ABOVE PHOTO: People gather at a park for a candlelight vigil to honor the victims of Friday night’s mass shooting on Saturday, May 24, 2014, in Isla Vista, Calif. Sheriff’s officials said Elliot Rodger, 22, went on a rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara, stabbing three people to death at his apartment before shooting and killing three more in a crime spree through a nearby neighborhood. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
There was no surprise that in between U.C. Santa Barbara’s mass murderer Elliot Rodger’s warped, sick, and perverse harangues against women, he also laced in a generous dose of racist rage and stereotyping.
Today I drove through the area near my college and saw some things that were extremely rage-inducing.
I passed by this restaurant and I saw this black guy chilling with 4 hot white girls. He didn’t even look good.
Then later on in the day I was shopping at Trader Joe’s and saw an Indian guy with 2 above average White Girls!!!
What rage-inducing sights did you guys see today? Don’t you just hate seeing these things when you go out? It just makes you want to quit life.
He returns to these hate mongering digs at black, Hispanic and Asian-American men for having the temerity to associate with white women, and worse their reciprocation with minority men more than a few times.
Rodger’s murderous psychosis is certainly evident in these rants. But that doesn’t tell the whole story of why a conflicted mixed race young guy would act out his rage in a deadly spree against innocents. The racial targeting can well be chalked up to ignorance, confusion, racial denial, and closet bigotry. But there have been several compelling hints that the racial blinders are tied chokingly tight on many whites, particularly young whites, as well as those who are conflicted about race, such as Rodger.
PHOTO: This image from video posted on YouTube shows Elliot Rodger. Sheriff’s officials say Rodger was the gunman who went on a shooting rampage near the University of California at Santa Barbara on Friday, May 23, 2014. (AP Photo/YouTube)
Racial digs that mock blacks, Latinos and Asians have been a common feature on more than a few college campuses in recent times. There’s the wave of fraternities that have been called on the carpet for mocking black notables and rappers, holding slave auctions, minstrel shows, displaying the Confederate flag in front of frat dorms, and for their members sporting the flag on tee shirts. Many have also been reprimanded for their vicious mocking of Latin and Asian immigrants. This was not merely a free speech issue, or a case of zany college kids making utter fools of each other. This was blatant racial slander.
An Associated Press poll in 2012 found that a majority of non-blacks had anti-black prejudices. But it also found that a significant number of those who held the same prejudices and outright bigoted views were in the under age 30 crowd. That’s precisely Rodger’s age demographic. His rants proved once more that bigotry, with all its twisted, warped, and psychotic delusions, fears and hates can explode any time, and anywhere in the orgy of murderous rampages that Americans are getting far too accustomed to seeing, and being victimized by. Rodger’s “Manifesto” tell that same sordid tale once more.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
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