We Need To Talk About Colt Gray And His White Privilege After The Georgia School Shooting

Colt Gray. | Source: Barrow County Sheriff’s Office

Here’s the thing: White people are going to roll their eyes when Black people call out the white privilege that tends to be on display when white mass shooters get taken in alive and receive what appears to be preferential treatment while they’re being processed through the system, and when the media feels compelled to report every detail it gets ahold of regarding the suspect’s mental health, family background, experiences with bullying, etc. Many thought we were being petty when we complained about Dylann Roof being treated to Burger King by police fresh off of his arrest for going on a murder spree at a Black church. We’re called “race-baiters” when we point out that violent Black people are called “thugs” and violent Muslims are called “terrorists” while white male mass shooters are granted a descriptor with a positive connotation like “lone wolf,” as if he were the protagonist in a classic Western.

We have always been chided for “playing the race card” regarding these matters, and it will be no different when it comes to the case of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old white male accused of gunning down two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, on Wednesday morning.

MORE: Donations Pour In For Grieving Family Of Mason Schermerhorn, Lone Black Victim In Georgia School Shooting

We’ve already reported about how Gray was arrested without incident despite being heavily armed and assumed to be the shooter who executed four people and injured at least nine others while Black suspects who are armed or unarmed tend to get shot by cops who “fear for their lives” under far less dire circumstances. But it goes deeper than that, and Black people aren’t going to shy away from calling out all of it no matter how much white people groan.

We’re going to take note of the fact that Gray was charged as an adult but is being held at a youth detention center. We’re going to have something to say about media outlets reporting ad nauseam about his mental health struggles and rough home life. After all, how many young Black men do you imagine are sitting in prison cells right now who struggle with mental illness or had it rough at home or were bullied at school? When was the last time a Black criminal suspect was accused of doing something violent and vile and media outlets responded by digging even remotely that deep into any part of their background outside of their criminal record?

If he was Black, he'd have been lucky to get taken alive. My Mom says you can always tell when the perp is White because there's a delay in them posting the picture, so they can find 1 of them in a good light. When they're Black their faces are plastered everywhere immediately.

— Lelouch Vi Brittannia (@LelouchVeeGeass) September 6, 2024

There’s also the general stigma regarding criminality and racial generalizing that white people don’t even have a real frame of reference for because nothing they do individually is widely attributed to white people as a whole, which is why there’s a quiet relief Black people and people of color feel when a shooter is revealed to be white. (This also makes it worth noting that some news outlets falsely identified a Black child who was one of Colt’s victims as the shooter initially.)

Yea. I said it.
White privilege means Black households get treated like a widespread crisis. But almost every school shooter can be a white male and there's no national emergency about how white families raise their children. pic.twitter.com/vo6ciCYmWf

— Optimus Fine (@sunnydaejones) September 5, 2024

Actually, I’ve written about this before:

But I know that if the shooter had been black, the national conversation would somehow “straw-man” its way into being about Black Lives Matter and black criminality. God help us if it had happened at a rap concert. “Black-on-black crime” would’ve been on the tongues of every demagogue blowhard with a platform, and black athletes wouldn’t be able to kneel in protest of police brutality again without having a massacre thrown in their faces. (In fact, Fox News managed to get in a swipe at black NFL players anyway.)

If he had been Hispanic, it would be the reason “we can’t let these people in our country.” Whether he was actually an illegal immigrant would’ve been obfuscated into irrelevancy within the first day of reporting, as pundits bleated about massive deportation and building walls (logistics not included).

If the shooter was Middle Eastern or Muslim, the rhetoric would pretty much write itself at this point.

But white people don’t need to fear their movements for justice being undermined or the whole of their demographic feeling the pressure to answer for the crimes of a few.

9/11 happened and the way airports operate in America would be forever changed. Crime gets out of control in Black neighborhoods and “stop and frisk” policies, three-strike laws and mass incarceration are almost universally seen by our government as viable remedies. However, when mass shooting after mass shooting happens consistently in America, next to nothing is ever done about it. There’s never any significant change in the law. We generally get to watch politicians and pundits quibble about the efficacy of gun laws and whether they infringe on the Second Amendment, and then once the new story of a new shooting gets old enough to fall out of the current news cycle, we pretty much go back to business as usual, which is to say, we just wait for the next shooting to happen, and rinse and repeat.

Hell, our own legislators and media talking heads can’t even agree that what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was a terrorist attack, and there’s no shortage of Republican officials, including the ex-president who instigated the riot in the first place, who are falling all over themselves to defend the perpetrators.

This is the power of whiteness, good people, and, at this point, all it’s doing is keeping us in more danger.

SEE ALSO:

Rep. Mike Collins Says ‘Praying’ For Georgia School Shooting Victims As His Old Gun Ads Resurface

Georgia, Kamala Harris And A Study On Guns Showing Why Black Children And Teens Are At Most Risk

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