WHITE BOYS LOADED

This column has been a statistic-free zone. But here are some numbers that
stunned me:

White high school seniors are seven times more likely than blacks to have
used cocaine; eight times more likely to have smoked crack; seven times
more likely to have used heroin. More white students have used crystal meth
than black students have smoked cigarettes.

If you, like me, are white, those numbers probably run contrary to your
assumptions. However, they come from the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services. And there's more, this time from the Centers for Disease
Control:

Between the ages of 12 and 17, whites are more likely to sell drugs, twice
as likely to binge drink, and about twice as likely to drive drunk. And
here's the kicker: White males are twice as likely to bring a weapon to
school as black males.

So white boys are loaded, and they're loaded. As white middle-class parents
of relative privilege, my friends and I don't notice this nor do we want to
be told. That's one of the essential points made by a Nashville writer and
educator named Tim Wise, who gathered these numbers for an Internet article
that's caused a stir.

"White people live in a state of self-delusion," Wise wrote after the
Santee high school massacre. "We think danger is black, brown and poor, and
if we can just move far enough away from 'those people' in the cities,
we'll be safe.

"If we can just find an 'All-American' town, life will be better because
things like this don't happen here. Well, in case you hadn't noticed,
'here' is about the only place these kinds of things do happen."

Wise's piece has touched a nerve. By last week, he had received 5,500
e-mails, he says, and was still being interviewed by the media many times
each day. Friends and parents were sending his article to each other; I
received a number of copies. Much of Wise's mail was from people of color
who were surprised and gratified to find a white writer looking at whites
the way whites usually look at people of color.

What occasioned his piece was listening to the commentary in the wake of
the latest school shooting. These shootings in "nice communities" have been
going on for five years now, and we in the media have said a zillion times
that the shooters tend to be loners who were picked on and had access to
guns. We've hardly mentioned that they're all white.

What got Wise's ire up was that once again the FBI insisted that there was
no profile of a school shooter. "Come again?" says Wise. "White boy after
white boy after white boy . . . decides to use their classmates for target
practice, and yet there is no profile? Imagine if all these killers had
been black."

That's an observation as plain and persuasive as the whiteness I see when I
look in the mirror. I'm not sure, however, I can take the next step with
him into what he calls "the dysfunctionality of privilege."

He argues that since middle- and upper-class white kids don't have to
endure systemic barriers to advancement, they lack the coping mechanisms
that kids of color and poor kids have developed to live with daily
frustrations. When the privileged are up against it, they pop: substance
abuse, suicide, guns and these shootings.

Though Wise stops there, much of what's been written about these shootings
dwells on the spiritual emptiness and competitiveness of the kind of mostly
white, relatively affluent suburbs similar to the one where I live. The
competitiveness - to belong, to get the best grades, to have the nicest car -

is real enough. We parents are not blind to having acquiesced to a
super-competitive upbringing for our kids. What we are abashed to
acknowledge - when our kids have so much - is that the pressure to compete
may be too great for some. It seems our kids are soft when the struggle of
poorer kids is so much more daunting.

But pointing the finger at spiritual emptiness to explain what's going on
strikes me as facile. Alienation is the usual and normal state of
middle-class white American adolescents. How much spiritual difference is
there between Holden Caulfield in "Catcher in the Rye," and 50 years later
Stan in Eminem's Grammy winning song?

Two things have changed in my lifetime: The ubiquity of guns and the
warp-speed and wrap-around media that inundates us not just with sex and
violence but with whatever is the hot new idea of the day. White
dysfunctionality, for instance.