What If It Wasn’t in Suburbia?

The murderous rampage by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris left many parents, school officials, politicians and the police shaking their heads in puzzlement that it happened in Littleton, Colo., and not some other place. After all, Littleton is a mostly white middle-class suburb with two-story modern homes, neat lawns and well-attended PTA meetings. A major scandal is when a neighborhood kid is caught shoplifting or driving drunk.

But behind their puzzlement is a huge presumption that their neighborhood is a cordon sanitaire against the violence that is thought to occur exclusively in the ghettos and barrios. This ignores the fact that recent teen shooting sprees at schools across America did not occur at predominantly black or Latino inner-city schools but at predominantly white schools in Jonesboro, Ark., West Paducah, Ky., Edinboro, Pa., and Springfield, Ore. It denies the harsh reality that there are plenty of negligent parents, indifferent teachers, lackadaisical school officials and emotionally tortured students in the suburbs, too.

The presumption that the violence at Columbine High School happens only in other places also rests on a heavy foundation of racial stereotypes and myths about African Americans and Latinos. Suburban kids and their parents are fed tales of crime, drugs, gangs, violence and dysfunctional families in the ghettos and barrios.

Legions of politicians have built and sustained their careers by screaming for tougher laws, police and prisons to crack down on ghetto and barrio crime. The presumption that inner-city neighborhoods equals bad kids and bad homes comforts and ultimately deludes many parents into turning a blind eye when their own kids take drugs, intimidate others, toss around racist epithets, prance around in gangster-style trench coat attire, drape themselves in Nazi paraphernalia or play mayhem and mass murder on the Internet.

The presumption that savage rampages aren’t supposed to happen in places such as Littleton also allowed school officials, teachers, the police and probation officials to miss the glaring signs that Harris and Klebold were time bombs.

When a monstrous tragedy like the Columbine massacre happens, it shouldn’t matter what the income, status or color of the victims are. Their deaths should evoke the same reaction of grief and compassion. But the nagging suspicion is that if the dead and wounded had been African American or Latino kids at an inner-city school, there would not have been the intense and prolonged national agony and outrage. The television networks would not have had daily round-the-clock coverage, with a small army of psychologists and educators endlessly analyzing troubled youth. There would not have been the instant clamor by Congress and state legislators for tougher gun control. The NRA would not have called off nearly all its convention activities in Denver this weekend. The vice president and a parade of a dignitaries would not have trooped to the memorial services for the victims.

Outrages that victimize minorities tend to draw muted public fury, perfunctory expressions of regret from public officials, and then disappear from the nation’s headlines. There is also deep doubt that if the perpetrators of the assault had been black or Latino that they would have been characterized simply as two kids gone haywire and the bunch they hung out with benignly labeled a clique. They almost certainly would have been lambasted as gangsters, thugs, terrorists and predators.

When much of the media routinely brands inner-city parents as irresponsible and derelict and their kids as violence-prone, it’s small wonder that those who live in places such as Littleton can delude themselves that kids like Harris and Klebold don’t live in their neighborhoods. But they do. And to ignore them or pretend that they don’t is to perpetuate the worst stereotypes.

*

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of “The Crisis in Black and Black.” E-mail: [email protected].