Future Man by Tim Samuels

Author:Tim Samuels
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628729955
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2019-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

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The workplace (and school) shootings seem to be the preserve of the white male. Kimmel terms these workplace shootings as “suicide-by-mass-murder”—a grandiose gesture that’s rooted in an aggrieved entitlement, with a desire to make others pay.

“White men want to destroy the entire world in some cataclysmic video-game-and-action-movie-inspired apocalypse. If I’m going to die, then so is everybody else, they seem to say. Yes, of course, this is mental illness speaking: but it is mental illness speaking with a voice that has a race and a gender.”37

He contrasts this with: “When young men of color experience that same sense of aggrieved entitlement—that perception of victimhood despite everything men expect for themselves—they may react violently, and even with lethal violence. But the victims of their violence are usually those whom the shooter believes have wronged him, and the unintended and accidental victims caught in the line of fire. And it rarely ends with his suicide.”

By a beat-up main road in the north of Charlotte, North Carolina, away from the gleaming financial district that’s second only to New York, Garry McFadden reflects on the twenty-two years he spent as a (black) homicide detective. “We’re on what they call the Ford. Heavy African American populated area. We have a store over here called Mighty Midget Mart—that store has seen ten or fifteen homicides. Across the street, there were so many murders they changed the name of the street because it was that bad.”

McFadden agrees with the notion that gang shootings tend to be a response to feeling slighted by someone in particular—rather than the grandiose gesture of aggrieved entitlement in a (white) mass shooting—or an attempt to prove manliness. “You gonna have to shoot somebody, you gonna have to make people scared of you, and to them that’s being a man. But it’s not.”

The ex-cop now goes into schools to mentor at-risk boys. “All they want is somebody to care for them, to show them some love, give them some self-worth.” And social mobility. Children born into the bottom fifth of household incomes in Charlotte have a mere 4.4 percent chance of reaching the top quintile at some point in their lives.

Chicago is perhaps a starker case in point. In a city where 92 percent of black sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds are unemployed, more than 80 percent of homicide victims were from the African American community in 2017.38

Nationally, the unemployment rate among blacks is about double that in the white community, as it has been for most of the past six decades.39 For most, that will translate into the inward frustrations of being unemployed or a kick to self-esteem from doing a job that doesn’t fulfill your potential.

If angry, white America is driven by desperate attempts to recoup the losses of what it once had, perhaps on the Ford the loss is of any pretense that the American Dream is an equal-opportunity employer. When a whole segment of society isn’t able to “compete” on a level playing field in this great Y chromosome

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