White entitlement leads to violence

Can we talk about white violence?

Can we talk about white parents who bought their son a gun as an early Christmas gift?

Can we talk about the kind of white entitlement where a parent either assumes their son won't harm others or doesn't care that he might?

"LOL, I'm not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught."

Why does this echo of centuries of white violence, getting handed down from generation to generation, in many cases written into laws, systems and culture, especially when it came to domination of women, Black people and then other people of color?

I'm trying to understand the mindset of a parent that would look at a note their son had written, a note that was scrawled with images of a gun, a person who had been shot and a laughing emoji, and the words, "Blood everywhere," and, "The thoughts won't stop. Help me." (see NYTimes) and... NOT HELP THEIR SON by seeing if he had brought his gun, that they bought him just a few days ago, that he was caught searching online for ammunition for, to school with him.

I'm a parent. What is the thought process here?

It seems unfathomable, yet there is also something familiar about this. What's familiar is the kind of entitlement where white parents are so committed to the idea that their children are incapable of causing harm, or that they are entitled to cause harm, that they seem to be blind to the fact that their sons are being culturally and systemically indoctrinated into violence.

And so it was that it somehow seemed perfectly reasonable for these parents to, in this case LITERALLY BUY A WEAPON CAPABLE OF MASS SHOOTING for those their son, at a Black Friday sale, as an early gift for Christmas, like it's a new video game or something.

And if that was an action that seemed reasonable to these parents to take, just four days earlier, then I suppose it would therefore seem reasonable to them that they would be informed of their son's behavior, know he had access to a gun, and not take any actions to see if he had brought the gun with him to school.

This is all speculation of course, but do I think these parents thought their son would shoot up a school, kill several people, and that they themselves would be on the run from the law and then apprehended and charged?

No I do not.

But that is exactly what I mean by entitlement.

Meanwhile Black folks have to account for the fact that they might be pulled over, arrested or shot and killed at any given moment for no particular reason whatsoever other than their race... and the legacy of centuries of violence against them upon which our entire country's systems were built.

And that is entirely the point. Our systems, history and culture make this kind of entitled thinking a logical outcome.

However, these systems, history and culture are often invisible. We can create different outcomes only if we make these invisible root causes visible. And that starts with naming and acknowledging them, and then taking different actions.

What would it look like to stop treating innocent and unarmed Black and other people of color as a threat? And what would it look like to hold armed white men accountable? What would it look like to redesign our systems and shift our culture and socialization in order to do so?

I should note that, interestingly, it seems that mass shooters by race are roughly representative of the population at large, racially, in the US, although they skew heavily male (see Statista). I'm not saying every white boy is at risk of ending up a mass shooter, or is more at risk than their non-white counterparts. But they are not less at risk, which is often the narrative and assumption. And the same root causes that lead to violence from people of different racial backgrounds in this country manifest differently.

Racial violence is one of the key foundations upon which this country was built. We won't solve gun violence without also dismantling white supremacy.

Banner photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

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