Yes, Elliot Rodger is White: What the Santa Barbara Shooter Can Teach Us About Race and Masculinity

[mwrguy]

For people that think race is about genetics.

Elliot Rodger was/is a white man.

For some people, this fact is very controversial and upsetting.

As I wrote in 'The True Alpha Male': The Santa Barbara Mass Shooting, Elliot Rodger, and Aggrieved White Male Entitlement Syndrome, when the bad behavior of white people is publicly called to account, said person’s relationship to “Whiteness” is rarely discussed.

To be forced to include white mass murderers, madmen, and Right-wing domestic terrorists as part of the tribe is very uncomfortable and disconcerting.

This is understandable: what reasonable person would not want to excommunicate them from their community and affinity group?

Only white folks have such a luxury in the United States: a black rapist, thief, or murderer is de facto a representative of “the black race” with its “bad culture” and “pathologies”. There is no parallel for whites. The white murderer, thief, rapist, or mass shooter is an outlier, “mentally ill”, or some type of deviant whose behavior reveals nothing about white people en masse.

The boundaries of Whiteness and white privilege are heavily policed: bad people are “them”; good people are “us”.

Part of the appeal of “race” as a heuristic device and decision-rule is how it offers simple answers to complex social questions.

Despite what white supremacists and their allies would like to believe, race is a social construct with little to no biological basis. There is one race: the human race. Human beings have not existed long enough to be divided up into distinct breeds like dogs.

In the West, a person’s “blood quantum”, phenotype, or skin color has been, and continues to be used to calculate their location within a society’s racial hierarchy.

Stereotypes and assumptions related to behavior can also be neatly triangulated relative to race as well.

The question “what are you?” is often less an existential matter about consciousness and agency, than an effort to locate a given person within a society’s racial order.

Wait a minute! Elliot Rodger’s mother was Asian! How can he be white!

These predictable (and tired) objections reflect a desire for simplicity in how race is conceptualized and discussed.

Whiteness is malleable.

Elliot Rodger is a white man with an “Asian” mother. Allowing for how race is constructed in a very different way for African-Americans, Barack Obama is a black man with a white mother. Moreover, Rodger’s Asian ancestry would be of no concern if he did not commit mass murder: there would be no reason for those who police the boundaries of Whiteness and white privilege to jettison him from the clan.

http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2014/05/yes-elliot-rodger-is-white-what-santa.html

[Louisiana1976]

1. Excellent post. K&R

[mwrguy]

2. Thank you

[redqueen]

3. K&R nt

[DonViejo]

4. Elliot Rodger’s half-white male privilege - by Joan Walsh

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025019263

[shaayecanaan]

5. this is pathetic

You can see conservatives having a field day with this: look at the left, trying to make out that because he's a bad guy, he must be white.

Even if you disregard genetics, the fact is that he identified as Eurasian.