When the dreaded ‘other’ is an angry white man
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Lately, the news seems filled with grim mug shots of angry white guys. A white man allegedly kills two black people at a supermarket after failing minutes earlier to enter a black church. Another opens fire at a yoga studio, killing two people and injuring five more before turning the gun on himself. And a third is accused of massacring 11 worshippers at a synagogue, afterward yelling, “I just want to kill Jews.”
Yet during this same period, Trump and others have warned Americans of another threat: a caravan of Latino migrants headed toward the United States to seek asylum. They’ve alternately said the caravan is filled with gang members, “Middle Easterners” and even people with rabies. Trump also announced plans to deploy as many as 15,000 US troops to repel the “invasion” and warned that if any of the caravan’s migrants threw rocks at troops, they could be shot — a threat he later denied.
No one is saying the recent spate of shootings can be blamed on the GOP. But the contrast between the terror that many Americans actually experience and the specter of violence that Trump invoked is a classic example of an insidious form of racism that some say is pervasive, though seldom acknowledged:
Angry white men seeing “primitive aggressions” in others that they refuse to see in themselves:
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