Don Lemon, a broadcast host for CNN, is quoted “So, we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right.”
How can we stop demonizing people as Lemon wants by demonizing them as Lemon does? He contradicts himself within the space of one sentence.
A few white men, whose behavior loosely speaking is “mad” and certainly extreme, aberrant and criminal, act up and Lemon indicts all white men.
If a few mad dogs had bitten people in different cities, would he say “The biggest terror threat in this country is dogs”? We’d reject such stereotyping right away, knowing that most dogs are well-behaved. Aren’t most white men well-behaved?
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that Lemon works with, knows and has friends among white men, perhaps many.
Let’s be charitable and discount his actual words. I think what he may want to say is that if we somehow assembled all the people in this country who are terror threats, the largest group would consist of white men. We can’t do this, but we can examine all those who have been the terrorists in this land or so accused. Some information on that is here. They do not break down race as much as we need to decide whether Lemon’s statement, modified by me to become more reasonable, is true.
Of the 15 lethal terrorists since 9/11, 2 are white; 2 more of Russian origin may also be white. There were 4 non-lethal attacks, and none of the perpetrators were white.
The largest group at the time of being charged by the justice system were Muslims (422). There were only 27 non-Muslims and unknown. 93% were males, which is no surprise. Lemon has the sex right, but he missed the religious affiliation. This one-sided religious factor may arise from selection bias. The authorities, set in motion to wipe out al-Qaeda, would have focused most of its attention on people sympathetic to bin Laden’s brand of Muslim extremism.
If white men en masse develop some strong reasons to engage in violence, they will. It hasn’t happened yet, and it’s highly unlikely. Being white is not much of a factor to unite disparate male Americans into a violence-prone group. We are more likely to find such groups based upon narrower bases of identity. Think of Antifa. Think of angry left-wingers making all sorts of violent threats against their opposition.
Lemon has the race wrong, at least as far as the past experience so far suggests. If the next generation of domestic terrorists turns out to be nearly all white men, we can credit Lemon with his foresight or intuition. I’ll consider his statement as wrong until there is some reason for suspecting that white men have developed such dissatisfaction with their lot in life that they turn to violence to achieve some goals.
Meanwhile, I think we should realize that in our country that has 120 million male adults, it takes very few to create disorder. If only 1 in a million steps over the line and commits mass murder crimes each year, that’s 120 adult males and 120 mass tragedies a year. There have been actually about 3 a year since 1967.
In other words, extreme violence is almost a sure thing to happen on occasion, not because the criminals are a certain color, class, religion, political belief or ethnicity but because they pass over a line of restraint that works most of the time to keep us in line. This involves their whole being. Their movement toward violence becomes noticeable. They seem to telegraph their tendencies ahead of time. Often people around them report it to the authorities, but to no effect.
The issue is to identify a very few mad dogs before they bite, among a large population of well-behaved dogs, without invading everyone’s privacy. We can’t suspect all white men or all Muslims. We suspect everyone boarding an airplane flight of being a potential terrorist threat, and that solution is horrible.
9:13 pm on October 30, 2018 Email Michael S. Rozeff
