In scanning today’s headlines about the horrific act of racial terrorism in Charleston, in which nine Black people lost their lives, there were only a few that grabbed my attention enough to click through. I didn’t feel up to the mental exhaustion of reading every article; however, this one, by Arthur Chu, merited a full reading simply because I’ve learned that Chu is always worth reading. He focuses on why it’s a cop-out and a whitewash of what happened in Charleston to attribute it to mental illness. A quote: “We love to talk about individuals’ mental illness so we can avoid talking about the biggest, scariest problem of all–societal illness. That the danger isn’t any one person’s madness, but that the world we live in is mad.” I won’t try to summarize further. Read it.
It’s not about mental illness: The big lie that always follows mass shootings by white males