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'He was a quiet and normal kid': The infantilization of young, white, male domestic terrorists
what we should be saying to the media and to white America about
the pathological need to humanize white men who commit mass shootings.
It is a pattern that people of color are all too familiar with.
It is a pattern that some women can see clearly.
with predictable certainty, the media launched into a series of mind-numbing, willfully ignorant reports in which they obsessively search for answers—
imploring us to understand what would make such a nice, normal white boy do such a terrible thing.
Quiet. Normal. Nerdy. From a tight-knit, godly family. Polite. Unremarkable. No criminal record. Challenged.
These are some of the adjectives used to describe Conditt by major newspapers across the United States.
one person, as reported in The Houston Chronicle, has suggested that things may not have been as tranquil on the inside of the Conditt home as they appeared.Nearly all of them come from suburbia.
The Conditts lived in an old part of the town 20 miles north of Austin.
They kept their children out of public schools so they wouldn't see "the bad stuff in society,"
said the man, who worked with Conditt's father and spent time at their home.
"It was a very 'us versus them' type of household," he said.
"I'm guessing that was a catalyst that led Mark to believe what he thought."
The family held regular get-togethers at their East Pfluger Street home. It was "not a cult," but may have been mistaken for one, the former co-worker said.
And if you’ve ever lived in suburbia in America you know that there are some really ugly truths that must be confronted about these supposedly great places to raise kids.
Whether it’s because of aesthetics, their own selfishness, or this tendency not to rock the boat in signs of trouble, a lot of suburban parents don’t know what the is happening with their children.
It's also time we ask what is to be gained by continuing to see these incidents as isolated and outliers instead of
a deeply entrenched culture of violence perpetrated by angry, white men.
And, lastly, it's time we wrestled with the desire to infantilize these killers by framing them
as normal, happy-go-lucky young men who suddenly took a wrong turn somewhere and were inexplicably driven to murder.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...tail=emaildkre
