Let's Bus Inner City Kids to White Suburban Schools to Prevent School Shootings

Real life is a trillion times more ironic than any comic book plot.  Let's take for example the tragic example of school shootings.   Just as educators and law enforcement agencies are racking their brains to find a way to prevent the next such rampage, so are parents.  So here is my idea.

Upper and middle class suburbs need to bus youngsters from inner city neighborhoods to attend their white schools.   In parts of the country where there are no nearby inner cities, wealthy communities should build a certain number of low-income housing units in order to attract poor people to their communities. And they should welcome these people,  for after all, the newcomers may be saving their childrens' lives.  Have I lost all of my marbles or what?

Observers have known for sometime what the profile of a school shooter is . But it is only in the past few years that they have come to understand why.  And each new incident, reinforces that profile.

 Michael Kimmel and Cliff Leek offers one of the most insightful analyses of school shooters in an article entitled: The Unbearable Whiteness of  Suicide-by-Mass- Murder.  The authors observe:

In the last 30 years 90% of shootings at elementary and high schools in the U.S. have been perpetrated by young white men. . .they want to destroy the entire world in some cataclysmic, video-game, and action movie-inspired apocalypse. If I'm going to die, then so is everybody else, they seem to say. Yes, of course, this is mental illness speaking: but it is mental illness speaking with a voice that has a race and a gender.One must feel a sense of aggrieved entitlement to pick up a gun and go on a rampage, yes. But that sense of aggrieved entitlement must also be grandiose if you are going to make them all pay.

So pervasive has this white, privileged male rage become associated with the mass murder of school children that criminologists have given it a name:  aggrieved entitlement.   


And this brings me back to my idea about busing inner city kids to white suburban and small town school districts.  "Aggrieved entitlement" is a function of racial homogeneity.   It is precisely the lack of diversity that creates such a warped sense of victimization among the privileged. What do we expect from kids who have never been exposed in an every-day-sitting-next-to-at-school-way with poor kids, or maybe a classmate  whose parents were just deported, or someone whose older brother was falsely arrested because of profiling, or a friend whose family just got evicted.  I really don't mean to sound maudlin and melodramatic here.  I'm merely trying to say that the value of diversity is that it helps children find their own place in the world by observing  and therefore learning from the experiences of others.

It is therefore not surprising that these school shootings occur in so-called "safe" communities.  Children go from a school environment that bears no relationship to the complexities of the real world, to a video game environment that bears no relationship to anything even human.