The urge to collectively blame and punish
Nowadays when we learn about a mass shooting, every minority community makes the same silent prayer: “I hope he wasn’t one of ours.” We’ve grown used to this because we understand what typically happens in the wake of a violent act committed by any brown or black skinned, immigrant, trans or Muslim individual: condemnation of every other member of that community. ...
Been there, done that ... was the latest culprit somebody queer? Or left leaning? Or perhaps Black or Brown? Will some authoritative "they" make this an excuse to come after me or my friends?
So many of us have to carry that instinctive reaction. I bet a majority of Americans had that thought in the summer of 2024 when some white kid took a potshot at Donald Trump, nicking his ear.
Kuo goes on, dissecting how we frame mass violence by individual perps:
... In the case of the Bondi Beach killings, it was another Muslim man, Ahmed al-Ahmed who, out of sheer bravery and thanks to his training and background in law enforcement, disarmed one of the killers, saving untold lives. Al-Ahmed is the son of refugees and a father of two; to counter the rank Islamophobia surrounding the attack, many are understandably uplifting his story and heroism as a counterexample.
While it’s important to recognize that there are also heroes within a targeted community, too, it is a strange and likely fruitless point to argue with the haters. As one commentator aptly noted, “You’d think that a Muslim man on Bondi Beach committing one of the most heroic acts ever caught on camera might dispel some of the otherwise inevitable racist rhetoric. But it won’t.”
That’s because such examples are up against systemically ingrained beliefs. When a white mass shooter is taken down by a white officer or bystander, we never focus on their race or religion. This only happens with ethnic, religious or sexual minorities—because our brains are wired to accept that minority communities are somehow responsible for the acts of any one of them, while whites are always absolved of any guilt by association.
This requires a bit of unpacking. What it means is that society still views, and tacitly accepts, that minorities are “all the same” and capable of whatever any one of them has done, while whites in the majority are deserving of individualized consideration and justice and are innocent until proven guilty.
... We must remain vigilant over and vocal about opposing calls for collective punishment that are steeped in animus and prejudice.
Most people still don’t even realize what it is when [that's] happening. That needs to change, or we will forever be in the land of “I hope he wasn’t one of ours.”
I'd love to live in a country where, when someone murders someone, most of us don't have wonder -- “I hope he wasn’t one of ours.” We'll have to carry that fear as long as we make weapons of war so readily available to people, still mostly men, who, for whatever reasons, lack inner constraints on violence. And as long as we unconsciously assume that "they" -- those people who are different -- are an undifferentiated mass which can be collectively blamed and despised.
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