Aside from attacks on the Second Amendment, there is a certain theme that’s now repeated after every massacre committed by an unhinged individual: that most all mass killers are white. After the recent Elliot Rodger murders, for instance, Michael Moore said that he no longer had “anything to say” before immediately saying, “Nearly all of our mass shootings are by angry or disturbed white males.” Not to be one-upped in the inanity department by a mass of male whiteness, one Brittney Cooper at Salon wrote, “How many times must troubled young white men engage in these terroristic acts that make public space unsafe for everyone before we admit that white male privilege kills?” Ironically, Cooper had mentioned, parenthetically, that “as many commenters have pointed out, [Rodger] had a white father and mother of Asian descent,” but, hey, you can’t let a minor detail get in the way of a good racial screed. And perhaps mass killing is such a Caucasian domain that perpetrating one bestows a person with honorary whiteness. Yet about this we should ask a question:
Before rushing to play pin the tale on the honkey, did anyone bother to check the history of mass killings?
Because I have — a comprehensive list dating from 1982 through 9/16/2013 is found at Mother Jones here — and guess what?
Of the last 20 mass killings of that period, 9 were perpetrated by non-whites.
That would be 45 percent, which exceeds non-whites’ 37 percent share of the population.
Of the last 30 mass killings, 11 were committed by non-whites — right at the 37 percent mark.
And what if we go all the way back to 1982? We then have 66 mass killings in which the races of the perpetrators were known, and 22 of them, or one-third, were at the hands of non-whites. Note here that America’s demographics have been changing, with non-whites comprising only about 20 percent of the population in 1982; thus, if we consider an approximate average non-white population of 28.5 percent during the 31-year period in question, it appears that, again, mass murderers are slightly disproportionately non-white.
In other words, there is no evidence whatsoever that mass killings are a characteristically white phenomenon.
And there never was.
