Rachel has been writing about the kidnapping and torture of a young black woman, and it’s incredibly horrific stuff. I read about this case the other day, and have been holding off posting because it’s so thoroughly repulsive and disturbing that I couldn’t make myself read the articles about it, and I certainly couldn’t formulate any sort of coherent thoughts. Luckily, Rachel has been wading in, and one of the interesting things she’s discovered is how other bloggers are responding to this — by calling the torturers “white trash” and “hillbillies” and referencing Deliverance.
It’s a sentiment I can understand — white people are so disgusted and angry at the torture of this woman that we need to other her torturers to prove that they’re different than us. We need to put racism in a neat box — out there in the hills, with the people who don’t have any class, the people who are unenlightened and snaggle-toothed and live in trailers. Not like us.
It takes a special kind of evil to do what those people did. But it’s not rare. It’s not a symptom of poverty. It’s not about “white trash.” For every one of us who reads these news articles in horror, there’s an upper middle class white college kid somewhere who idolizes Patrick Bateman and thinks that misogynist torture is kinda cool — you know, if you’re classy about it. The focus on the class background of these torturers obscures the larger picture of what they did. It makes it comprehensible — those pieces of trailer trash aren’t quite human, which is why they were capable of doing this. Only subhuman hillbillies are racist.
What happened to this woman was evil. No decent human being should be able to comprehend how people can do what the individuals in West Virginia did. But that doesn’t mean that horrific acts of violence like this are isolated, freakish occurrences. It doesn’t mean that the ideologies which inspire violence are relegated to the hills or the trailers or the homes of poor people. This crime was not caused by the perpetrator’s economic or social status; it was caused by their violence, their racism, their absolute rottenness.
Hate crimes aren’t always this extreme, but they happen with regularity. Shifting the explanation to someone’s economic or cultural background obscures the reality that racism, and race-related violence, permeate every social and economic class in America. Poor white folks definitely don’t have a monopoly on it.