Guno צְבִי
Am Yisrael Chai
In recent years, the United States has seen a surge of white supremacist mass shootings against racial minorities. While not always the case, mass shooters tend to be young white men.
Some journalists and researchers have argued that class and ideals of white masculinity are partly to blame.
This argument is not surprising. Throughout U.S. history, white men’s anxieties over their manhood and social class help explain many violent attacks on Black people, whom the perpetrators blame for denying them their rightful privileges.
Such was the case with Dylann Roof, a then 22-year-old white supremacist who was convicted and sentenced to death in the 2015 deaths of nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
In another case involving a racist mass shooting, Payton Gendron, a white supremacist who believed a slew of racist conspiracy theories he discovered online, was sentenced to life in prison after his convictions on the 2022 murders of 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
One such unfounded conspiracy that then 18-year-old Gendron frequently cited was the “great replacement theory,” the false idea that a group is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage and, eventually, violence. Such ideas reflect white supremacist beliefs, but they also reveal deep insecurities about white men’s social status in America.
It’s my belief as a scholar of U.S. history, labor, ethnicity and masculinity that Roof, Gendron and other recent mass shooters in racist attacks share similar insecurities with their historical predecessors.
news.yahoo.com
Some journalists and researchers have argued that class and ideals of white masculinity are partly to blame.
This argument is not surprising. Throughout U.S. history, white men’s anxieties over their manhood and social class help explain many violent attacks on Black people, whom the perpetrators blame for denying them their rightful privileges.
Such was the case with Dylann Roof, a then 22-year-old white supremacist who was convicted and sentenced to death in the 2015 deaths of nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
In another case involving a racist mass shooting, Payton Gendron, a white supremacist who believed a slew of racist conspiracy theories he discovered online, was sentenced to life in prison after his convictions on the 2022 murders of 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
One such unfounded conspiracy that then 18-year-old Gendron frequently cited was the “great replacement theory,” the false idea that a group is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage and, eventually, violence. Such ideas reflect white supremacist beliefs, but they also reveal deep insecurities about white men’s social status in America.
It’s my belief as a scholar of U.S. history, labor, ethnicity and masculinity that Roof, Gendron and other recent mass shooters in racist attacks share similar insecurities with their historical predecessors.
Today’s white working-class young men who turn to racist violence are part of a long, sad American history
Throughout US history, racist attacks against racial minorities were committed by white men grappling with their masculinity and social status.
