WHITE VIOLENCE

I saw a clip on facebook from the Chris Hayes show, ALL IN. He had a guest from the West Coast, Cord Jefferson a writer at gawker.com, whose theme was taking a look at white culture with a cold eye. He said black culture is taken for a violent culture the tv news affirms. He pointed out a recent riot at Huntington Beach in California where a crowd of unruly white boys broke loose at a surfing competition, tearing up, looting, being stupid white boys, drunk, high and violent. He showed a short video of knocking over some porta-potties and making mayhem. Seeing the guys involved, watching them act like they saw themselves in a Rambo movie, I thought these are the same guys you see in a mosh pit at hard-core punk concerts, college jocks pretending to be Vikings raiding an Irish seaside village. Similar mayhem on a larger scale happened at the end of Woodstock 99. They're the people you see down in front at big concerts. At Rolling Stones concerts now they have white pony tails.

I was glad to hear Cord Jefferson address the issue of white violence. Because most white people don't behave violently (outside the house). We tend to think of the violent people as aberrant, people we don't know, those people. I believe the same can be said of the black people, who I have known to be peaceable people. I don't know the world of the inner city gangbangers, nor do I know what it is like to be peaceable people trying to raise respectable kids in a world that won't accept them. We in the white world tend not to even think about the violent people. We stay away from places where something unpredictable might erupt, In high school we let the hoods stay to themselves, while the jocks are the rock stars, automatic popularity, access to the hottest babes, violent behavior rewarded with a virtual merit badge for coolness. Maybe it is an aspect of warrior culture where the boys are raised to kill and be killed for the flag to encourage boys to rowdiness. In WW2 the boys who volunteered to fly the kamikazes to their death would have the run of the bars and whores before his flight. I believe several "terrorists" from the Middle East have been found to be committing all the sins before their suicide moment, because they automatically go to heaven, so just as well get a little here when it doesn't count against you at heaven's door.

I've often wondered if college boy violence and drunkenness is encouraged. During that time of my life, it was peer pressure by tradition, by custom, for the boys to be at least a little bit wild. Boys quite naturally fight. Or maybe it has become that way because it was encouraged from birth. Parents and everybody else treat little girls very differently from how they treat little boys. From day one, it's Little Man or Princess. Daddies that grew up with a name for fighting tend to want their boys to be good fighters too. The boys at school who are the fighters are a minority, quite a minority. At all the schools I went to, most of the boys just wanted to get along in peace. I don't have any idea what it's like to be in school now. It would be different in different places. I suspect the tough guy persona is the same now as then, just different, again, in different places. The guys I saw in the Huntington Beach incident were the same as guys I knew in high school, ball caps on backwards the only difference. This is American white guy behavior. These are the guys the others look up to and admire, but secretly don't. There is not only training, but testosterone has its role too. Roosters, dogs and tomcats are the closest to home examples. The only thing I can say about the fighting urge among men is, that's what we do. History is ongoing warfare of the blood-letting variety, up close and personal, until the 20th Century. And now the drones.

I believe this man, Cord Jefferson, is onto something. I know he is. It's in front of our faces every day obvious, and suddenly someone has pointed it out as a social phenomenon we need to look at, now that black violence has been a media sensation for so many years. White violence has been deprived of media attention, except for school slayings. But no matter how many of these school killings, no media attention given to it as white on white violence as an issue. It's just accepted that they're white guys, outsiders. They must be proven outsiders, which they are, to distinguish them from the respectable white people. Now that white people are only half the population, white people no longer are an automatic majority. Now that white people are no longer the majority, it's a good time to size up privileged white violence, bring it up for examination with the same zeal as black violence. White boys grow up in a tough world of other white boys. Violence by white boys is privileged. In corporate media world I don't see an examination of privileged white boys going very far. Sponsors don't want too much that doesn't look good about the privileged race. The corporate world is about the privileged race, as are the congress, the senate, the supreme court, the Bank. Mr Whiteman, the philosophe of the republican party, the man so easy for cartoonists to make into a pig, Rush Limbaugh, has lost his airwaves status. Sponsors have withdrawn. White man hatred is no longer acceptable. I'd like to see this a trend to cease the glorification of white violence, mental as well as physical.

 

 

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