Download Supremacy Crimes Gloria Steinem

Supremacy Crimes
Gloria Steinem is a feminist writer of world renown, and a founding
editor of Ms. magazine. The full version of this article appeared in Ms.,
August/September 1999. Reprinted by permission of Ms. Magazine,
©1999.
You've seen the ocean of television coverage, you've read the headlines:
"How to Spot a Troubled Kid," "Twisted Teens," "When Teens Fall
Apart."
After the slaughter in Colorado that inspired those phrases, dozens of
copycat threats were reported in the same generalized way: "Junior high
students charged with conspiracy to kill students and teachers" (in
Texas); "Five honor students overheard planning a June graduation
bombing" (in New York). Nonetheless, another attack was soon
reported: "Youth with 2 Guns Shoots 6 at Georgia School."
I don't know about you, but I've been talking back to the television set,
waiting for someone to tell us the obvious: it's not "youth," "our
children," or "our teens." It's our sons--and "our" can usually be read as
"white," "middle class," and "heterosexual."
We know that hate crimes, violent and otherwise, are overwhelmingly
committed by white men who are apparently straight. The same is true
for an even higher percentage of impersonal, resentment-driven, mass
killings like those in Colorado; the sort committed for no economic or
rational gain except the need to say, "I'm superior because I can kill."
White males--usually intelligent, middle class, and heterosexual, or
trying desperately to appear so--also account for virtually all the serial,
sexually motivated, sadistic killings, those characterized by stalking,
imprisoning, torturing, and "owning" victims in death. Think of Edmund
Kemper, who began by killing animals, then murdered his grandparents,
yet was released to sexually torture and dismember college students and
other young women until he himself decided he "didn't want to kill all
the coeds in the world." Or David Berkowitz, the son of Sam, who
murdered some women in order to feel in control of all women. Or
consider Ted Bundy, the charming, snobbish young would-be lawyer
who tortured and murdered as many as 40 women, usually beautiful
students who were symbols of the economic class he longed to join.
These "senseless" killings begin to seem less mysterious when you
consider that they were committed disproportionately by white, nonpoor males, the group most likely to become hooked on the drug of
superiority. It's a drug pushed by a male-dominant culture that presents
dominance as a natural right; a racist hierarchy that falsely elevates
whiteness; a materialist society that equates superiority with possessions,
and a homophobic one that empowers only one form of sexuality.
As Elliot Leyton reports in Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern
Multiple Murderer, these killers see their behavior as "an appropriate-even 'manly'--response to the frustrations and disappointments that are a
normal part of life." In other words, it's not their life experiences that are
the problem, it's the impossible expectation of dominance to which
they've become addicted.
This is not about blame. This is about causation. If anything, ending the
massive cultural cover-up of supremacy crimes should make heroes out
of boys and men who reject violence, especially the notion of
superiority, altogether. Even if one believes in a biogenetic component
of male aggression, the very existence of gentle men proves that
socialization can override it.
Nor is this about attributing such crimes to a single cause. Addiction to
the drug of supremacy is not their only root, just the deepest and most
ignored one.
But it is truly remarkable, given the relative reasons for anger at injustice
in this country, that white, non-poor men have a near-monopoly on
multiple killings of strangers, whether serial and sadistic or mass and
random. How can we ignore this obvious fact? Others may kill to
improve their own condition--in self-defense, or for money or drugs; to
eliminate enemies; to declare turf in drive-by shootings; even for a
jacket or a pair of sneakers--but white males addicted to supremacy kill
even when it worsens their condition or ends in suicide.
Men of color and females are capable of serial and mass killings, and
commit just enough to prove it. Think of Colin Ferguson, the crazed
black man on the Long Island Railroad, or Wayne Williams, the young
black man in Atlanta who kidnapped and killed black boys, apparently to
conceal his homosexuality. Think of Waneta Hoyt, the upstate New York
woman who strangled her five infant children between 1965 and 1971,
disguising their cause of death as sudden infant death syndrome.
Nonetheless, the proportion of serial killings that are not committed by
white males is about the same as the proportion of anorexics who are not
female. Yet we discuss the gender, race, and class components of
anorexia, but not the role of the same factors in producing epidemics
among the powerful.
As for the victims, if racial identities had been reversed, would racism
remain so little discussed? In fact, the [Colorado] killers themselves said
they were targeting blacks and athletes. They used a racial epithet, shot a
black male student in the head, and then laughed over the fact that they
could see his brain. What if that had been reversed?
What if these two young murderers, who were called "fags" by some of
the jocks at Columbine High School, actually had been gay? Would they
have got the same sympathy for being gay-baited? What if they had been
lovers? Would we hear as little about their sexuality as we now do, even
though only their own homophobia could have given the word "fag"
such power to humiliate them?
Take one more leap of imagination: suppose these killings had been
planned and executed by young women--of any race, sexuality, or class.
Would the media still be so uninterested in the role played by genderconditioning? Would journalists assume that female murderers had
suffered from being shut out of access to power in high school, so much
so that they were pushed beyond their limits? What if dozens, even
hundreds of young women around the country had made imitative
threats--as young men have done--expressing admiration for a wellplanned massacre and promising to do the same? Would we be
discussing their youth more than their gender, as is the case so far with
these male killers?
I think we begin to see that our national self-examination is ignoring
something fundamental, precisely because it's like the air we breathe: the
white male factor, the middle-class and heterosexual one, and the
promise of superiority it carries. Yet this denial is self-defeating--to say
the least. We will never reduce the number of violent Americans, from
bullies to killers, without challenging the assumptions on which
masculinity is based: that males are superior to females, that they must
find a place in a male hierarchy, and that the ability to dominate someone
is so important that even a mere insult can justify lethal revenge. There
are plenty of studies to support this view. As Dr. James Gilligan
concluded in Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, "If humanity
is to evolve beyond the propensity toward violence...then it can only do
so by recognizing the extent to which the patriarchal code of honor and
shame generates and obligates male violence."
I think the way out can be found through a deeper reversal: just as we as
society have begun to raise our daughters more like sons--more like
whole people--we must begin to raise our sons more like our daughters--
that is, to value empathy as well as hierarchy; to measure success by
other people's welfare as well as their own.
But first, we have to admit and name the truth about supremacy crimes.