Theorizing a Prototypical Community: Rethinking a Racialized Approach to Extremist and Mass Violence

The existing literature on suspect communities has focused on marginalized groups that are more likely to be perceived as suspects or perpetrators of mass violence based on their cultural, ethnic, or racial identities, and the role of security elites and the media in their formation. However, this paper seeks to explore a new concept, the "prototypical community," which emerges from the formation of suspect communities in security discourse. The paper argues that white perpetrators of mass violence, who belong to the dominant racial, ethnic, and cultural group in the US, are not typically pathologized or securitized based on their identities, as their violence is attributed to personal failure or mental health. As a result, white perpetrators form a "prototypical community" that is not considered inherently capable of such violence. To investigate this phenomenon, I selected 15 subjects who committed mass shootings between 2017 and 2021, stratifying the selection by race to ensure equal representation of white and non-white subjects. I collected news articles and law enforcement statements about the attacks and analyzed the language used to describe the subjects using a Corpus Assisted Discourse Study (CADS). The study reveals substantive differences in the language used to describe white and non-white perpetrators of mass violence, highlighting the racialized effects and consequences of securitization and security discourse. This research contributes to a better understanding of how white privilege and hegemonic identity interact with security discourse and securitization, producing gaps in surveillance and security infrastructure that can be exploited by white extremists and mass violence perpetrators. Additionally, this study produces a new dataset of media and law enforcement statements and reports on the mass shooters included as subjects, which can be used to inform future research on this topic.