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Angry White Boy
What's the common thread among the school shootings
at Columbine, Jonesboro, Paducah, Conyers, Oregon,
Alberta, and the other copycats? The shooters were
all alienated middle-class white males.
What's different about now versus previous
decades? Why have all these school shootings
emerged now? Until recently, alienated middle-class
white male teens could take solace in their being
accepted, indeed, extolled by mainstream society.
Today, however, the white male teen who is rejected
by peers is also de facto rejected by the
mainstream society that he sees: every school and
media celebration of Blacks, gays, women, etc., is
by omission, a denigration of straight white males.
Middle- and upper-class white males are often
referred to in the curriculum as oppressors and in
sitcoms as boors or evil. Hollywood, in part in
fear of being called racist, is bending over
backwards to, where possible, make the bad guy a
white male.
Most teens are deeply concerned with being
accepted. Today's middle-class white male teen, if
rejected by peers, neglected by too-busy parents,
and now, for the first time, denigrated by society,
may consider violence; they feel unaccepted,
unloved--an intolerable situation for many teens.
While gun control and better parent-child
communication are, of course, partial answers, I
believe that an essential part of the solution is
to ensure that the media and schools aren't
celebratory of everyone but white males. Indeed,
the curriculum should be less divisive. It seems
that, outside of science and math, much of today's
curriculum is inadvertently polarizing; much of the
discussion centers around race, class, gender, and
sexual orientation--with recommendations typically
that middle-class white males are the bad guys.
That can engender anger from a teenager who already
feels that everyone is against him. And that sense
of commonality, I believe, would help instill a
conscience that might prevent school shootings.
A few years ago, we heard of "The Angry White
Male." The school shootings are, I believe, a
manifestation of the Angry White Boy.
© 2007, Marty
Nemko
* * *
Marty
Nemko holds a PhD from the University of
California, Berkeley, and subsequently taught in
Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He is
the worklife columnist in the Sunday San Francisco
Chronicle and is the producer and host of Work With
Marty Nemko, heard Sundays at 11 on 91.7 FM in
(NPR, San Francisco), and worldwide on
www.martynemko.com
 .
400+ of his published writings are available free
on that website and is a co-editor of
Cool
Careers for Dummies.
and author of The All-in-One College Guide.
E-Mail.
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