PubDate: Sunday, April 1, 2001
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Page
WB - 3
Contact:
www.sfgate.comURL:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?Þle=/chronicle/archive/2001/04/01/SC152103.DTLAuthor:
Mike Weiss
WHITE BOYS
LOADED
THIS COLUMN has been a statistic-free zone. But
here are some
numbers that stunned me:
White high school
seniors are seven times more likely than blacks
to have used cocaine; eight
times more likely to have smoked
crack; seven times more likely to have used
heroin. More white
students have used crystal meth than black students have
smoked
cigarettes.
If you, like me, are white, those numbers
probably run contrary to
your assumptions. However, they come from the U.S.
Department of
Health and Human Services. And there's more, this time from
the
Centers for Disease Control:
Between the ages of 12 and 17, whites
are more likely to sell
drugs, twice as likely to binge drink, and about
twice as likely
to drive drunk. And here's the kicker: White males are twice
as
likely to bring a weapon to school as black males.
So white boys
are loaded, and they're loaded. As white
middle-class parents of relative
privilege, my friends and I don't
notice this nor do we want to be told.
That's one of the essential
points made by a Nashville writer and educator
named Tim Wise, who
gathered these numbers for an Internet article that's
caused a
stir.
"White people live in a state Of self-delusion," Wise
wrote after
the Santee high school massacre. "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 Þnd an
'all-American' town, life will be better
because things like this don't
happen here. Well, in case you
hadn't noticed, 'here' is about the only place
these kinds of
things do happen."
Wise's piece has touched a nerve. By
last week, he had received
5,500 e- mails, he says, and was still being
interviewed by the
media many times each day. Friends and parents were
sending his
article to each other; I received a number of copies. Much
of
Wise's mail was from people of color who were surprised and
gratiÞed to
Þnd a white writer looking at whites the way whites
usually look at people of
color.
What occasioned his piece was listening to the commentary in
the
wake of the latest school shooting. These shootings in
"nice
communities" have been going on for Þve years now, and we in
the
media have said a zillion times that the shooters tend to be
loners
who were picked on and had access to guns. We've hardly
mentioned that
they're all white.
What got Wise's ire up was that once again the FBI
insisted that
there was no proÞle of a school shooter. "Come again?" says
Wise.
"White boy after white boy after white boy . . . decides to
use
their classmates for target practice, and yet there is no
proÞle?
Imagine if all these killers had been black."
That's an
observation as plain and persuasive as the whiteness I
see when I look in the
mirror. I'm not sure, however, I can take
the next step with him into what he
calls "the dysfunctionality of
privilege."
He argues that since
middle- and upper-class white kids don't have
to endure systemic barriers to
advancement, they lack the coping
mechanisms that kids of color and poor kids
have developed to live
with daily frustrations. When the privileged are up
against it,
they pop: substance abuse, suicide, guns and these
shootings.
Though Wise stops there, much of what's been written about
these
shootings dwells on the spiritual emptiness and competitiveness
of
the kind of mostly white, relatively afþuent suburbs similar to
the one
where I live. The competitiveness - to belong, to get the
best grades, to
have the nicest car -
is real enough. We parents are not blind to having
acquiesced to a
super- competitive upbringing for our kids. What we are
abashed to
acknowledge - when our kids have so much - is that the
pressure
to compete may be too great for some. It seems our kids are
soft
when the struggle of poorer kids is so much more daunting.
But
pointing the Þnger at spiritual emptiness to explain what's
going on strikes
me as facile. Alienation is the usual and normal
state of middle-class white
American adolescents. How much
spiritual difference is there between Holden
CaulÞeld in "Catcher
in the Rye," and 50 years later Stan in Eminem's Grammy
winning
song?
Two things have changed in my lifetime: The ubiquity of
guns and
the warp- speed and wrap-around media that inundates us not
just
with sex and violence but with whatever is the hot new idea of
the
day. White dysfunctionality, for instance.
You can e-mail Mike
Weiss at
mikeweiss@sfchronicle.com.
2001
San Francisco Chronicle