A suspect is in custody in Iowa after two police officers were fatally shot early Wednesday in what appear to have been unprovoked ambush attacks a few miles apart. Both officers, one from Urbandale and one from Des Moines, were shot multiple times as they sat in patrol cars.
There was no massive national freak-out over these killings as there has been whenever the suspect is a person of color or has an Arabic-sounding name. The man accused of these killings is a white guy. Scott Michael Greene — whose home reportedly features a Trump/Pence sign in the front lawn — was allegedly upset with police after he was forced to leave a high school football game because he was waving a Confederate flag and threatening black students.*
Greene’s prior troubles with the law included a domestic violence arrest and a charge of elder abuse (he allegedly attacked his mother). This bit of background is being reported as a discrete, distinct individual character trait and not as one more data point confirming the overwhelming pattern in which mass-shooters and spree killers almost all are men and, more specifically, men who have a history of violent contempt for women.
Every time a mass shooting or spree killing occurs in America there’s this weird ritual that plays out. The story is breathlessly reported as breaking news — stop everything and pay attention only to this! But all of this initial reporting is conditional, awaiting more information on who the suspect is. Awaiting a name and a picture. If the killer turns out to have even some tenuous Muslim-seeming connection, the story accelerates, and it becomes all that the media talks about for several days during which we’re all urgently urged to be very, very afraid. If the killer turns out to be black, then the story accelerates in a different direction, with white audiences urged to be vigilant against further such uprisings and black audiences somberly warned to settle down and remember their place lest their uppity behavior prompt further violence that will leave blood on their collective hands.
But if the killer turns out to be white, well … nevermind. A Muslim killer is reported as a reflection of all Muslims, and a black killer is reported as a reflection of all black people. But a white killer is always just a lone individual. So nothing to see here — back to our regularly scheduled programming and more stories about email and/or debris that will turn out not to be that missing Malaysian plane crash. No need to change your Facebook profile pick or anything.
This ridiculous — and baldly racist — ritual has become so standard that we’re distracted from seeing the larger pattern. Before any arrest is made, before any suspect is named and any name and photo is released, we already know what to expect, and it’s not about race or religion.
This is a thing that men do. The suspect will be a man. And that man will have a history of violence against women.
* Iowa, for the record, was on the winning, American side in the Civil War, opposing treason in defense of slavery. The Confederacy, of course, was at war against the United States. Scott Michael Greene is not alone in weirdly imagining that there’s something patriotic about waving a Confederate battle flag. That’s deeply confused. It’s the equivalent of imagining that you’re being a patriotic American by waving an ISIS flag, or the flag of al-Qaida. Although neither of those groups has killed nearly as many Americans or burned nearly as many American flags as the Confederate military did, so an ISIS flag or an al-Qaida flag wouldn’t really be quite as utterly anti-American.
The Venn diagram of people who imagine the Confederate flag to be “patriotic” and people who wish to “Make America Great Again” has a great deal of overlap.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In