I will not opine on the question of whether the recent execution-style murders of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, constitute a "hate crime." That is a legal definition and will be decided eventually, correctly or not, in court.
Instead, I will suggest that the actions of Craig Hicks constitute a White Anxiety Crime (WAC). I have no statutory authority to apply this label, only a lifetime's study of history and culture.
Today, in Europe and in North America, white anxiety is reaching a fever pitch.
The problem in Europe stems from its never-properly-atoned-for colonial legacy combined with the slow-motion collapse of the Neo-Liberal dream that appears to have been the underlying justification for the EU (witness the recent elections in Greece and Spain).
The problem in the U.S. is slightly different. In 2012 the U.S. census bureau reported that 50.4 % of all children under age 1 in the U.S. are minorities (non-white). This is a first in a country that was founded upon a never-properly-atoned-for white slaughter of red people and white enslavement of black people. The potential implications of this demographic shift for the future of white supremacy in the U.S. are not difficult to fathom.
White anxiety in Europe and the U.S. expresses itself in scape-goating: if you've never read Norman Cohn's classic Europe's Inner Demons, this would be a good time to do so.
No one is safe from the paranoia of white people afraid of losing their "God-given" privileges to those who are not "their kind." No one. But people perceived to be non-white by anxious whites are especially vulnerable.
No comments:
Post a Comment