reality of white
violence and a media-engineered misconception that locates the
blame for social violence outside of white neighborhoods.
For years, the media has engaged in some of the most brutal and
callous wars against African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Arabs and
Native Americans, in part, by demeaning them as violent, criminal
and dangerous.
Bombarded by stereotypical images of minorities as drug pushers,
pimps, gang-bangers, rapists and welfare queens generated primarily
by the media industry, an assumption has been generated among white
constituencies that they have little to fear as long as they
continue to safeguard their interests by keeping their
neighborhoods gated (either literally or symbolically), by ensuring
the justice system remains based on white property rights, by
abolishing affirmative action, by restricting immigration from
Latin America, and by incriminating youth of color.
There has been little effort if any to expose the criminal and
violent activities associated with white youth in suburban
communities.
To debunk racist stereotypes and misrepresentations of
minorities manufactured by the media, Wise offers some eye-opening
data worth noting.
For instance, “white high school students are seven times
more likely than blacks to have used cocaine; eight times more
likely to have smoked crack; 10 times more likely to have used LSD
and seven times more likely to have used heroin. In fact, there are
more white high school students who have used crystal
methamphetamine (arguably one of the most addictive drug on the
streets) than there are black students who smoke
cigarettes.”
Moreover, studies funded by the federal government have shown
that white youths between the ages of 12-17 are 34 percent more
likely to sell drugs than African American youths in the same age
group. Furthermore, young white adults are twice as likely to binge
drink and drive under the influence than African Americans.
Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that white male students are
twice as likely than black males to to bring a weapon to their
school campus.
What remains at the heart of this failure to acknowledge white
violence is the refusal to connect violence in most of its
incarnations (among white, African American, Asian and Latino
communities) to the political economy of insecurity brought about
by capitalist social relations. Lack of economic security and a
social safety net ““ not to mention the crisis within global
capitalism worldwide ““ has created what many youth believe to
be a zero-sum future for their current generation.
Since it is imperative not to question the social relations of
production within capitalism and the value system that has grown up
around the free-market that makes it synonymous with democracy
itself, the media find it a more prudent strategy (given that they
are owned by mega-corporations highly invested in capital
accumulation) to find scapegoats for social violence than to take a
serious look at its historical and material causes.