say say my playmate

When we consider the myriad school shootings that have occurred between 1992 and 2002 (there have been twenty-eight cases), several constants stand out. All twenty-eight cases were committed by boys. All but one was committed by a white boy in a suburban or rural school. We speak of teen violence, youth violence, violence in the schools. but no one in the media ever seems to call it suburban white boy violence, although that is exactly what it is. Try a little thought experiment: Imagine that all the killers in the more famous shootings in the 1990s - Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas, were black girls from poor families who lived instead in New Haven, Boston, Chicago, Newark. Wouldn’t we now be having a national debate about inner-city black girls? Would not the media focus entirely on race, class, and gender?

Of course it would: We’d hear about the culture of poverty; about how life in the city breeds crime and violence; about some putative natural tendency among blacks towards violence. Someone would probably even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in vain imitation of boys. Yet the obvious fact that these school killers were all middle-class white boys seems to have escaped the media’s notice, in part because race, class, and gender are only visible when speaking of those who are not privileged by race, class and gender but invisible when speaking of those who are privileged by them.