The left sure isn’t letting the Parkland shooting crisis go to waste. They’ve pulled out all the stops: shell-shocked kids libeling politicians and gun owners, flailing commercial boycotts, and playing good cop-bad cop with the Second Amendment. (“I don’t know how long I can restrain him. Just give me expanded background checks and age restrictions, and I might be able to calm him down.”)
Progressives of all stripes and gender identities find the chaos exciting and the attention seductive. They want in. And if your particular hobby horse issues aren’t really in play in the current crisis, relax. This is the Intersectional Age where, if you pretend hard enough, you can align all identity-based kvetching into one struggle against the tyranny of white male genitalia. Witness Salon’s Chauncy DeVega asking, “Did white privilege protect Nikolas Cruz?”
White privilege can be lethal. On Feb. 14, in Parkland, Florida, it was channeled through toxic white masculinity when Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and wounded dozens more.
“Toxic white masculinity!” Clearly, we are in the presence of 3rd-degree black belt intersectionalist. The white part is DeVega’s real concern. In short: you know all those dozens of calls and warnings the police and FBI failed to act on before the shooting? White privilege. “The many ways that white privilege and the color line intersect [Ding! 20 points!] with guns and masculinity in the tragic case of the Parkland massacre could be a chapter in a textbook for an Introduction to Sociology course,” DeVegas says. Or a “How Not To” policy paper for law enforcement.
Did DeVegas notice the shooters’ last name is Cruz? Surely some racist investigator would decide the guy’s he’s getting warnings about is one of DeVegas’s “brown people,” and “be extremely aggressive, escalate to physical force, act in a more lethal manner,” or at least have Cruz “institutionalized and otherwise monitored by the state, meaning the criminal justice system and social service agencies.”
You see, “black and brown” people are more likely to be on the receiving end of “proactive” policing. Black Lives Matter tells us so. DeVegas suggests Cruz got a pass because he was white, and lived in a white neighborhood. “Ultimately, black and brown communities -- especially if they are also poor or working-class -- are routinely over-policed in America. By comparison, white communities are in fact under-policed.”
Perhaps, but resources being finite, police have to go where the crime is. DeVega should ask Baltimore residents how they feel about being under-policed these days. Imagine if police departments were to do the opposite. If they swapped their footprint in “black and brown” neighborhoods with that white neighborhoods, outlets like Salon would scream that police don’t care about protecting black people.
Besides, DeVegas says mass shootings like Parkland are committed by “disaffected white men and boys with guns.” But as horrible as they are, such massacres only account for only a tiny percentage of violent crime in the country. In one weekend last month more than 30 people were shot (six fatally) in Chicago. The vast majority occurred on the South and West Sides. That goes on almost every weekend in the same general neighborhoods. How many resources should Chicago PD spend on brooding loners in Polish neighborhoods?
Then DeVegas throws out this old trope:
It is almost so obvious as to not require comment that a Muslim or Arab who was accused of stockpiling weapons would have been immediately detained or arrested on suspicion of "terrorism."
The Muslim that shot up the Pulse nightclub was on the FBI’s radar. They certainly didn’t intervene before it was too late. Ditto the Boston bombers. And long before Nidal Hassan killed 13 unarmed soldiers at Ft. Hood, superiors and coworkers suspected his extremism and did nothing because of an environment of political correctness.
But those are facts, and DeVegas is a good “woke” intersectionalist, looking for ways to make a bad story worse. Mass murder, gross incompetence and cowardice aren’t enough. Throw race in the mix. Sure, it doesn’t belong there, but every body’s invited to this party.
