Constitutive Outsider

The “Mental Illness” We Refuse To Name: White Male Entitlement

Trigger Warning: violence

Yesterday night 17 people became the victims of a violent and deranged individual, a madman, who was unbalanced and ill. And yet another white man poor soul has committed an act of terrorism been a victim of inadequate mental health care. Or so the story goes. 

Every time a white man commits a public act of violence, we as a nation desperately grasp at reasons to ignore the larger patterns of violence the act occurs in. White men make up approximately 36% of the population, but commit 75% of mass shootings. What would be called terrorism by any other skin tone is suddenly some mysterious unnamed disease. We as a society are perfectly happy to further stigmatize mentally ill people, who are far more likely to be victims of violence than commit violence, in the service of protecting white supremacy and male entitlement. 

So let’s name this “mental illness” and call it what it is: white male entitlement. This special brand of misogyny is acquired through prolonged exposure to toxic masculinity, white supremacy, rape culture, and white and male privilege. Unlike real mental illness, white male entitlement is a choice. It is the choice to see oneself as better than, the choice to see others as less than and deserving of violence, the choice to believe that one has the right to punish women/people of color/queer folk for daring to exist outside of servitude. White male entitlement is a learned cultural behavior that is the logical extreme of the systems of oppression at work in US society. So this gunman is not crazy, it is not crazy to believe things you have been told your whole life.