The Mental Divide
Interwebs running too slow today to listen to this, so, to be fair, I don’t have the full context and am going with the transcript running on ThinkProgress.
That being said, this is Fox News host and radio personality John Gibson on why he knew the Cleveland school shooter was white:
He killed himself. Hip-hoppers do not kill themselves. They walk away. Now, I didn’t need to hear the kid was white with blond hair. Once he’d shot himself in the head, no hip-hopper. […]
And I could tell right away ’cause he killed himself. Black shooters don’t do that; they shoot and move on.
I could go on about the use of ‘hip-hoppers’ as a blanket term black youth, or really any number of things about this statement. Instead I just want to express how incredibly thankful I am that this is not how my brain works.
Speaking of race, there have been a rash of noose incidents since the Jena 6 case.
I’m starting to think that the definition of ‘privileged’ should be disassociated with wealth and applied to some standard involving character, though that’s not really the word I want to use. I do honestly feel privileged that I would never in a million years use a noose or any other race/hate tactic against a fellow human. And not because it’s something I objectively decide not to do, but that my mind simply doesn’t function that way.
While it’s appalling, there’s also something so utterly pathetic about the time and energy one must put into thinking about these meaningless distinctions. Think about someone who goes through the effort of buying rope and constructing a noose. They would then have to bring it to work or school in their bag, holding onto to it all day until a surreptitious time could be found to plant it.
While it’s hard to pity someone who terrorizes others (and, notably, having never been a victim), I think I would hate living like that more than I would hate being a victim.
There’s something so fundamentally sad about bigots, whatever their stripe.
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