The Normalization of White Male Violence
Seven summers ago, when Dylann Roof killed nine parishioners in a Charleston church, he signaled that perhaps white millennials would not, in fact, be more racially progressive than their parents or grandparents. Here, again, the hard truth that progress is not linear: Payton Gendron, the Buffalo shooter, is 18 years old — ten years younger than Dylann Roof. The even harder truth: White racial violence is our nation’s default position. And subsequently, Black anxiety is my constant companion.
This dance of managing white liberal feelings in the midst of white-supremacist aggression is simply an added layer of exhaustion made more ironic by the fact, that however much well-meaning white folks might decry and condemn such violent acts, their lives are not harmed structurally through the commission of violence. More pointedly, their place atop the hierarchy is secured through these acts.
This, I would argue, is the reason that, not infrequently, a young white man shows up to slaughter Black folks doing some mundane task like grocery shopping on a Saturday morning. After the slaughter, he walks out of the store alive; his victims do not. Read HERE.