“Can I go ahead and scream yet? It’s time for America to admit what it’s long resisted: white male privilege kills.”
Salon.com contributing writer Brittney Cooper, who also teaches Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, has figured out what caused Elliot Rodger to go on his rampage: white privilege. Absent from the article is any acknowledgment that the shooter was half-Asian.
“Welp. Another young white guy has decided that his disillusionment with his life should become somebody else’s problem,” she begins. “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?”
She then states, “Black men are not rolling onto college campuses and into movie theaters on a regular basis to shoot large amounts of people. Usually, the young men who do that are white, male, heterosexual, and middle-class.”
Cooper offers an analysis of Rodger’s video and 140-page note and says that his behavior is definitively attributed to white privilege:
And make no mistake: from my standpoint as an arm chair therapist — having read transcripts of Rodger’s videos — his anger is about his failure to be able to access all the markers of white male heterosexual middle class privilege. He goes on and on about his status as a virgin, his inability to find a date since middle school, his anger and resentment about being rejected by blonde, sorority women. In fact, he claims he will “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut I see.” As Jessica Valenti so thoroughly demonstrates: “misogyny kills.” I am struck by the extent to which Rodger believed he was entitled to have what he deemed the prettiest girls, he was entitled to women’s bodies, and when society denied him these “entitlements” he thought it should become the public’s problem. He thought that his happiness was worth the slaughter of multiple people.
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