Occam's Razor

Since I’m a white male, I’m starting to think that maybe I need to be profiled and tracked. It seems like we white males as a class are pretty dangerous critters. Maybe we need a tag, neuter and release program. (Good news: I’m already neutered.) These days it seems like any one of us white males could go off like Vesuvius at any moment and probably take out a dozen or more innocent bystanders in the process. Of course we’ll use a gun, a semi-automatic one if we can get one. It makes killing strangers so much faster and lethal. Not a problem, according to the NRA and, hey, Buy American!

I know what you are thinking: “Mark, what the heck are you talking about? It’s the black males that are being tracked and profiled mostly because it’s black males that are committing most of these crimes. Why should a relatively prosperous, older, white guy like you be thought suspicious?”

Dear reader, it’s because it’s us white guys that are most likely to pop their gaskets and do crazy stuff. You know something is up when you encounter this statistic: white men make up 36% of the population but cause 75% of mass shootings. I may be out of the woods, as I am pushing sixty, living in Massachusetts and my testosterone levels are now officially low. If you are looking out for dangerous men though you’d be smart to profile us white guys. I can see it now: police cruisers driving around bowling alleys and American Legion halls and pushing around white guys in undershirts with rolled up shirtsleeves. Particularly when we are in our early manhood years, we can be teakettles on high boil without a ventilation hole. But it’s also possible we’ll go postal if we feel we are victimized, unloved or suffered one too many misfortunes. We are white men, after all. If there is supposed to be one privileged class in the United States, we’re it. After all, all but one of our presidents was a white guy.

It seems though that surging with testosterone and a sense of entitlement, psychologically we white men are more often on a hair trigger. I base this in part on my own personal experience. Ages eighteen to 22 were particularly challenging for me. My testosterone levels could not have been higher. There were times when walking down a hallway I would literally shake from another testosterone surge. I’d ache for the intimate touch of a woman (never forthcoming) the way an alcoholic craves that next spot of gin. I was reading arguably crazy and wacky books like this one and that one and kind of accepting them. Eventually my hormone levels receded to the point I realized I felt embarrassed that I even took those books seriously. (I’m wondering if Rand Paul’s hormones are still surging. I mean, Atlas Shrugged? Grow up!) To quote the musician Meat Loaf, I was “all revved up with no place to go”, just like Dylann Roof. I obviously did not go psycho but it’s not like the occasional psycho thought did not pass my mind. Sometimes they frequently passed through my mind. Lots of days I battled an inner rage masked by weak smiles and hiding behind books.

So if you want to talk about who’s likely to be a deadly and homicidal wacko, it’s hard not to single out us white guys. I think Americans tend to deny the obvious because there are so many of us. It also helps to be the sex and race that basically runs most of the United States. I might add that as a class we aren’t doing a great job of it. It’s hard to imagine that any other class of people couldn’t do a better job of running the country.

And then there’s the stuff we do just to get attention. Of course there are the stupid jock tricks, puking our guts out, harassing women, drag racing on public streets, knocking over mailboxes and plastering graffiti, which is actually the more benign stuff. When it comes to the really wacko stuff though, white males are Number One. Take a look at this Wikipedia page of rampages in the Americas and sift through those that occurred in the United States. With a few exceptions, it’s us white guys going postal. Here are a few in the top dozen:

• James Eagan Holmes, white male, age 24, killed 12 and injured 62 in Aurora, Colorado in 2012. He is just now coming to trial. (I blogged about this one.)
• George Pierre Hennard killed 23 people and wounded 12 in Killeen, Texas in 1993. He was 35 and white.
• Michael McLendon, white male, age 28, killed 10 and injured 6 in 2009 in incidents in three cities in Alabama
• Charles Raymond Starkweather, a white male, age 19, killed 10 people at various places across the United States 1958
• Michael Allen Silka, age 25, killed 9 and injured 1 in two incidents, one in Alaska and one in Alabama in 1984

I did find a few exceptions. James Edward Pough was black and he killed 11 and injured 6 in Jacksonville, Florida in 1990. Caril Ann Fugate was an accomplice of Charles Starkweather and was only 14 at the time. She holds a dubious record of sorts: the youngest woman to ever be tried and convicted for murder as an adult. Jiverly Wong is sort of white (Vietnamese) and a naturalized American citizen. At age 41, he killed 13 and wounded 4 in Binghamton, New York in 2009.

Anyhow, check out that Wikipedia page. It’s not hard to document that white men, most of them age 30 and younger, were responsible for most of these rampages. Dylann Roof’s recent racist rampage killed nine worshippers in a Charleston, South Carolina black church. Guess what? He is a white male, age 21, and a social loaner that is convinced that whites are superior. He says black men are disproportionately raping white women, although there is no evidence to back up this preposterous claim. He also conveniently forgets to mention the raping that often was instigated by white slave holders on their black female “property.” This likely included our third president, Thomas Jefferson.

It’s likely that all men suffer disproportionately from the same tendency, so the roots of these rampages are more likely environmental than genetic. You rarely hear about a woman going postal, even though women tend to suffer more from mental illnesses. I have a number of logical guesses for why white men are usually to blame for these mass murders here in the United States. These include:

• Expectations for white men are unrealistically high. They are expected to clear more hurdles more regularly than other men and women.
• White men compete with other white men for social status. Most of us won’t be in the top 10%. It’s hard not to feel inferior or worthless if you are on the left side of the bell curve.
• The male self-reliance myth that is mostly handed down from father to son, but is also part of the white male culture. When real life shows that we white men are as human, vulnerable and need help and meaningful connections from others like everyone else, it sets up a bad case of cognitive dissonance.

It all amounts to feeling disproportionately inferior and put upon, which can feed introversion and social disconnection. Eventually it leads to hurt feelings, and sometimes the anger we saw on Dylann Roof’s web site. In extraordinary cases it results in a rage so extreme it generates mass homicides of strangers.

It’s these myths imposed as things that white men must live up to that I believe are often triggering these men. Until more white men give up these stereotypes and these myths, more events like the one in Charleston are sadly predictable. Also predictable will be the sex, race and age bracket of the perpetrators.