A Look At Tragedy in Black, White
By Courtland Milloy
Let me tell you about my parallel universe.
It may exist in the same physical space as, say, my racially
desegregated world of work. But it is a separate emotional place
shared almost exclusively by other blacks. We may see the same
things as whites, but we often experience them quite differently.
Take the shootings at Columbine High in Littleton, Colo. In my
parallel world, you hear comments like, "I'm so glad those killers
weren't black. You know we'd all be in trouble if they were."
This is not just to say that a certain shame is associated with
black misbehavior. In the parallel universe, there is acute awareness
that white America responds differently when killers are black and
that its police apparatus can easily become a Gestapo-like operation --
as occurred in the aftermath of Susan Smith's claim that a black man
had kidnapped her two white toddlers in South Carolina.
In that infamous 1994 case, black men were being detained in six
states while Smith's boys sat strapped in a car at the bottom of a
pond where she'd left them.
In Columbine, the parents of the killers were not questioned by
police for several hours after the crimes, even though police knew
that bombs had been made in their homes. Had the killers been black,
the parents would no doubt have been hauled off in handcuffs in front
of television cameras, and everybody who knew them would be under
suspicion.
In my world, you also hear, "The chickens have come home to roost."
There is a feeling that if more attention had been paid to America's
"culture of violence" when it appeared to be confined to the inner
city, these rural and suburban school shootings might have been
prevented.
"Why are all the mass murderers middle-class white men and boys?"
Apart from the notion that black and white boys have different styles
of aggression due to different ways of being socialized, there is a
belief in the parallel universe that as America loses its "status" as
a white nation in the next century, more and more white people will
be going insane.
In Columbine, a TV reporter actually referred to one of the killers
as "a gentleman who drove a BMW." The shooters also were referred to
as members of a "clique," not a gang, and they were -- we were
reminded again and again -- so full of academic promise.
This obvious identification with the killers, and the reluctance to
demonize them as blacks would have been, did not go over well in the
parallel universe.
"As the media tries to soften the racist element in this tragedy,"
came an e-mail from Asiba Tupahache, in New York, "one student in
the library said she heard them laugh after shooting the black
young athlete and said, 'Oh, look! You can see his brains.' With
that kind of attitude, these guys could have had lucrative careers
in the NYPD."
Writing for the Baltimore Afro American newspaper, columnist Wiley A.
Hall 3rd recalled America's knee-jerk response to gun violence when
it was being portrayed as unique to urban areas.
"Politicians talked about the need to crack down on what they
described as tough young urban hoodlums who are terrorizing the
city," he wrote. "Sociologists blamed negligent urban parents who
fail to instill civilized values in their children. Police promised
to make more arrests. Prosecutors promised more convictions. And
judges promised to send more teenaged offenders to do hard time in
adult institutions."
Now, in the aftermath of Columbine, the finger is being pointed at
"a culture of alienation," and there is talk of improving school
curriculums, controlling guns, regulating the Internet and installing
V-chips in our TVs.
It's not just that it looks like excuses are being made for the
killers at Columbine; it's that some of them are the same ones that
were so roundly rejected when used to explain violence among blacks.
The one about how the killers' status as outcasts was to blame really
struck a nerve.
"Those of us whose high school experiences also included being
racialized have a more compounded view of this kind of labeling,
discrimination and outcasting," Tupahache wrote. "Only our visible
resistance made them drug us, call us troubled, got us abruptly
reprimanded, kicked out with no questions asked. Others can wear
swastikas, make disturbed videos and show it in class and all is
quiet."
Such feelings and concerns from the parallel universe occasionally
break out into the other world.
In the New York Times on Friday, Harvard sociologist Orlando
Patterson lamented that "there is a disturbing double standard in
the way we discuss the problems of different groups of people and in
the way we label deviant behavior. If the terrorist act of white,
middle-class teenagers creates an orgy of national soul-searching,
then surely the next time a heinous crime is committed by underclass
African-American or Latino kids, we should engage in the same kind
of national self-examination."
His was an eloquent appeal for love and understanding in a world
wherejustice is truly colorblind. In my parallel universe, however,
we aren't holding our breath.
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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