Does White Make Right? - Theorizing the Racial Politics of Securitization of Mass Violence and Extremism

From theorizing suspect communities – groups of people considered more likely to commit or suspect in mass violence attacks based on their racial, ethnic, or cultural identities – as a phenomena and consequence of security practices and discourse to examining the roles of security elites and media in the creation of suspect communities, the literature so far has focused on how the formation of suspect communities in our security practices victimizes and otherizes marginalized groups as a result of security discourse and understandings. This paper explores the inverse phenomenon. It theorizes a new concept: the “proto-typical community” as a consequence of the formation of suspect communities in security discourse. I examine how proto-typical communities are formed based on mass media and law enforcement discourse about the perpetrator and their violence following instances of mass shootings in the U.S. I argue that the violence of white perpetrators, being members of the hegemonic racial, ethnic, and cultural identity group(s) in the U.S. is not attributed in security discourse to their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities, and therefore is not pathologized and securitized as such. As a result, white perpetrators form a “proto-typical community” of mass violence perpetrators who, by way of the hegemony of their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities (or our common perceptions thereof), are not considered inherently capable of such violence and are thus treated as “proto-types” of our society. Their violence, then, is considered a function of personal failure or mental health and therefore not widely attributed to or securitized across their identity group(s). I select 15 subjects who have committed mass shootings between 2017 and 2021. These subjects were selected mostly at random, however, I did stratify the selection by race, ensuring that the subject pool was half white and half non-white subjects. Then, I collect news articles reporting on their attacks up to one-month post-incident from national news outlets in the U.S. and law enforcement statements identifying the perpetrator. I use a form of discourse analysis called a Corpus Assisted Discourse Study or CADS to analyze the patterns of language used in those media reports and broadcasts and by law enforcement to determine if there is a substantive difference in how those reports and statements discussed the subjects. Insights developed from the research in this paper can help us further understand the racialized effects and consequences of securitization and security discourse for marginalized groups. Further, the research from this paper produces a new dataset of media and law enforcement statements and reports on the mass shooters included as subjects More importantly, this research helps us develop a better understanding of how whiteness and hegemonic privilege interacts with security discourse and securitization. It depicts how this interaction produces gaps in our security and surveillance infrastructure that white extremists and mass violence perpetrators can use to organize and plan attacks unlike non-white perpetrators.