Sympathy for the (White) Devil
Capt Jay Baker of the Cherokee county sheriff’s office in Georgia recently made headlines and attracted a hurricane of criticism when he infamously said of Robert Aaron Long, a white man who killed eight people in a horrific shooting spree, many of them Asian women, “He was pretty much fed up, and kind of at [the] end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
People were understandably aghast that the spokesman for the Cherokee County’s sheriff office, a man whose job is literally to communicate with the public on law enforcement’s behalf, would characterize a massacre that horrified a nation so glibly and dismissively.
In what universe is having “a really bad day” any kind of rationale for hurting another human being, let alone buying a gun and murdering the employees of Asian spas?
The kindest possible interpretation of Baker’s “bad day” remarks is that the spokesman was paraphrasing Long’s own comments, that he was merely relaying what Long had said and not giving his own interpretation of the events.
He seems nice!
But if that were the case Baker should have been much clearer in articulating that he was merely relaying a suspected mass murderer’s excuses and his thoughts and sympathies of course lie with the eight people who were brutally murdered and their grieving families, not with the white man who did all of the killing.
Because of the abysmal manner in which Baker communicated with the press, it was easy to get the impression that he was on Long’s side, that he shared his frustrations and empathized with his pain. The day of Long’s killing spree was not a good one for the man pulling the trigger but it was a really bad one for the people he murdered and their loved ones. It was a terrible day. It was also their last day thanks to Long.
People were apoplectic about Baker’s words and attitude because they are so tone-deaf, appalling and insensitive but also because they fit neatly into a horrifying dynamic where young white men who commit horrible crimes against people of color or Jews or other religious groups are treated sympathetically by police and certain members of the press, a privilege not afforded to people of color.
With killers like Baker, the “question” on way too many people’s minds is “What could possibly have driven such a nice, white, straight Christian boy to do something so awful?”
Kyle Rittenhouse
Cops are so conditioned to see white people as fundamentally innocent and harmless that even when they kill multiple people, as in the case of Long and Kyle Rittenhouse, there is still a weird presumption of innocence, or a sense that there must be a good reason for the killing.
In the case of Rittenhouse, there is also the cult of self-defense. Republicans love nothing more than to imagine a world where they are the victims and targeted for persecution and/or destruction and the only thing standing between them and certain death is a loaded gun in the hands of a patriot who loves his country and the second amendment equally.
The bond of whiteness and racism is so strong between white killers and white cops that it can make a little criminality and killing (in self-defense, preferably) not just acceptable but justified, even righteous.
That’s why notorious racist and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson could say with a straight face, that the white criminals doing crimes by storming the Capitol were "people that loved this country” and “truly respect law enforcement" and “would never do anything to break the law” and consequently didn't scare at him at all, whereas “had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”
White fear of black violence is so potent that it can cause someone like Johnson to look at white violence being committed on behalf of a lawless white supremacist president and see only how much worse things would be if those awful Antifa and Black Lives Matter thugs were involved.
When white cops looked at Rittenhouse they saw themselves or someone who could be their awkward younger brother. When they look at black people, however, they’re much more likely to see a threat whether or not the person of color is doing anything wrong.
That’s because we live in a culture where non-whiteness is seen as inherently threatening regardless of context and whiteness is seen as non-threatening, even harmless.
That’s why we need to seriously re-think the role police play in our society to prevent more cops from sympathizing with white killers in a way that de-humanizes and de-values their victims when they do not remove them from the equation entirely.
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